Poor Beaumont, TX

Usually it's fun to live in a test market town. You get to try bizarre new gel laundry detergents, or peculiar fried things from snack companies trying to break out of the potato and corn chip rut. My personal favorite test market story: a paper company testing a new compact tissue product in a town in Colorado. Only to find out that high altitudes and the associated thin air made the boxes rupture on the shelf.

But Beaumont TX is now about to experience an unpleasant test market, and I hope they complain to all get out.

Comcast is testing a bandwidth cap there that limits the amount of bandwidth any person can consumer before getting charged for per gigabyte overages. You remember Comcast, the company that was caught slowing downloads for file sharers, which BTW are piping a lot more than illegal music around the world.

According to CNET, in this post, :

The company said earlier this week that it will begin testing a new metering system in Beaumont, Texas.The way it works is that subscribers who go over their limit for uploading and downloading material will be charged $1 per gigabyte. The test will only apply to new customers in the test region. The tiered pricing will work this way for the Internet portion of subscription packages that also include phone or video use: At the low end, users will pay $29.95 per month for service at a speed of 768 kilobits per second, with a 5GB monthly cap. At the high end, users will pay $54.90 per month for service at 15 megabits per second, with a 40GB cap.

They say 5% of their users are consuming 50% of bandwidth.

But that 5 gig cap...correct me if I am wrong, but isn't that a couple of streaming movies? Which is a service that Comcast actually advertises as a benefit to having broadband.

Hmm. Sounds like a price increase to me. Not a rationalization of bandwidth issues.

And as long as I am being a crankyparker, BTW CNET, people who use the net heavily are not "bandwidth hogs", but rather "heavy users." And I will wager those heavy users were the innovators and early adopters that got Comcast started in the damned high speed Internet business.

So poo to you Comcast, and...well...I really like CNET, so I am just going to give you an eye roll. But it is an ICY one. That chill you feel in your spines is the result. Feel my wrath! Err...mild CNET disappointment.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.