Comcast Not Counting Their Video Service Against Bandwidth Cap 284
Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
from the net-neutrality-really-works-after-all dept.
from the net-neutrality-really-works-after-all dept.
tekgoblin writes something not quite worth rejoicing over. From the article: "Comcast Internet subscribers can rejoice. Comcast has recently announced that they will not be counting content streamed via their Comcast Xfinity App on the Xbox 360 against their bandwidth caps. Comcast claims that since the data is only traversing their internal Comcast network that it will not count towards your 250 GB limit a month."
Comcast is claiming this does not violate net neutrality laws (and it very well may not); a number of folks are not very happy about it. I've always been perplexed by the large media interests of most U.S. last-mile providers.
Re:UVerse? (Score:5, Informative)
Which are overall reasonable plans on capacity and speed, terrible on price, but well, that's the price we pay for living in a large country slightly larger than the US but with the population of california.
California has about 5 million more people than Canada; it's so large that it would count as a medium-sized European country (with a very strong economy too).
Re:WAN (Score:5, Informative)
They have inconsistent acceptable use policies with data transfers or different definitions of public and local network bandwidth? I don't know, I am more confused now.
This is from http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/common-questions-excessive-use/#excessive22 [comcast.com] stating that the cap indeed still applies for XfinityTV.com which I would assume is on the Comcast local network just like the Xbox service. It was last updated Updated 3/9/2012.
Does the Comcast Usage Meter measure data that I consume from XfinityTV.com?
Yes. XfinityTV.com is an Internet web service from Comcast that you receive using your XFINITY Internet service. Comcast treats its affiliated services the same as it treats any unaffiliated services that you use your XFINITY Internet service to access. All data that travels over the public Internet on our high-speed Internet service (and all data that XFINITY Internet users send to one another using the service) is counted toward the monthly Data Usage Threshold, regardless of the source.
Re:Internal Network, eh? (Score:4, Informative)
only problem is, you'd be in violation of the TOS against servers with FTP, Telnet, Rsync or any other file transfer protocol because one system must act as a server
You demonstrate why NN should not be supported (Score:2, Informative)
A network provider should be a neutral network provider
Agree 100%.
However there is nothing about this that breaks neutrality, which is all about them not LIMITING other services. You seem to think it is but all it's doing is allowing access to some content they offer at reduced cost - where is the "limit" on other people?
It's simply the case that content they can store on the same network costs them nothing to transmit, and so you get it for free. It's simply passing along a cost reduction.
It boggles my mind how network neutrality supporters cannot understand this, from so many angles. You cannot understand how this does not violate network neutrality. Nor can you understand you any NN regulations even being considered would in no way address this "problem" which is not even a problem!!! Instead you support a stupid regulation which doesn't actually solve any of the problems you are imagining. It's inherently a stupid argument I think to claim that you should force a company to charge equally for something right next to you vs three networks away. It makes no sense in the real world and could not be sustained.