Are we going to be bandwidth hogs or cloud computing patrons? A three-way debate

Vrignaud asked six questions of Comcast and Qwest/Century Link. Charlie Douglas, a spokesman for Comcast, responded. Following each Comcast answer, we’ve put Vrignaud’s responses to Comcast, followed by answers to the same questions from Qwest/CenturyLink’s spokeswoman Meg Andrews.

Q&A with Comcast, Vrignaud and Qwest

Q1: Is your bandwidth data cap designed to protect your television distribution business?

Comcast A1:  No. Our number one priority is to help ensure that every customer has a superior Internet service. Consistent with that goal, the data consumption threshold is intended to protect the online experience of the vast majority of our customers whose Internet speeds could be degraded because one or more of their neighbors engage in consistent high-volume Internet downloads and uploads.  The threshold does not affect the online activities of about 99 percent of our residential customers. Our current median residential customer consumption is 6 to 8 gigabytes (GB) of data per month.  The threshold addresses potential problems that can be caused by the exceedingly small percentage of subscribers who engage in very high-volume data consumption (over 250 GB in a calendar month). To put this usage in perspective, 250 GB is the equivalent of: sending 50 million plain text emails; downloading 62,500 songs (173 days worth of music); upload more than 25,000 high-resolution photos; or streaming between about 100 to 800 hours of video (the range depends upon whether you’re streaming studio-quality video or good-quality, standard-definition video, which have different bit rates depending upon the provider.

By way of example, Netflix’s website reports that it offers three video quality settings for consumers, which range from up to 0.3 GB per hour for “good quality” to up to 2.3 GB per hour for “best quality.”

Our customers do, and are free to, use their Internet service for any purpose whatsoever — to stream, download, or upload data — up to the applicable monthly threshold.  Data consumed by all Internet-delivered services, including Internet voice, music, video streaming and download services, and uploading to online cloud storage, count against the usage threshold, including Comcast’s XfinityTV.com, an Internet-delivered service.  Comcast’s cable television service is not delivered over the public Internet (and is paid for by customers separately), so usage does not count against the threshold.  Similarly, if a customer had Comcast’s high-speed Internet service , but chose to subscribe to Verizon’s television service (which is also not delivered over the Internet), that television service would not be counted against the threshold.

Here is Vrignaud’s overall response to Comcast’s answers:

Thank you for Comcast’s responses. Unfortunately, while I appreciate the effort in your writing responses, many of the questions haven’t been answered, or have been answered in an evasive way. I’m familiar with the art of spinning an answer, and am not criticizing you personally. I understand very well how hard these are to answer within the constraints of current company policies. However, I still feel Comcast is being evasive in answering these questions.

I’ll go into more detail below with each answer, but I’ll highlight a few examples here first. (Note that I will also send my responses to any press who request them, and grant them permission to use this letter in part or in whole as they wish.)

One example of an evasive answer is A1. In it Comcast continues to conflate the issues of data congestion (data being slowed) and data overuse (using “too much,” which leads to being cut off per your policies.) These are not the same thing.

Comcast has never adequately explained how cutting a user completely off serves any legitimate purpose. With my highlights below, let me quote a letter sent to the FCC by Public Knowledge:

“In 2008, Comcast drew an explicit distinction between throttling designed to ease network congestion and data caps designed to punish “excessive” users. It is unclear why excessive data use that does not cause network congestion matters to Comcast. It is further unclear how Comcast determined that 250 GB was “excessive” in 2008, and why it has not revised that level in the years since.

In fact, Comcast appears to now be contradicting statements it made to the FCC in the past about its data cap. In 2008, Comcast went to some pains to draw a distinction between congestion management practices such as peak time throttling and “excessive use” policies like data caps:

“These congestion management practices [such as throttling] are independent of, and should not be confused with, our recent announcement that we will amend the ‘excessive use’ portion of our Acceptable Use Policy, effective October 1, 2008, to establish a specific monthly data usage threshold of 250 GB per account for all residential HIS customers. … That cap does not address the issue of network congestion, which results from traffic levels that vary from minute to minute.”

Yesterday, a Comcast spokesman exhibited just that confusion in defending Comcast’s actions by confidently stating “If someone’s behavior is such that it degrades the quality of service for others nearby – that’s what this threshold is meant to address.”

As Comcast recognized in 2008, but appears to have forgotten recently, data caps are a poor way to deal with network congestion. Uploading 250 GB of data between midnight and 6 am over the course of a month should not strain a network.  However, it could trigger the cap.”

Another example of an evasive answer is A2. The question is “why do you insist on completely cutting off data instead of using other more consumer-friendly options such as charging for overages or slowing internet use?” It remains completely unanswered.
Each of your answers is designed to evade discussion of the key point: Data caps are arbitrary and harm consumers by stifling innovation and choice. And they attempt to obscure the threat data caps pose to consumers. I could go on here, but instead I’ll do so below in response to each answer.

I’ve previously sent Comcast email suggesting policy changes that would address this issue. Only one was a “requirement” in my mind: Comcast would no longer completely disconnect users for “overuse,” and would instead shift their “data cap” policy to throttling or some other method after passing a certain point if required. (Note that “data cap” is in quotes, because data would not be cut off — it would be throttled or shaped.) Out of everything, this is the single biggest change you could make to address this issue in a positive manner, and I hope you will continue to consider it.

Here’s Vrignaud’s specific response to A1: As previously stated, this answer is evasive, and conflates the two separate issues of congestion and “overuse” of data. It doesn’t explain why the use of data in off-peak hours (such as between Midnight and 6 a.m.) has any impact whatsoever on the experience of the majority of your customers. It also ignores suggestions previously sent to you in email including charging for overages, throttling after reaching a certain point (i.e., in a manner different from your Bittorrent disconnecting history), and exposing your bandwidth meter applications programming interfaces that allow partners such as Carbonite and Amazon to utilize your network at low-data usage times.

In addition, It does not address at all the new wave of legitimate cloud services such as Dropbox, Carbonite, Mozy, Amazon’s Cloud Music Player, etc — all of which are distinguished from your examples by the use of significant amounts of ongoing upstream bandwidth. It also doesn’t point out that a subscriber to your Xfinity Extreme 105 plan using these same services could hypothetically hit your 250 GB data cap in five hours and be cut off.

Finally, your distinction of Comcast’s cable television service not being delivered over the “public” internet is also evasive. While Comcast may have a completely separate, second backbone set up just for cable television, it’s much more likely you send all data (cable television and broadband internet) over the same fiber backbone networks (including peering agreements you have with partners) and split it at your headends. More importantly, your answer does not address the fact that cutting off data on the “public” internet threatens new, competitive services such as Netflix that deliver services comparable to your existing cable television business.

Qwest/CenturyLink A1: Our excessive use policy is in place to ensure that our high-speed Internet network is being used in ways for which it was designed in order to deliver an optimal Internet experience for all of our high-speed internet customers. CenturyLink offers broadband products designed to accommodate normal residential and small-business data usage, and high-end data products to accommodate commercial data usage (that of an enterprise customer).

We do not currently offer Prism (IPTV) in legacy Qwest markets; our excessive use policy is in place to ensure that our high-speed Internet network is being used in ways for which it was designed in order to deliver an optimal Internet experience for our customers.

Because we are a customer-focused company, CenturyLink works closely with customers who have been identified as excessive users in order to give them every opportunity to either reduce their usage or migrate to an alternative high-speed Internet service that better suits their broadband needs, such as one of CenturyLink’s commercial-grade Internet services.