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Re: Comcast Cuts Off Heavy Internet Users and Modems and Webcams and VoIP and web servers and ...
From: David Farber <dfarber () cs cmu edu>
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 02:40:18 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: "Bob Frankston" <bob37-2 () bobf frankston com> Date: August 27, 2007 12:11:20 AM EDT To: <dave () farber net>, <ip () v2 listbox com>Cc: "'Brett Glass'" <brett () lariat net>, "'Dewayne Hendricks'" <dewayne () warpspeed com>, "'Lauren Weinstein'" <lauren () vortex com> Subject: RE: [IP] Re: Comcast Cuts Off Heavy Internet Users and Modems and Webcams and VoIP and web servers and ...
Here we go again! Haven’t we seen this before when modems were destroying the fabric of the country and when webcams were abuses? If we follow this line of reasoning then running a gigabit network in my house must be very wasteful – will I get cut off too?
If you think about the history of the phone network – originally the failure to use the phone and list your number impeded others’ ability to send and receive information. We’ve gone from encouraging communication to discouraging it even as the capacity keeps increasing. Tragedy? Comedy?
They do have a point as we’ve seen with the discussion on ATT’s inability to find a business model in this new world. They cannot afford to let us use our, oops, I mean, their network. It’s not that it’s expensive – almost all the fiber is lying fallow. And in another recent discussion we learned that the cable companies are realizing that they are wasting all that redundant broadband in broadcast mode – they want to increase the capacity for their services but not to make that Internet available to us to use. The problem is that they don’t have a business model so we can’t have a life model.
There is some (more) (Moore?) irony here – they compete on broadband speed but then cite us for actually using it? Huh? They reason they have to use the “we’ll know it when we see it” policy is that they are applying metrics suitable to 1934 in 2007. It is indeed like obscenity.
The question is why we put up with this nonsense. Why do we act is if the Internet is something we consumed like electricity rather than something to which we call can contribute. Why do we accept such limits on public safety, education etc? (There is a longer discussion on the problem of the Internet opportunity dynamic meeting telecom’s one-size-fits-all dynamic).
One reason is that we confuse the artifice of carrier pricing with reality.
Brett is caught in the middle – he’s really a broker for his users and not a provider. The carrier pricing is his reality. But it’s more fun to identify with the carriers rather than his fellow users. His problems are real but must not be the basis for larger policy decisions.
The investors better start asking hard questions if they are putting money into businesses which fear abundance.
-----Original Message----- From: David Farber [mailto:dfarber () cs cmu edu] Sent: Sunday, August 26, 2007 21:32 To: ip () v2 listbox com Subject: [IP] Re: Comcast Cuts Off Heavy Internet Users Begin forwarded message: From: Brett Glass <brett () lariat net> Date: August 26, 2007 7:02:09 PM EDT To: dave () farber net, ip () v2 listbox com Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Comcast Cuts Off Heavy Internet Users R J Riley writes: > It seems to me that Comcast is using deceptive advertising and that > their > conduct should be subject to review by agencies like the FTC and also > could > be addressed with civil litigation. Perhaps someone with legal > training > should look into the legality of advertising unlimited use and then > arbitrarily cutting off service. Here's the problem, from an Internet provider's point of view. The moment an explicit cap is set, a competitors can offer a larger one... and another one can offer one that's still larger, and so on. Pretty soon, everyone's back to "unlimited," which none of the providers can afford. So, rather than engaging in this sort of "competition," they try to act quietly. We don't play that game. Our company explicitly states that it shapes traffic (rather than cutting users off, it merely holds them back) and publishes its traffic shaping policies. Users can measure the capacities of their connections and actually see that we're giving them what we promise. But we pay for our honesty when a competitor states the maximum speed of the modem as the user's speed. (Both the cable and telephone companies in our area do this.) A business user says, "Wow -- 8 megabits per second over a cable modem for $150 per month is cheaper than you per megabit; I'll go with them." They test a connection, see it burst close to 8 Mbps during the test, and assume they'll always get that capacity. And they switch. We've lost three business customers this year due to this sort of situation. But if the business is really using 8 megabits per second, the cable company is taking a bath. Even with their great financial clout, they just cannot get backbone bandwidth for $20 per megabit per second in our state. No one can. So, at some point the cable company -- in this case, Bresnan -- must either throttle or lose money. We've resigned ourselves to letting go of the customers who really believe that they will be able to saturate an "8 Mbps" cable modem connection ($125/month) or a "7 Mbps" DSL connection ($69/month) 24x7. We figure that if our competitors are forced to live up to those claims, they'll take a loss, and that's good for us. And if they renege on those claims (which is more likely), we'll get the customer back in a few years. It's happened a few times already. But it's painful for a small business to lose customers and have to wait for the users' contracts to expire before they come back. It's just a shame that little guys like our small ISP have to try to compete with large companies' deceptive marketing tactics. --Brett Glass, LARIAT.NET ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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