Re: Comcast Considering 250GB Cap, Overage Fees

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Brett Glass [brett () lariat net]
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 7:32 PM
To: David Farber; ip
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:   Comcast Considering 250GB Cap, Overage Fees

At 08:35 AM 5/7/2008, Lynn wrote:

> If I purchase a movie view from Comcast (on demand) will that count in
> their limit? I doubt it.

It shouldn't, because it is not costing Comcast money for Internet
bandwidth -- which can be quite expensive, especially outside of
major metropolitan areas. Any provider deserves to be paid more to
recover this perfectly legitimate cost, which -- due to
consolidation in the Internet backbone market -- is increasing at a
time when one would normally expect advances in fiber technology to
be causing it to decrease dramatically.

Another thing to bear in mind when considering this issue is that
TCP/IP is the most inefficient method yet devised -- in terms of
bandwidth costs, infrastructure costs, and overhead -- for
delivering video. Any broadcast medium -- be it a satellite ,
terrestrial broadcast, or a channel on a coaxial cable -- is much
more efficient, because the content is transmitted once (or maybe a
few times) and reaches all of the customers who have requested it.
Even DVDs delivered via media mail are far more cost-effective than
Internet delivery. And "pay per view" cable or satellite is far
more efficient, because hundreds of customers who sign up for the
pay per view movie or event are served at the same time. Also,
there is no upstream traffic, as there would be with TCP/IP (for
the acknowledgements) or especially with P2P (which would multiply
the cost exponentially, as the UK's ISPs are finding out from iPlayer).

If a customer demands that content be distributed less
cost-effectively, it is only reasonable that he or she expect to
pay more for it. This isn't corporate malfeasance; it's just fair.
Internet bandwidth is not free for anyone -- and especially not for
smaller providers.

In a truly fair world, smaller providers would be the first to go
to overage charges, or even charging entirely by the bit, because
excessive bandwidth consumption costs them more than it does bigger
ones. However, in the real world, they cannot be first for several
reasons. Firstly, consumers absolutely hate surprises (witness
their dislike of cell phone overage charges), and so this is not
consumer-friendly. Secondly, the average user has no control over
most of his or her bandwidth usage -- and lacks the knowledge or
expertise necessary to control it. Most software updates are
automatic, and if a user gets an insidious P2P program such as
Limewire on the system it will run up big bandwidth charges by
running continuously in the background without the user's knowledge
or consent. And if small ISPs began to charge by the bit, larger
ones could defer doing so (they'd lose money, but they could afford
it) as an anticompetitive tactic to put competitors out of business.

In any event, there's nothing wrong with any business changing its
pricing model to align charges to customers more closely with its
costs. And -- conspiracy theorists to the contrary -- there's
certainly no evidence that it's part of any insidious plot.

--Brett Glass


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