Subscribe[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KOMO Seattle Man Loses Internet for a Year 7-14-11.mp4[/flv]
Last week, Stop the Cap! shared the story of Andre Vrignaud, a 39-year-old gaming consultant in Seattle who found his Comcast Internet service shut off for a year for twice exceeding the company’s arbitrary 250GB usage cap. The story continues to draw media attention, including this TV news report from Seattle station KOMO-TV. Cloud computing is implicated, but Vrignaud’s cure — paying more for additional usage, strikes us as the wrong answer. Monetizing broadband usage is a provider’s dream come true. The better solution would be to fight to remove the cap or at least ensure residential customers can upgrade to business service, if they choose, without the year-long “ban” in place. (3 minutes)
Regular broadband users need to hear this story to understand it’s not the “1%” of users as claimed that are getting slapped with overages or having service cut, everyone is affected.
Even with providers like Comcast that’s hundreds and thousands of people having to pay large fees or face assinine policies.
Glad the news team blew up the spot saying this guy is now stealing Internet off a neighbors network. Comcast can now monitor that and charge him with Theft of Service and slap him with a HUGE fine!
Comcast Should adopt ATT Business plan. If you go over 150gig dsl or 250gig vdsl data caps they will charge you $10 for every 50gig. Comcast is missing out in this hugh cash cow, Anyone notice this guy owns one those twitting scales, the same one Leo Laporte owns.
That is 10¢ per GB, a rate at which they still make a significant amount of profit. Ever heard of TekSavvy, a Canadian Internet service provider? They charge $31.95/month for their 300 GB DSL plan at 5 Mbit/s. That’s exactly 10.65¢/GB.
UPDATE: Cheaper by the Cable. At $27.95/month, TekSavvy’s 3 Mbit/s offering includes 300 GB per month. That’s less than 9.32¢/GB, a lower rate at which the company still makes a reasonable profit.
That’s monetizing broadband usage, one of the things we are very much against. They already have a cash cow offering unlimited service. They just want to overmilk the cow.
Well, then here is my beef. If they force “Consumption Based Billing” then the FCC should IMMEDIATELY REQUIRE ALA CARTE CABLE! They can’t have it both ways. They say subs should only pay for what they use – fine. Then we should only pay for what channels we want too.
Brian Roberts makes 31 million while his customers are only supposed to use their internet account for emailing birthday wishes to their relatives
I am still amazed that there is more outcry for netflix raising their prices slightly than there is for ISPs pulling stuff like this. I don’t buy that customers “agreed” to it, as they said. This guy said he had Comcast for 8 years. The cap policy is apparently only something like three years old. So, he was forced into agreeing to it. I’m assuming there are no alternative ISPs or he would have just switched. So, that means that the customer was essentially forced into accepting the caps with no alternative. That’s some crap right there…
It is no surprise to me because even seasoned computer users often have no idea what their usage is like. Take Netflix for example. How do you know if/when they adjust their video quality up or down. What used to consume 150MB for an hour show could quietly run more than 400MB if they increase the quality of the stream without your knowledge. High quality streamed video can be a real bandwidth piggy, and trust me most people have no idea by how much. It used to be people were called pirates and torrent thieves when they consumed a lot… Read more »
If the FCC wants America to survive in the 21st century and they want to keep their lobbyists happy it can be done. Take away all franchise agreements for Comcast et al that impose caps on their users. If they don’t want to share their lines yes this goes for you Verizon FIOS that is fine. Any third party that wants to build fiber networks to compete with them should be allowed to do so. Those networks should be open access and the users should own their own lines even if they don’t pay to have them instaled. I wonder… Read more »
I agree that open access is at the heart of today’s marketplace duopoly. During dial-up days, large telcos had to open their networks and sell wholesale access to the network of dial-in numbers people used to use to avoid long distance access charges. Then, the very-business friendly Bush Administration hearted Big Telecom’s arguments that their broadband networks should be closed to wholesale access. That means AT&T, Verizon, and the cable companies can refuse to sell access to third party resellers. The only exceptions are some minor voluntary agreements with companies like Earthlink, who offer very little (if any) savings to… Read more »
I don’t disagree with Google being one of the few who has the power to directly challenge ISPs on their own turf. I may be wrong but I do believe that Docscis 3 has a 100 mbps symmetric limit per user if it is not oversold. Cut that in half if it is over sold. Time Warner thinks that 20 mbps down 2 mbps up is worth an extra $20, I say hell no. The reason that Google may not want to expand is not only the money involved, but the rules and regulations that the ISPs and government have… Read more »
There’s a long pdf that explains why the communities that are able to deploy ftth muni networks should. We’ll see what happens after our next Presidential election. We’ll see if we head down the path that South Korea et al have taken. Or if we head down the path of Canada and other heavily capped and sensored countries.