When It's no Longer Comcastic

It's not that you're downloading too much, you're just downloading too much. Huh? The Boston Globe reported this morning that some high bandwith users of Comcast's Cable Internet service have been informed by the company that they're using too much bandwith and service will be turned off if they don't reduce. Some users have already been severed from service. Comcast doesn't actually impose a specific bandwith limit on users in their terms and conditions, it's part of the overall statements that users can't degrade the service of others, something that will happen given the cable internet infrastructure.

In the quote from Matt Davis he seems to suggest that there might be some other motivation for Comcast in making the decision to cut some users off from service

Matt Davis, a research director at IDC Corp., said that because of the way cable high-speed Internet works, a person using a huge amount of bandwidth will slow service for hundreds of customers.

"You look at it and see there's some two to three people in the neighborhood or a college dorm . . . and what they're doing is impairing the customer experience for the rest of the people off that node," Davis said. "Then it's a business decision: Do you alienate a small percentage of customers to make your other customers happy?"

Perhaps Comcast is looking to thwart piggy-back wireless connections or types of connection sharing between neighbors and a WiFi. Though perhaps we're going too far and they're not actually looking to crack down on people looking to diffuse the $60/month they charge for service by splitting it a couple ways. The three people cited in the article as losing service don't indicate whether or not others were sharing their connection – but if the figures cited in the Globe articles are correct the bandwith stats those users had isn't really that hard to fathom as attainable.

Image of a speed test in progress at SpeetTest.net