Ramble

The end of the Internet as we know it has arrived. Comcast has confirmed the long-standing rumor that they would implement a 250GB monthly bandwidth cap.

This may be a “generous” cap, depending on how you look at it, but if duplicated by the other broadband ISPs, it spells the end of high bandwidth video sites, backup services, teleconferencing, and anything else that uses significant bandwidth, which is everything nowadays.

As we move toward HD video online, that 250GB will seem very skimpy. If you share your Net connection with other people in your household, 250GB suddenly seems really inadequate. But, the problem is deeper than just the technical limitations imposed, this move may have a chilling effect on innovation.

I work on a video podcasting service geared towards University needs and this kind of cap could severely limit its utility to heavy users and especially to the many off-campus students who increasingly demand high quality, high bandwidth multimedia as a standard part of their online educational experience.

This move is soley about forcing people to use Comcast’s video and VOIP services over competetors that depend on a fast general pipe to the Internet. As Om Malik mentions in his post today, their technical arguments defending this move ring hollow when they are proclaiming that average bandwidth usage is only 2GB/month. Why bother capping, if that is true and the vast majority of their users will not ever get near it? I don’t think it is true, at least not completely.

Comcast executives are not stupid, they can see the trends just as well as I. The future online is HD video, mobile computing, cloud computing, and attaching everything possible to the Internet (assuming we don’t run out of address space, first). The common thread amongst these disparate trends is the ever increasing demand for bandwidth they imply. But, Comcast doesn’t make the big bucks selling a simple utility, a pipe to the cloud of end-point services. No, they make money with the “value add” services, like video, and voice, that directly compete with services like Hulu and Skype. If they can disable competetors by making them more expensive (through potential overage fees) or simply less useful (because you might hit a cap using them), they create a nice incentive for people to use Comcast services instead. This doesn’t even take into account the possibility of charging for a “higher tier” service that is just the same crappy Comcast service with a larger cap.

The tiered Internet has arrived. If you are a Comcast subscriber (like I am), it is time to protest in the only way that seems to get a mega-company’s attention and cancel your service. Make sure that whoever you switch to knows that the reason for this change is Comcast’s bandwidth cap policy and maybe we can prevent this from becoming a trend.

I’m pessimistic. I think we are entering a new era online, and it is not good.