Thursday, August 28, 2008

Comcast Bandwith Limits

First, it's been quite a while since my last post.... I have a couple posts I need to do (some photos of the Chicago Airshow, a Crazy lighting storm we had here in Chicago about a month ago, and my new Gig...) so I'll get to those hopefully this weekend...

However, this cannot be ignored!



I saw this on Ars Technica this evening and I am very worried about the future of the internet/ISP in America.

Comcast cable beginning on October 1, will be imposing a bandwidth limit of 250GB per month. Now I realize that this seems like a lot of Data and I'll admit that for most people it will never be an issue. I fear that this is only the first straw in what will become the downfall or 'clamp-down' of internet access accross America. Luckily I have chosen to not use Comcast for my ISP, even though I have used them in the past (and I realize that the througput on my AT&T DSL is not nearly as close to my old cable service) but as a frequent user of the internet (streaming audio & video), a person who downloads movies, music, photography, applications, *nix operating systems and more recently having started working from home; where my livelyhood is completely dependant upon having a constant high speed connection to the internet, I fear that other companies will begin to adopt these types of policies and either cutoff my service once these threashholds are met or charge me even MORE money for additional bandwidth.

I completely understand that I don't have to worry about this since I am not a Comcast customer any longer (nor will I be one EVER again), but this can't be a good thing for the Internet in America. This type of action will eventually affect the growth and innovation of streaming media, leveraging web based applications such as Google Docs, web based data storage (you're going to pay for the storage and the data transfer; it's kinda like gas surcharge)

I'm am going to start tracking my bandwidth on my new Macbook Pro (it's another blog post I've been meaning to get to) which will not take into consderation my Ubuntu Laptop and Windows (Gaming) Desktop, but hey... it's a start. So I would love to see more people make the choice; if it's available to you, to stop using this company and any other company that is making the decision to limit how you use the internet. (wishful thinking... I know, but a 'Girl can Dream' can't she?)

*I would like to note that even though nobody ever reads this, that this is not my best post ever. So I need to Blame Barack Obama, who is giving his DNC Acceptance speech, which I have found to be extremely distracting :-) but I am inspired... Also, BOOO COMCAST!!!!

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