The scary high-bandwidth applications cited here are actually fairly low-bandwidth compared to what Comcast and the other residential access providers are worried about.  The 384Kb/s Skype video conferencing streams in this piece’s worst case scenario pale in comparison to the 2Mb/viewable second iTunes videos, which pale in comparison to the HDTV videos we’ll start seeing soon.

I’m rather skeptical of the idea that metered billing would vastly increase the fees paid by typical Internet users.  Given that those fees are currently set by market pressure rather than regulation, it seems unlikely that users would suddenly be willing to pay more due to metering.  If we look at cases where metered versus unmetered phone services are going up against each other, the prices for unmetered service appear to have a considerable amount of use built in.

What I would expect metered use to do is to discourage the biggest users of bandwidth—not those looking at websites or making VOIP calls, or even doing low-bandwidth video conferencing, but those watching DVD or HDTV-quality video, or serving that video content to other users.  These are precisely the users Comcast is targeting via technical rather than economic means now.  Giving users a choice of whether to pay for that sort of bandwidth, rather than outright preventing them from using it, seems like a good thing to me.

It should also be noted that there are more and less resource-intensive ways to deal with high bandwidth applications like streaming TV over the Internet.  Using services that cache data locally is much nicer to the network than using services that pull each copy over from somewhere far away, but in a “distance is dead” unmetered access world, it’s rather difficult to align the incentives of the end users with the incentives of the network operators.  To use another analogy from the original posting, metered billing for water doesn’t generally discourage anyone from drinking a glass of water, but it does encourage people to fix leaky faucets.

All good points, but metered services do discourage even relatively mild usage patterns.  With gas prices as they are, I’m quicker to put on a sweater than to crank up the heat even just a few degrees.  Water is relatively cheap, but if it weren’t then people would think twice about washing their cars, watering their lawns or filling their hot tubs, all normally reasonable acts.

One thing I’ve sensed all through the Comcast saga is that many people are unhappy with the cost of broadband, specifically that of Comcast.  I find this strange.  Unless Comcast’s pricing varies widely, which I am unaware of, their pricing is reasonable, along the lines of $40/month.  If people are finding that to be too much, maybe they should consider whether or not they should even have Internet access.  It is much more expensive (and lower quality) in underserved regions of the world.  I have Comcast’s triple play which is like $99/month.  Even if I attribute a heavier portion of that, say $40, for the broadband portion, that is remarkably cheap when you consider that you are getting about a T1 of bandwidth (sometimes more) to your home.  I think most folks outside the industry don’t realize that to get a conventional dedicated T1 - if you even could actually get one to your home at all - would cost you in the hundreds of dollars per month going up as you get further from whatever ISP you want to land at.  If $40 is too much, what should it be?  Free?  $10 per month?  $20?  We all want things to be as cheap as possible but you have to be reasonable.  I think some of the expectations out there are ridiculous.  If seems like everyone just wants something for free (see illegal music and video downloading, which ironically enough is the root of the issue we are discussing.)

What is funny too is that I recently switched from Verizon DSL to Comcast Cable when I moved houses.  Verizon DSL pricing was along the same $40 line, but they added in the phone line charge which they assumed you already had.  You couldn’t get out of it, even if you were using Vonage and your cell phone like I was.  I got the lowest price per-call service since I was never going to use it, but it still was like $20/month after all the fees and taxes you pay (that you don’t pay with Vonage), so the overall broadband bill was like $60.  And, although I thought Verizon DSL was fine, I found that Comcast service is faster.  So I’m now getting better service for a lower price.  Yet Comcast is getting all this heat.  But look out Comcast if Verizon FiOS makes it to my neighborhood!

But yes, if metered service appears, there is a very good chance someone’s bill will go above $40 even with what seemed like relatively mild use, just like SMS and cell phone minutes can drive your bill up in a hurry from reasonable to awful if you aren’t careful.

Campbell, your post seems to have a fair bit of misinformation.  Here’s one example quickly verifiable.  You say DSL is $40 + 20 / month.  Umm… AT&T is selling dsl for $10/month (not including 20/month or so for the phone line).  Even ignoring that unadvertised $10/month deal, googling “verizon dsl” brings up 3 ads for $13/month Verizon DSL…  So your information was way off.

Unfortunately, we don’t know what Comcast is selling us for the $4x/month - because they have been shown to consistently lie about it to their customers who ask.

