How to lose friends and make enemies: The Comcast Capacity Planning lesson

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily
Right now there’s a bit of a brouhaha about Comcast high speed service. Many Comcast customers are finding themselves cut off from the service because of excessive usage.
To be fair, I was unable to find any reference where Comcast says that their broadband package is “unlimited.” However, they fail to disclose what, exactly, “excessive usage” consists of in their Acceptable Use Policy.
I don’t have a problem with Comcast limiting bandwidth. There’s only so much traffic that their servers can handle, so much that can go down their pipes. Theoretically, limiting the use of the heaviest users would enable better service for the vast majority of users for whom speed is more important than volume.
(Of course, the cynical assume that Comcast is dropping high-usage customers because they’re the least profitable and that supporting those users would require investing more in bandwidth and infrastructure – but we’ll leave that theory alone for now.)
What I’m concerned about is people suddenly being disconnected from the Internet after passing a line that they know nothing about. I’m sympathetic – my Internet access was cut off without warning back in 1998 at The College of New Jersey, and that cost me a pretty well-paying part-time job as a Web designer. (There were other reasons, but this was a significant reason that I decided to transfer to New Jersey Institute of Technology the next semester.) If my home internet access was cut off today, I’d be at a serious disadvantage with my job editing this blog!
But it also worries me because I can’t imagine this happening to a corporate customer. If an IT department asked “how much bandwidth do we have,” that information would never be withheld from them. You can’t do any meaningful capacity planning if how much capacity you have is kept hidden from you.
Disclosure is obviously the most important step, but there are other options that Comcast could take. Instead of cutting users off, it could throttle down speeds once a customer produces a set amount of traffic – The customer still has access to the Internet, but it doesn’t take up quite so much bandwidth. While downloading Linux ISOs via Torrent are going to take longer, viewing YouTube and talking on Skype shouldn’t be affected by reasonable, but lower, bandwidth caps.
At any rate, if Comcast simply couldn’t keep up with the demand, then perhaps they need to consider billing as a pay-as-you-go service. Sure, we did away with hourly billing around when AOL switched to flat-rate service in 1996… but certainly, paying for the service that you use is probably very appealing to the vast majority of people paying $50 a month to do nothing more than check e-mail and Web browse.
Then again, there are other solutions which are probably preferable. Namely – improving the performance of Comcast’s existing infrastructure, or adding capacity to Comcast’s existing infrastructure. Apparently, though, both those solutions are more expensive than suddenly dropping a few customers from the rolls and engendering ill-will.