The FCC voted 3-2 in early August that treating certain types of Web traffic differently violated its “net neutrality” principles, which state that all Internet traffic should be treated equally.

Comcast says while it will comply, it is still appealing the order “to protect our legal rights and to challenge the basis on which the [FCC] found that Comcast violated federal policy in the absence of pre-existing legally enforceable standards,” EVP David L. Cohen said, in a statement.

FCC chairman Kevin Martin told Bloomberg he’s “disappointed” by the challenge, and that “it was important for the commission to continue to protect consumers’ unfettered access to the Internet.”

Even before the FCC’s ruling, Comcast announced a different strategy to keep the most prolific consumers of bandwidth from overburdening their network: It will slow down users based on how much bandwidth they’re using — not based on what software they’re using. And as of Oct. 1, the company will impose a cap of 250 gigabytes a month for residential customers, a move that could affect about 1% of Comcast’s 14.1 million broadband subscribers.

They don’t market that you can only use #mbps X seconds per month. So if they sell me a plan for 16mbps without adequately disclosing limits, they are practicing a bait and switch technique. Lure the customer in with an attractive marketing offer, then sell them something they did not expect.

Also, they do not provide any good metering, management, or QOS tools. It doesn’t matter what the limit is, whether it’s a fair and reasonable limit, if they impose limits on households (and in mine I have 7 machines in use for the family), then they need to provide useful tools for the ordinary consumer.

As a network engineer, I know how to effectively manage my household bandwidth use, and my kids are throttled so they don’t impact my Vonage service, and Vonage is set on my router as high priority traffic with QOS settings.

We use hulu, joost, amazon VOD, slingbox, PS3 online, gametap, and are certainly on the high end of capacity usage (and this cap would actually not even impact me TODAY). But I use Verizon FIOS and only purchased a 2/5 plan. Even with all those services and up to seven concurrent users, 2/5 is enough for me, my wife, and kids.

BUT, Comcast’s marketing will fool the average consumer. Go ahead Comcast, and sell a product with bandwidth limits, but don’t market something entirely different.

Myself, I’m happy with Sovernet: 2Mb down / 256 Kb up for $37/month with no cap. I wish I could get Burlington Telecom (3Mb/3Mb for $33 through municipal data lines, yay local government!) but I live one town away.

For what it’s worth, I don’t know one 2.4 children ‘average’ household in Australia, New Zealand or the Eire that would even know what to do with 250GB a month, but I do know that a hell of a lot of them shell out each month for Cable or Satellite TV — somewhat independantly of their net access.

… and with the PS3, XBox360 and other ‘media streaming’ devices (ie. those that the technicially challenged can build or acquire) lagging behind in their support of most formats from the web anyway, if they’re not using it for TV, not finding pr0n 24/7 and not using fifteen gaming consoles at once — what would they need it for?

It just sounds like american’s are experiencing the ‘we built the links, everyone came, now we profit’ mentality that shareholder concerned Telco’s/ISPs the world over are driven by, that’s all.

The problem with bandwidth caps is not really the limit, more that most ISP’s do not increase it enough over time. While the need for bandwidth grows faster. Most ISP’s tend to go for more profit instead of better service. Trough healthy competition could take care of that. I’ve always found it striking that in countries with little competition on internet connections have bandwidth caps. Also. you can claim that letting small users pay for the heavy use of others is not totally true. Simply maintaining the network cost a lot, independent from how much the network is used. Also, measuring bandwidth in the first place (especially deep packet inspection) is not only difficult, but also costly. Not to mention completely useless with a fair use policy.

However, if you allow a bandwidth cap, all high bandwidth users will move to competing ISP’s, effectively driving up there bandwidth cost, and force them to start bandwidth measurement and caps as well.

Quick calculations suggest you could download ~525 hours of reasonable quality divx video (over 22 continuous days of viewing).