The blogosphere has been roiling of late over allegations that Comcast is suspending the broadband service of customers who surpass a particular bandwidth limit. Operators of shared-bandwidth networks do need to throttle bandwidth. It's well known that the number of cable modem users and how much bandwidth each is consuming affects quality and availability of the service.
Comcast warns customers about exceeding bandwidth limits, and it's likely that few users beyond the most ardent downloaders of music and movies actually exceed than a handful of gigabytes each month. However, according to recent reports, the company isn't clear where the ceiling is. Nobody knows how to manage Comcast's network better than Comcast does, but in a world moving fast toward bandwidth-on-demand and greater service flexibility, users aren't going to tolerate this sort of situation for long.
For More:
- Here's a posting [1] at ConsumerAffairs.com that includes a response from Comcast,
- The Wired blog site has this story [2]
Links:
[1] http://consumeraffairs.com/news04/2007/08/comcast_ban.html?imw=Y
[2] http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/08/does-comcast-br.html