Bandwidth Caps Are Bad

Yesterday, Comcast officially announced that starting in October, they would be capping their user's bandwidth a 250GB per month. This is primarily to stop, or at least hinder, Bittorrent traffic on their network. While 250GB may seem very high for the average user, think about what you actually do with your internet connection before determining just how high it is. Do you purchase music or video from iTunes or Amazon or some other internet-based store? Do you listen to podcasts? Do you watch videos on YouTube or some other video site? Do you look at pictures online? Do you use software that backs up your computer to a remote server (MobileMe, Mozy, etc...)? All of these things take up more than just a little bandwidth. With things moving into the cloud more and more, people are using more and more bandwidth. Each little thing you do uses up a little bit, and over the period of a month, it does build up. Now think about that 250GB limit in terms of a family. Mom, Dad, Susie, and Dan each have their own computer. Mom and dad really only use it to surf the web a little bit and check their email, so they're more than covered. But the kids both use iTunes to download music and put onto their iPods. They also love watching YouTube videos that their friends send them, and sometimes spend hours on end on the site browsing. Dan also uses Xbox Live a lot to play games with his friends around town. Suzie and her friend have video chats every other night to gossip about people at their school. Both kids also upload photos of their friends to Facebook. Mom has a sudden interest in emailing family lots of pictures of the kids. All of a sudden that 250GB spread over 30 days isn't really all that much. The principle of the matter is even more disturbing than the actual amount. Putting a limit on a service that is being used more and more and becoming one of the most important venues ever is just plain wrong. Imagine your phone company saying that you only have so many minutes to use per month, and after that you can't make any calls. Or only being able to use X Gallons of water per month. I'm sure after having to spend a few days without taking a shower you'd realize what a bad idea limits like this are. Two other ISPs in the US have bandwidth caps. Qwest has an unofficial cap around 250GB, and Time Warner Cable is experimenting with a tiered-service that caps at 5GB and 40GB. Thankfully my provider, Verizon, has not made any attempts to shape their traffic or put limits on bandwidth (at least that I've reached, and I exceed 250GB limit every 2.5 to 3 weeks). But if these companies can get away with this policy, than others will be more likely to adopt similar policies. As a closing, I would like to refer you to GigaOm's Bandwidth Challenge to try and break the bandwidth caps that these companies are setting.