Comcast vs. The Internet

zia — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 16:23:09 +0000

In the past few weeks, a flurry of internet articles have become a giant snowball flying right at Comcast’s head. As it turns out, Comcast isn’t equipped to handle all of the traffic that its users generate, so they try and control BitTorrent use and cut off their customers’ service when they’ve used too much bandwidth.

The undeniable economics: the demand for internet content is more than Comcast can supply, so someone has to bend. Either the user has to cut down on the amount of content they’re consuming, or the system has to increase their capacity. It should be apparent which option makes Comcast a more useable system, but on the contrary, Comcast is forcing their users to do the bending.

How can this happen? Quite simply, because Comcast can. Comcast is the only choice for many when it comes to internet providers. I’m sure that Comast will say that it is trying to maintain a usable system by not overloading itself with so much data flow, but in this case, “usable” does not mean that a system is simply up and running at an acceptable speed. It means that a system is not only running, but is meeting the needs of its content-hungry consumers.

How easy would it be for Comcast to upgrade their systems to meet the consumer demand? Probably not easy. But find a way, as soon as humanly possible, or someone else will.

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Comcast vs. The Internet