comcast posts

The federal government just got hit with a big defeat in court today over the issue of net neutrality and its something that could affect the future of internet and online gaming. News.com reports that a federal appeals court has ruled that the Federal Communications Commission overstepped its authority to tell cable and ISP company Comcast to stop blocking its customers from using BitTorrent downloads in 2008.

The effects of this decision could be far-reaching for online gaming. The FCC would like to see net access be accessible to everyone without broadband caps. However many ISPs would like the power to control their bandwidth as they see fit without regulation from the government. If this ruling holds we could see ISPs try to enforce broadband caps on their services. That could affect how people download games as well as upcoming streaming game services.

Want to download games and patches faster than anyone else? Want your ping times to be the envy of your clan? Well this week you will be able to in St. Louis and later in every market that is serviced by cable TV provider Charter Communications. The company announced this week that St. Louis will be the first place they will launch their Ultra60 service. As the name implies the service offers residential users a way to have Internet access with download speeds up to 60 Mbps (upload speeds are limited to 5 Mbps).

That number is over what Verizon and Comcast are offering for their current top speeds (50 Mbps). Pricing will be $140 a month as a stand alone service (you save $10 a month if you get Charter's telephone service). And the best part? There's none of that pesky Internet bandwidth caps that Comcast currently has in place.

[Via Engadget]

One of the things that has made the Internet a massive form of commerce for businesses and the consumer is the availability of broadband download speeds. Beginning in the late 1990s Internet service providers began to offer affordable fast download speeds to households.

The results served to turn the Internet from just a way to send email and view web sites to downloading music, movies, TV shows and of course games. Not only that but faster broadband speeds served to give gamers a way to truly play online titles like MMOs and first person shooters with little to no lag unlike playing such games on 56K modems.

However, the expansion of the game industry on the Internet could be in jeopardy thanks to a recent move by one the biggest ISPs in the US. Starting this month, Comcast will begin enforcing a 250 GB monthly limit on its broadband download residential customers. While that cap seems very generous, the reality is that hardcore gamers on both the PC and broadband-enabled game consoles could find themselves approaching or even exceeding those limits in the near future.

We have been waiting for this day for a while now and in just over a month, residential customers of Comcast will become the first major US users to have a broadband cap on their Internet usage. According to News.com, Comcast will impose a 250 GB cap on broadband usage beginning on October 1. People who violate this policy the first time will get a warning but the second time will get their broadband immediately cut off; it will be an entire year before those customers can use Comcast as their Internet provider again.

Of course 250 GB sounds like an awful lot and most customers should be OK with this new limit but as the article points out Comcast offers no way for people to monitor exactly how much bandwidth they are actually using. Comcast imposed this limit to curtail peer-to-peer downloads (most of which are illegal) for a small percentage of their customers. However we are seeing the PC game industry using the download business model more and more and a cap on bandwidth, even as one as generous as Comcast's, could curtail that business, especially if more ISPs follow Comcast's wake.

We have reported earlier this month that two major cable ISPs, Time Warner and Comcast, are testing in select markets some type of metered Internet usage. The moves have prompted consumer groups to cry foul, stating that most customers are unaware of their own Internet usage. This also could threaten the growing use of the Internet to deliver large multimedia files, including games. Now AT&T is saying that some kind of meter Internet usage is coming whether we like it or not.

According to an Associated Press story (via Google) AT&T spokesperson Michael Coe is quoted as saying, "A form of usage-based pricing for those customers who have abnormally high usage patterns is inevitable." As with other ISPs, Coe states that 5 percent of their Internet customers use nearly half of their bandwidth. He stopped short of saying when AT&T will begin their metered usage. Once again since some PC games offered via download are several gigabytes in size such a new pricing system could restrict what many are calling the PC game industry's major hope of staying afloat.

[Via Shacknews]

Starting today, Comcast subscribers with older hardware or those in high Internet traffic areas, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, might notice slow download speeds that have nothing to do with seeds or leeches. Comcast will be testing an imposed download cap of 200 gigabytes, as reported by The Consumerist. According to The Consumerist's source, "Comcast even has a system ready to go where if you exceed the limit a popup will ask you to purchase additional gigabytes."

Consumerist continued by saying that the graphical user interface for said system is in place, but Comcast "hasn't deployed it, because they're waiting for either another ISP to do it first, or to figure out how to do it without angering their customers, whichever comes first."

Despite claims to the contrary, the rather generous cap is likely another attempt by Comcast to cripple the heavy bandwidth activity that results from the usage peer-to-peer programs such as Limewire and the massively popular BitTorrent. Late last year, Comcast "was surreptitiously interfering with file transfers by posing as one party and then, essentially, hanging up the phone," according to CNET's Declan McCullagh.

Comcast isn't the only cable giant to test download rates and caps. In a recent News Blog post, CNET's Marguerite Reardon wrote that low end "users will pay $29.95 per month for service at a speed of 768 kilobits per second, with a 5GB monthly cap," with a higher price point of $54.90 per month attached to "service at 15 megabits per second, with a 40GB cap." Subscribers who exceed their allotment will be charged $1 per extra gigabyte. "The tiered pricing will work this way for the Internet portion of subscription packages that also include phone or video use," clarified Reardon.

"We think it's the fairest way to finance the needed investment in the infrastructure," said Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable's executive vice president of advanced technology. "Time Warner Cable subscribers will be able to check out their data consumption on a 'gas gauge' on the company's Web page," wrote AP Technology writer Peter Svensson.