Comcast recently announced it was, effective Sept. 5th 2008, going to cap its residential users Internet access to 250GB per month. While that may be a substantial amount for most users, people who spend lots of time on the Internet and/or play a lot of games could run into some issues on a month to month basis.
Downloading of HD content also will instantly begin putting a toll on their monthly cap. So what can Comcast customers do?
Well apparently monitor your usage via software tools, run the risk of getting capped or upgrade to a business line for $100 a month US.
Oh wait there is a third option, let the U.S. Govt. come to the rescue. Yes, yes... I just said let the U.S. Govt. come to the rescue. As reported on http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9289&Itemid=1, the FCC has told Comcast they cannot cap Internet usage as it violates our rights as users to have unfettered access to the internet. Comcast has filled to challenge their ruling and we await the outcome.
So what does this mean? Well quite frankly this is quietly one of the biggest news stories of this year for the Internet.
If Comcast succeeds, they will open the doors for other Internet providers to begin capping monthly usage and setting up additional pricing tiers to take our hard earned cash. And in the end take what is a blossoming economic front and turn it into a gimped media format that could become too costly to support for users.
I am all for having tiers of service for how fast you can access things. But putting a cap on how much I can access in a month is akin to telling me how much I can read in one month or how much TV I am allowed to watch in one month. Why not just start burning some books while we are at it?
More PlayStation 3 News...
09-09-2008
Posted 5 hours ago
by
costing over $100 a month. For uncapped (but you only get full speed for 12 hours a day, the rest of the time it is throttled to 20kb/s) you pay close to $250 per month.
