* Posts by Eric

1 publicly visible post • joined 8 May 2008

Comcast mulls overage fees for bandwidth lovers

Eric
Dead Vulture

Or perhaps

It's because the companies instituting these caps and transport filtering are doing so to constrain emerging alternative online video and phone services that will threaten their revenue. As a consumer, If you can't reliably and cost effectively use a non-Comcast service for VOD or audio / video conferencing, but instead can get quasi-similar Comcast-provided offerings, then... right. You'll suck it up and consolidate on their systems.

I understand the bandwidth concerns, and the digital cable conversion in the United States should help some of that, but if the bandwidth is constrained to such a degree that Comcast need to institute new caps and protocol policing, then how are they pushing ahead with "HD," VOD, and phone rollouts?

Take a quick look their most recent earnings info - look very closely at the growth #'s and then think on applications like Skype, Google's Grand Central, iChat, Hulu, Netflix on demand, etc.

http://biz.yahoo.com/e/080501/cmcsa10-q.html

I'm no tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist, but I know when I'm being manipulated by a company. And yes - that's business - but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.