FriendFeed and SocialThing! are extremely helpful for finding crap that pisses me off. Dave Winer twittered a story about Comcast considering a transfer cap system. The system would limit users to 250Gb per month, while as of right now, uploads would remain unaffected. If you go over your 250Gb, you get charged $15 per 10Gb over. This would probably mean they will define 10Gb as you go a megabyte over your 250Gb, you get charged $15. Apparently, Comcast is seriously considering this as they are “currently evaluating this service and pricing model to ensure [they] deliver a great online experience to [their] customers.”
Personally, I think this is bullshit to the highest degree. I can understand Comcast wanting to limit the amount of data travelling through their system, it can be taxing. I understand that. What I don’t understand is the want to go backwards in time. Transfer limits are a thing of the past. Other countries do it for broadband, but the US never has. Nobody likes transfer limits and this move by Comcast harks back to the days of limited “minutes” on a dial-up Internet connection. Just knowing that you have a monthly limit is going to make a lot of (pardon the term) uneducated people very nervous. A lot of people don’t know the size of a webpage or a YouTube video. Granted that a lot of people probably won’t even come close to the 250Gb mark, but what about increasing connection speeds. If you have a 20Mbps (2.5 megabytes per second) down connection, you want to be able to use it and not worry about how much data you retrieved in a day. Limiting the amount you can use your connection and increasing the speed of that connection seems counterproductive to me.
No, I certainly don’t agree with this move by Comcast and think it should not go into effect. Comcast may be overlooking the wants of its customers, not to mention the ability of expanding technology. Internet-based technology is growing at such a rate that limiting the consumer like Comcast plans, is a couple of steps backward. Regardless of whether you think Web 2.0 is another growing bubble waiting to pop, moves like transfer limits from Comcast and (undoubtedly eventually) all the other cable companies, will shrink the bubble back to Web 1.0.
Download transfer limits are dead and a thing of the past. What do you think?
