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| Tuesday, March 13, 2007 |
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Before a jury of peer-to-peers 
More about less. Or vice versa.
Sit up straight. Zip your fly.
Can't somebody out there give me a "Duh?"
Tragedy of the Comcast
| | Attention heavy Comcast bittorrent users. |
| | Amanda Lee of Cambridge received a call from Comcast Corp. in December ordering her to curtail her Web use or lose her high-speed Internet connection for a year. |
| | Lee, who said she had been using the same broadband connection for years without a problem, was taken aback. But when she asked what the download limit was, she was told there was no limit, that she was just downloading too much. |
| | Then in mid-February, her Internet service was cut off without further warning. |
| | For Lee and an increasing number of people, a high-speed Internet connection is a lifeline to everyday entertainment and communication. Television networks are posting shows online; retailers are lining up to offer music and movie downloads; thousands of Internet radio stations stream music; more people are using WiFi phones; and "over the top TV," in which channels stream over the Internet, is predicted to grow. |
| | That means that more customers may become familiar with Comcast's little-known acceptable-use policy, which allows the company to cut off service to customers who use the Internet too much. Comcast says that only .01 percent of its 11.5 million residential high-speed Internet customers fall into this category. |
| | "Comcast has a responsibility to provide these customers with a superior experience and to address any excessive usage issues that may impact that experience," Comcast spokeswoman Shawn Feddeman said in a statement. "The few customers who are notified of excessive use typically consume exponentially more bandwidth than the average user." |
| | Feddeman declined to say where Comcast draws the line on too much Internet usage, instead saying the amount of data that could trigger a warning call would be roughly the equivalent of 13 million e-mail messages or 256,000 photos a month. Although those files vary in size, a typical photo file size is 1 to 2 megabytes, meaning that excessive users are downloading hundreds of gigabytes per month. |
| | And you thought you escaped the bell curve when you got out of school. |
| | Welcome to the world of telecom/cablecom, where Your Choice of Monopoly fails to emulate a free marketplace. |
| | There is nothing wrong with cable and phone companies making money by providing services. There is something wrong with cable and phone companies treating the Net as a secondary or tertiary service when in fact it is a fundamental public utility. |
| | The only answer here is local barn-raising using CFR — copper, fiber and radios — to build whatever it takes to establish a real commons that offers citizens paths around the false commons that the telco/cableco system embodies. |
| | This barn-raising doesn't have to be done by government. But governments (especially local and state ones) should do their best to open the local Net deployment and service markets to real competition, and to the involvement of businesses other than incumbent carriers alone. |
| | Meanwhile we have to stop expecting the cable and phone companies to behave as if they don't want to put the Net's genie back in their TV or telephone bottles. |
| | We have to stop believing what our phone and cable bills tell us: that the Net is gravy on top of telephony and television, when it should be obvious that the Net is a base public utility while voice and video are just two forms of data that can ride on it. |
| | Trust me: This will be a cause you care about sometime in the next two years. |
A lesson from a life
| | Mom would have been 94 today. |
| | Yesterday afternoon I was looking at my unshaven face in the mirror, sweaty and a bit sunburned after half an hour of basketball with my ten-year old son. (I won a game of HORSE, mostly on shots from downtown. This time. There won't be many more.) For the first time I noticed these long gray eyebrow-hairs — old-guy hairs — arching down into the path of my vision, my eyes watching the world from under lids puckered and creased after nearly sixty years of use. |
| | I don't feel my age, even though I look it. Mom never seemed to, either. I'll always remember her as beautiful, loving, sensible, smart, funny. With a killer smile, a ready hug and cheekbones big as billiard balls. Idealized, I suppose; but I had a lot to work with there. Still, I like that picture of her in that first link, at age 14 or so, in the '20s, with her flapper hairdo. It's not the most flattering, but I like how she looks like she's ready for something: unfinished, yet ready to take command. |
| | Funny, I looked more like her as a kid than I do now. Now I look like my father with a goatee. He was a good man, now gone almost 28 years. Still miss him, too. |
| | So many times I think about something I'd love to share with Mom or Pop, then remember they're gone. Often I hear Mom's voice: firm, instructive and loving as ever. Give to the living, she says. That's what love is for. Her lesson: Death makes us give love to the living. She was a teacher. Still is. |
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