Comcast has decided to impose a 250GB/month limit on their customers. I have a lot of friends that use Comcast for their internet service provider and are likely to hit this limit, even counting fully legit data. Linux isos aren’t small. And I know that I do a lot of backups and whoisi testing that uses a decent amount of bandwidth. I’m sure I’m well past this limit. [ Note: I am a very happy Verizon FIOS user. ]
But the real story is about what this does to competitive video services. Want to get access to better, lower-cost video than Comcast cable service from somewhere like Amazon, Netflix or Hulu? Nope, welcome to the world of false scarcity. You will use their video service and you will like it.
Om calls this “the enemy of innovation” and he’s right. Part of the explosion of video, services and data via the web has come because of the growth and availability of broadband into people’s homes. What this says is “growth is fine as long as it doesn’t compete with our video offerings.”
I am reminded of the oldest story of this behaviour when AT&T didn’t want to support the Internet because they didn’t want competition to their proprietary long haul services. And rightfully so. It’s a good thing that AT&T didn’t win that battle, right?
Also, they list how many pieces of email you can send with a 250GB limit. (Huh? Seriously?) I wonder how many youtube videos or hulu videos that amounts to. Anyone know the avg size of one of those? That might make for a more interesting number.
