Bandwith Crisis Starting to Affect Cable Service
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | March 12, 2007 | Share This
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As the entertainment industry moves online, cable broadband companies are feeling the pinch. The Boston Globe reports that cable providers have started enforcing their “Acceptable Use” policies by disconnecting customers that consume excessive amounts of bandwidth. The Globe writes,
“Comcast’s little-known acceptable-use policy allows the company to cut off service to customers who use the Internet too much. Comcast says that only .01 percent of its 11.5 million residential high-speed Internet customers fall into this category…Feddeman declined to say where Comcast draws the line on too much Internet usage, instead saying the amount of data that could trigger a warning call would be roughly the equivalent of 13 million e-mail messages or 256,000 photos a month. Although those files vary in size, a typical photo file size is 1 to 2 megabytes, meaning that excessive users are downloading hundreds of gigabytes per month.”
Though 13 million emails a month seems like an incomprehensible amount of Internet time, consider that one year’s worth of emails (from an average user) is equivalent to about an hour of video. About 60% of IP traffic is P2P filesharing, most of which is video, and is expected to increase as digital tv and other bandwidth-needy content moves online. Last month, Google warned that the growth of online television could “bring the global network to its knees.” As USA Today reports,
“Broadband Internet delivery to homes and small businesses is one of the most lucrative segments for cable TV operators, but heavy investments in infrastructure are needed to meet the rapid rise of Internet file-swapping and video downloads.”
Foreseeing that “the internet wasn’t built for TV”, Google has been quietly buying fiber-optic cables for over a year. As Linda Sherry from Consumer Action told the Globe, “Legitimately, everybody’s going to be a bandwidth hog sooner or later, because that’s what the Internet is, going forward.”
Topics: Technology |