Comcast & The FCC
 

"It must be nice living in a country that doesn't have download limits on internet plans."

That may be changing. I caught a quick glimpse on Fox news a few days back that there is some sort of regulation in the works. A pay by meg. type of thing or a download on demand. If so that will hurt the porn bus. May not go any where but in this econ. who knows???????????????


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Well, FoxNews is so reliable.

The FCC is working on a project to make high speed Internet available to everyone. That is contrary to this statement of regulations to make you pay more for downloads.

Unfortunately, recently, Comcast won an argument that prevents the FCC from interfering with Comcast's internet company. In other words, with this loss, there is potential for the loss of Net Neutrality. What it means is that Comcast, not the government (through regulations) can dictate what you can and can't see on-line. If you want to view videos on demand, Comcast would prefer you use their own services rather than Netflix or Hulu or others. So if there is any extra charges for downloading anything, it will come from the ISPs, not from any government regulations.

Now, would Comcast be dumb enough to set itself up like this? As you say, who knows? But it isn't a good sign.

The intent of Comcast is to take action against people who download illigal movies and hog so much bandwidth that other subsribers on that same node get slowed down badly. When a Comcast internet user exceeds a certain amount of volume - very considerable - in a month then that user gets slowed down in the interest of other users.
I do not believe that Comcast has any hidden agenda. Still it is a little troubling, because now that there is that potential, some activists may start to bug them to use that as a tool to combat porn. Because porn is evil, you know.

Porn is evil. My wife hates how much of a better lover I am because of it

Comcast was, is, and will probably continue to be sh*t, no surprise there.

Anyway, even without monthly limits, there's still a speed bandwidth limit, and in the US there are very few plans with extremely high bandwidth, not like Japan or anything.

neukgraag, when you say no limits, you mean no "XGB per month" limits right? I mean, you still have a certain speed at which you download stuff and can't go above that speed, right?

Current Comcast High-Speed Internet subscribers will see an increase in their current internet speeds with the launch of DOCSIS 3.0. of up to 16 Mbps download/2 Mbps upload. However, in reality, of course, it is limited by the host server and the path to my house and FTV is comparable to other sites in that respect. Only Kink.com has considerably faster transfer rates. Now, that speed would be throttled by Comcast if I exceed my usage limits for the month. With all the downloading of videos I do - I am on several sites - I do not come close to that limit.
By the way, with the launch of DOCSIS 3.0, Comcast will also be offering two new levels of speed service:

Ultra 22 Mbps download/5 Mbps upload (up to 30 Mbps/7 Mbps with PowerBoost)
Extreme 50 50 Mbps download/10 Mbps upload

Imagine that.

They can decent speeds, but even if they don't charge an insane price, I still wouldn't go with them because of some of their other policies and such.

And this from CNET:

The Federal Communications Commission is moving forward with its National Broadband Plan despite an appeals court decision earlier this week that called into question the agency's authority over regulating the Internet.

In its 2010 Broadband Action Agenda released Thursday, the FCC said it plans to address more than 60 rules in the making and other proposals by the end of the year. The FCC said it was important to move forward with these items to reach its goals of helping 100 million U.S. homes get affordable access to broadband with download speeds of 100 Mbps over the next decade; promoting innovation, investment and competition and consumer interest in broadband; and providing a platform to improve energy consumption and monitoring, education, and health care.

That's correct. Nowadays your download speed seem to be effected by the limits on the servers. There are both bandwidth caps and throttling going on nearly everywhere. Getting a faster connection doesn't necessarily make things faster in real life. However, there are other sites to the one you mention with 'decent' bandwidth. 'Website 1' has allowed download speeds of up to 1.5 Mbytes/s or 12 Mbits/s, but averaged at half that speed. That content was in .mp4 (BTW the format of content seems to have an effect on download speed on a same server...). On 'Website 2' the .mpg files downloaded at only 500 kbytes/s or 3.9 Mbits/s. However, the zip files peaked at 2.5 Mbytes/s. Yes, that's 20 Mbits/s real world speed!

Those Ultra and Extreme connections seem interesting. However, the upload looks kind of restrected to me. Luckily, I'm fortunate to have equal speed in both uploading and downloading. How fast is my connection? Well, fast enough: 24 Mbps download/24 Mbps upload :D

There is a good broadband speed test on the internet that is easy and free to do. It gives good measures of one's real connection speed. I won't link it here, but finding the site is easy.