A Sneaky Assault on the Future of the Internet.
Comcast recently announced it was considering extra charges for users who consume more than 250 GB of bandwidth per month. After 250 GB, users could purchase additional bandwidth in 10 GB amounts for $15 each.
On its face, this plan sounds very reasonable. I’ve monitored my bandwidth usage before, and I’m what many would consider a fairly heavy user. In a good month, I generally wouldn’t exceed 30 GB of bandwidth. That’s a little peer to peer file sharing, a lot of music streaming, occasional software downloads. Maybe a Linux image here and there.
But if you look closer, this is nothing more than an insidious attempt to hijack the future of the internet.
Jim Lynch over at ExtremeTech called it:
“I suspect that Comcast is making a preemptive attack to hurt Apple and other downloadable content companies. In effect, Comcast is trying to kill the downloadable content market in its infancy. It sees the future and in that future Comcast may be nothing more than the owner of some dumb pipes that carry everybody else’s valuable content.”
Downloadable movies and other similar sorts of content delivery systems are just right over the horizon. The only thing that’s holding off deployment of downloadable movies is bandwidth.
To make that sort of business model really work, you need fast service – the sort they have in Japan and Korea and Hong Kong, right now – where download speeds of 50-100 Mb/s are pretty much standard.
After years of waiting, speeds like that are coming here soon, with the deployment of DOCSIS 3.0 and FTTH.
At 100 mb/s, a 6 GB SD movie takes just 6 minutes to download; a 25 GB Blu-Ray movie would take about a half hour.
If you stream the video you can almost watch right away. But this still uses a humongous amount of bandwidth – Blu-Ray movies streams can consume up to 54 mb/s of bandwidth.
And therein lies the problem with Comcast’s plan: you could blow your entire month’s bandwidth allowance by watching just 10 Blu-Ray movies.
Add to that other bandwidth-intensive applications that are also just over the horizon – like video phones and streaming HD TV shows – as well as current downloadable content, like video games and other software – and you might very well find yourself out of bandwidth in a hurry.
And Comcast knows that these apps are coming. And they fear that.
First and foremost, Comcast is a cable TV company. They make the largest portion of their bucks by delivering content – programming – over cable TV lines direct to TVs.
The proliferation of downloadable content could easily change that.
Comcast and the other cable companies offer packages of different TV channels for different price points. Usually, in any channel package you buy, the majority of the channels are junk – stuff you never ever would watch.
But with downloadable content, that changes. You need only pay what you stream or download. Everything’s a la carte. You get to pick and choose and only pay for what you watch. All your favorite TV shows, movies, news, sports – everything will soon be available over the internet and deliverable directly to your HDTV via your Playstation or Xbox (or PC interface).
This scares Comcast absolutely shitless. Why? Because it makes them redundant as content providers.
As the author at ExtremeTech said, it relegates them to the position as the simple owner of dumb pipes.
So how do they insure their future as content providers? Oh, they are so, so sneaky. They take pre-emptive action to kill-off all downloadable content not their own, by imposing caps that make downloading non-Comcast content too expensive.
But 250 GB of data you say? We’ll never use that much, ever!
Yeah, right.
My first PC had a 20 MB hard drive – and at the time, that was plenty. Microsoft Word version 1.1 was only about 1.5 KB. It took me a year or so to fill up that 20 MB drive.
Then in the late 90’s the first 1-3 GB drives came out. You’ll never fill that up, said one of my friends. That of course, was wrong.
In the past few years, VHS tapes went away and were supplanted by DVD’s which held a humongous amount more data (6-8 GB); now DVD’s are being phased out in favor of Blu-Ray discs which hold yet four times more data (up to 48 GB).
And that 20 MB hard drive I started with wouldn’t even hold the boot-files for Windows Vista.
My current PC has three hard drives with a total of 270 GB locally augmented by a network storage device with one TB of space – which is currently half full (at the rate I’m going, I’ll have to add another TB later this year).
Similarly, in the house of the near future, you’ll burn up a tremendously larger amount of internet bandwidth. How many movies do you normally rent now? 2-3 a week, maybe? That’s not uncommon.
Say you watch three Blu-Ray movies per week, streamed – that’s about 75 GB per week (or 300 GB per month). Add other 5-10 hours of other HDTV streaming – say sports and other TV programming, maybe another 50 GB per week (or 200 GB per month). Maybe some videophone calls here and there at the rate of say 12 Mb/s. Download two new games off Steam – 25 GB. Buy some songs off Amazon or ITunes. Maybe do a little peer-to-peer. Stream some music from your favorite radio stations.
That’s probably 550 GB of stuff right there. And that’s for just an average sort of user. A “power” user might do several times that.
Comcast knows this will come to pass, if the internet business models remain as they are. But with the metered billing, they get their piece of the pie (or kill off the applications, whichever works).
So under the metered billing approach, what would Comcast charge for the 550 GB per month average user?
Right now, the top tier Comcast HSI service costs about $60 per month (without cable TV). Using the metered billing approach they’re planning to implement, that 550 GB you may use in one month would cost an extra $450 – for a total bill of about $510 per month.
With rates like that, how many people will download or stream movies or other HD content?
Zero.
And Comcast knows this. And Comcast loves it.
This makes it more important than ever to pass a net neutrality bill in congress. We must protect our future!
