Fancy That: Comcast's Network Holding Up Fine Without Usage Caps
from the captive-audience dept
For many years in the early aughts, broadband providers insisted they needed to impose usage caps and costly overage fees to help manage network congestion. By 2015, leaked documents from Comcast revealed that was never true. In the years since, even industry CEOs have acknowledged that the limits are little more than an additional tax on captive customers in uncompetitive U.S. broadband markets.
As COVID-19 struck, ISPs quickly bowed to pressure to eliminate such restrictions so home-bound Americans weren't inundated with significantly higher bills. In a press release, Comcast makes it clear that its network has (gasp), performed perfectly well under the added load -- despite a 32% increase in upstream traffic and 18% increase in downstream traffic. There's been a 77% surge in gaming downloads, a 37% bump in streaming video consumption, and a 228% bump in VOIP and teleconferencing use. This is, Comcast says, causing no issues for Comcast:
"Our ongoing, proactive network investment to add fiber and capacity has put us in a good position to manage the increases that we are experiencing today. While the COVID-19 experience is new and unprecedented, the Internet ecosystem is flexible and performing the way it was designed. We engineer the network to handle spikes and shifts in usage, and what we have seen so far with COVID-19 is within our capacity."
Many ISPs, like Comcast, backed off the "congestion" claims a few years ago after their own memos, and numerous researchers and journalists, kept debunking them.
These days, most ISPs can't even be bothered to offer a justification for the arbitrary limits. When they do attempt to justify them, they're usually (falsely) passed off as an "issue of fairness." But that's false too: Americans already pay some of the highest prices for broadband in the OECD, and flat rate broadband is perfectly profitable, regardless of usage. Comcast's CEO has also routinely tried to compare bandwidth to electricity and gasoline consumption, which is again a misleading comparison to finite, completely different resources -- all in a bid to make the restrictions sound sensible and necessary.
Imposing additional surcharges on everybody isn't an issue of fairness, it's monopoly price gouging of captive customers. Such restrictions wouldn't work in competitive markets; users would simply flock to the uncapped provider. But thanks to apathetic US telcos that refuse to upgrade their aging DSL networks, Comcast is securing a bigger monopoly than ever across countless US markets. Worse perhaps: such limits create a perfect opportunity for ISPs to anti-competitively exploit them in their battle against streaming providers, something that's already happening at AT&T.
Yet there are still occasionally folks who try to justify these arbitrary restrictions as just normal, creative, business price differentiation. But that logic not only ignores the monopoly, consumer, and competitive problems noted above, it ignores that extremely heavy users of bandwidth -- say like a guy running a server in his garage -- can already be (and are) nudged to more expensive business class tiers without applying confusing, costly additional surcharges on everybody. It also ignores that (again due to no competition), you'll never see very light users (like grandma who just checks the weather and email) pay significantly less. She too pays a high price. Everybody pays a high price for broadband in America. Again, with with a few regional exceptions, because it's a broken, monopolized market.
Like so many "normal" behaviors, COVID-19 has exposed broadband usage caps as folly. Yet once things settle down it remains likely that large ISPs will bring back such surcharges -- along side ambiguous, debunked, and nonsensical justifications for them. After all, with very little competition in US markets, and US regulators now a rubber stamp for industry interests, who or what exactly is going to stop them?
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Filed Under: broadband, congestion, data caps, home working, infrastructure
Companies: comcast
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Wait, you mean Richard Bennett lied?
Somebody bring my fainting couch!
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Re: Richard Bennett
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Re: Re: Richard Bennett
No, just Ajit Pai's cum-soaked concubine.
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greed is the virus
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like the rest of them, always have been and always will be lying pieces of crap that will never be satisfied, regardless of how much profit they make, how much funding they get, how many tax breaks they get, how many senators and congressmen/women they have in their pockets and how crappy a service and customer service reps they have!! think of the number of hospitals that could have been built, lives that could have been saved if the funding these assholes continuously get offered and keep taking for services they NEVER DELIVER! just like the entertainment industries, they want everything but are NOT prepared to give a fucking thing!
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Just wait for the "COVID19 network cleaning" charges...
or the Emergency Prevention fees (that they will start charging EVERYONE during non-emergency times, you know just in case they have lower revenue during an emergency... only 8.99 a month (during non emergency months only... we aren't barbarians).
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Re:
I remember the earthquake tax in California years ago ... I laughed because I did not live there but will the fed/states now levy a coronavirus tax? Of course it will hit the disadvantaged more than the advantaged.
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Because Science
That is because people listened to the government and stopped playing online video games and instead watch 4k streaming TV shows. Though 4k uses a lot more bandwidth we are all doing our part. Video games are bad.
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Re: Because Science
Yeah - that's the ticket.
Not only that but the congestion claims were taken out of context, they did not really say that and if they did - it was sarcasm.
/s
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re: comcast's network performance during this work from home era
I disagree. Comcasts's network has been slow-to-unusable, here in northeast metro Altanta. Prior to the 'everyone work from home' my connection was typically 200M/12M for 23+ hours per day. Since everyone started working from home, my average speed has dropped to around 45M/9M with abysmally low 0.0029M/2M as the worst recorded speedtest.net results (and this was to a site with no bandwidth issues (i know this because my servers are hosted in the same data center)).
We have had several people working from home, and one rule we instituted at the beginning was, if its for entertainment between 8am and 5pm, minimize the bit rate, but before 8am or after 5pm, feel free to set it back to 1080p.
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Re: re: comcast's network performance during this work from home
I live in Rome and the connection here has been superb. I remote in M-F to my job in ATL and rarely have any problems doing remote support, IP telephony and calling\taking calls. Where I get bogged down is after 8pm when I start surfing, playing ESO and other games as well as the SO watching Netflix, Amazon, etc.
I have the top tier whatever that is.
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Re: Re: re: comcast's network performance during this work from
Rome… Italy?
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Re: re: comcast's network performance during this work from home
If you don't live in company housing, how does having employees limit the use of their home connections have any measurable effect on the business's internet speed? The other 99.9% of subscribers competing for the resources are under no such rule.
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Wouldn't be so infuriating if our tax dollars weren't going towards this BS.
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Not so much no.
They have decreased streaming quality to free up bandwidth. So have a lot of the server-side providers. And their was a pretty big east coast outage the other day. I don't know if it was capacity related, but my guess is it probably was.
I expect it to get worse. Monopoly markets are saturated. They are just charging more and more for the same capacity, and the state is endorsing the scheme.
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