Putting a lid on broadband use
By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: September 22, 2003 4:00 AM PDT
Earlier this month, a Philadelphia Comcast broadband subscriber got a letter from his service provider, telling him he'd been using the Internet too much.
Keith, who asked to keep his full name private, said he'd subscribed to the service for four years and never had a complaint before. Now he was being labeled a network "abuser."
Worse, he said, Comcast refused to tell him how much downloading was allowed under his contract. A customer service representative had told him there was no specific cap, he said, adding that he might avoid being suspended if he cut his bandwidth usage in half. But even then, the lack of a hard number gave Keith no guarantee. "I don't mind restrictions, but how can Comcast expect users to stick to a limit when they don't say what the limit is?" he said. "If they're going to impose limits, that's one thing, but at least tell us what they are."
As Keith and other frustrated users found, the company's warnings to subscribers were not triggered by any "predetermined bandwidth usage threshold," Eder added. Only about 1 percent of subscribers received letters, which were based on having exceeded average usage patterns rather than a specific number, she said.
For now, this quiet imposition of usage caps affects only a tiny fraction of extraordinarily high-volume users. But it goes to the heart of the competitive decisions cable and telephone companies are making as they struggle for broadband dominance. Comcast in particular is working to provide ever-increasing download speeds , and as result it is struggling to contain busy file swappers and others who are putting stress on their networks.
It is not something the broadband providers are eager to talk about. Even as Comcast sends out letters to its customers targeting high-volume users, the company bristles at the notion that the policy is a cap.
It's easy to see why: As cable and DSL companies race to bulk up on subscribers, companies tagged as "bandwidth cappers" could be at a disadvantage. The problem is particularly awkward for cable companies, which have tried to avoid a price war with the telephone companies by promising better quality of service.
"The industry is leery of explicit caps, because even people who don't come anywhere near the caps feel like something is being taken away from them," Jupiter Research analyst Joe Laszlo said. As consumers grow more used to broadband services and begin understanding what to expect from their connections, companies "can't claim their service is unlimited if there is some kind of informal limit," Laszlo added.