But let’s get back to “the business or technical viewpoints” you say are being ignored.  They aren’t.  The business and technical data has been well explained; it indicates Comcast’s head on a platter is quite appropriate. 
If comcast is suffering under BitTorrent usage and using that as the excuse for impersonating me, then why did it just claim to have increased bandwidth throughout the bay area?  And why does it offer phenomenally high upstream bandwidth to commercial customers over the same physical plant that it simultaneously claims is horribly congested?  Seems like the business dog is wagging the technical tail, that is, asking the technical folks to spout a bunch of insupportable hogwash to support the business goals of degrading the basic service so they can charge more for a premium version.

It’s certainly technically possible to throttle or meter upstream bandwidth only, if that’s the critical issue, as some have claimed (with limited evidence).

Voice phone calls carried over Internet connections are so cheap that even a 1000% markup, the raw bandwidth used for calls made 24/7 would not make them expensive enough to warrant metering, even if carrier (i.e. ultra-high) quality Internet connections are used.

The big players, when claiming that 2 broadband Internet providers is enough to provide robust competition, claimed that broadband is a simple commodity, and used that argument successfully to corner the market.  But once they had established the oligarchy, they changed their tune and now change the product so that while they’re still locking out the competition, they are offering multiple products, and degrading the less expensive ones to push prices and customers to high monopoly rents.  If that’s not a reason to call the authorities, I don’t know what is.

I am not sure how I misinformed anyone about AT&T’s DSL pricing since I make no mention of it anywhere.  (But I do find it amusing that the word “monopoly” is mentioned in the same post where AT&T is used as an example of a service provider that operates fairly, given their history.)  I don’t know what special deals AT&T is advertising in certain areas but a quick look at their website shows three tiers of DSL service from $20 - $35, presumably plus the phone line which would push the total price to at least $40-$55.

Also, I never generalized DSL service pricing.  I was referring to Verizon DSL with which I have direct experience as a customer from 2004-2007, where my bill with the cheapest phone line I could get was around $55, more than the $40 or so I now pay to Comcast.  But if you take a harder look at the rates you saw advertised, you will see that their $13/month pricing is promotional for 6 months after which it goes up to $18.  That doesn’t include the phone line, which will run push the total cost to around $40/month.  It is also a limited service that is throttled to 768Kbps / 128Kbps.  So you are basically paying the same as I pay for Comcast but for a lower end service.  It’s good that Verizon offer a more economical package, but I personally would never buy that one because of the 128K upstream limitation.  They also offer a 3Mbps / 768Kbps “Power Plan” priced at $30/month, again plus the phone line.  So I don’t think I misinformed anyone or negated the point I was making.

On the same note, I do not understand why Comcast’s practice is considered to be monopolistic while there is no outcry when a legacy LEC advertises broadband service at one price (with “voice service required” buried in the fine print), then forces you to buy the phone line, which about doubles the cost.  A layperson not aware of how DSL worked would question what one service had to do with the other, especially if they used alternatives for voice service.

Anyway, all of that pricing info is beside the point because they are all reasonable prices to pay for high speed bandwidth to your home.

Let’s not kid ourselves what we are talking about here.  The root of the issue, at least for the time being, is the illegal file sharing of copyrighted material and an ISP’s attempt (that is more common than just Comcast) to thwart such abuse.  Sure, they are also motivated by protecting their investment and postponing infrastructure upgrades.  They are in business to make a profit, else why do it?  But they are also interested in avoiding churn and protecting their subscriber base, the majority of which do not participate in illegal file sharing.  Without illegal file sharing that applications like BitTorrent promote, Comcast is not on the hotseat and we are not even having this discussion.

I realize there are bigger issues at stake, as I said in my article, that unregulated discretion could lead to a service provider applying such policies more liberally and in a truly anti-competitive manner.  So it is worth having this discussion now before we slip down that slope.  But let’s not try to disguise the current issue exclusively in legal or philosophical arguments about the openness of the Internet.  They sound way too much like when you see people hiding behind the first amendment or gun laws when common sense and general decency should tell them that compromise is in order.  For right now, this is not about watching streaming video (I know, because I sometimes watch Netflix on demand over Comcast with no issues).  It is not about VoIP, Skype, email, web browsing or any other routine application used by the masses.  And it is certainly not about the “legitimate” use of BitTorrent.  It is about applications that are largely used in the process of committing federal crimes and a technique that helps to mitigate the issue so that the rest of the paying subscriber community is not adversely affected by it.