Comcast executive VP David Cohen told reporters that the headline on its
announcement Thursday that it was
changing its Xfinity data-use threshholds should be that there was no
longer a cap, but critics of usage-based pricing saw it differently.
"Comcast Should Eliminate Punitive Data Caps Altogether," said
Free Press, while Public Knowledge Legal Director Harold Feld also saw it as
increasing the caps, but at least suggested that was going in the right
direction, as did Netflix.
Free Press didn't seem to find an upside to the Comcast announcement,
although the Company's new baseline, at least in a couple of testbeds, is
300GB, up from 250GB, with the 250 cap no longer enforced until Comcast figures
out the best way forward for all its 18 million-plus ISP
customers.
"Comcast has never had any legitimate reason to cap its Internet customers,
and today's announcement of new overage charges is just another example of the
cable giant's efforts to discriminate against and thwart online video
competition," said Free Press Policy Adviser Joel Kelsey. "Data caps
are not a reasonable or effective way to manage capacity problems, which are
virtually non-existent for Comcast."
Cohen said during the call that only an extremely small fraction of users --
he would not put a number to it -- now approached the 250MB cut-off, and said
the reason for the move was that a more flexible approach without that hard cap
was more customer-friendly and was the right message to send to customers.
Feld was a little more optimistic, though he also saw it as raising the cap,
not removing it. "Comcast recognized the need to increase the cap on data
'usage' that the company set in 2008," he said, "and to experiment
with additional flexibility for customers. As Time Warner Cable's recent
decision to offer a capped plan as a discounted alternative shows, more flexible
pricing plans can benefit consumers where they offer opportunities for savings
without compromising quality or an open internet. We await further details of
Comcast's plan so that subscribers can fully assess how these changes will
impact their user experience."
But Feld also said unanswered were the questions of how such caps are set,
and why, and said Congress and the FCC should be investigating.
Suspending enforcement of the 250 MB caps while 300MB threshold was being
offered to some was likely necessary to avoid criticism that Comcast was
discriminating in bandwidth management, which could bump up against network neutrality
rules. IPS are allowed to manage their
networks, but cannot discriminate in the provision of that service.
Netflix, one of the online video competitors feeling thwarted, appeared
somewhat encouraged but underwhelmed. "Increasing the data cap is a small
step in the right direction," Netflix spokesman Joris Evers told Gigaom,
"but unfortunately Comcast continues to treat its own Internet delivered
video differently under the cap than other Internet delivered video. We
continue to stand by the principle that ISPs should treat all providers of
video services equally."
Comcast says that its Xfinity video service over the public Internet does
count against the cap, but not the video delivered via an Xbox app through a
set-top. That video, says Comcast, is not being delivered over the public
Internet, so it's not subject to the cap. "It is a real stretch to create
a discrimination argument," said Cohen Thursday. "Even Netflix, on
its earnings call, acknowledged that a static 250 Gig didn't get into its way...
It's going to be a stretch that we
haven't transitioned to an approach that is significantly pro-consumer and
pro-innovation."
"We continue to stand by the principle that ISPs should treat all
providers of video services equally," Evers told B&C/Multi.
