Comcastic? Maybe not so much

In my email inbox at the Cube's annex (a/k/a home), I found a notice today from Comcast confirming the controversial change to its user agreement that will limit Comcast broadband users to 250 gigabytes of bandwidth, upload and download combined, starting on October 1. This has been well-covered in the general and tech press over the past month or so, so the email hardly came as a surprise. With Comcast's ubiquity as a broadband provider in the lower Valley portion of GazetteNET's coverage area, I thought I'd take a look at what this means now and for the future -- and be assured, those two time periods will result in very different meanings for this decision.

Let's look first at Comcast's own propaganda from the email about what 250GB translates to in current real-world terms. The company says in its examples that to hit the 250GB cap, you'd have to:

* Send more than 50 million plain text emails (at 5 KB/email). 5K per email is a joke, of course -- have these people never heard of embedded HTML or attachments? (Note the parsing here of "plain text" email.) But email is never going to put you anywhere near your limits. We can safely blow off this example.

* Download 62,500 songs at 4 MB/song. Of course, at that size, we're talking mp3s or formats like the AAC compression that Apple uses for iTunes downloads. For lossless compression, a favorite of more discriminating music fans, you can be looking at file sizes for a song that are way bigger than that; a good Grateful Dead jam with a song segue can put you into the 100MB-150MB area.

Still, it's hard to grab even enough lossless music to push the cap. Right now, I don't see this as a huge problem for anyone but the most aggressive downloader. I have a monthly Usenet subscription that affords me 25 GB per month in downloads for my music bootleg habit, and only in months when I'm really on the case do I run up against that. Let's say I did that, though, and also hit some of the more popular BitTorrent sites for downloading music at the same rate. I'd still be at one-fifth of my monthly Comcast cap.

* Download 125 standard definition movies at 2 GB/movie. Now, here's where discussion of this cap becomes real. Video tips the scales a lot more. But right at the moment, 250GB is a lot of capacity unless you've figured out a way to tap some serious high-definition video sources. Notice Comcast's parsing yet again: "Standard definition movies." Sure...except that the HD future is all that anyone is talking about as the future for reaching consumers, Comcast included. The streaming model for video is very close to a reality; Netflix may have a great mail delivery service for DVDs at the moment, but that's still an expensive model for them, and that streaming they offer as the add-on now is what they'd like to become the norm for its consumers. Figure on that happening in five years' time, at most.

Suddenly, 250GB going both ways starts to strain the limits pretty quickly. Can you get a few streamed HD movies a month, plus a few fully lossless albums (since the record companies would also love to get rid of the shiny plastic things called CDs and save on their overhead too), plus iTunes downloads, plus your kid's addiction to YouTube, playing World of Warcraft or Halo 3 online, and his shared-group multimedia project for homework? Maybe...and maybe not. For the average single user, even for the aggressive downloader, 250GB may be OK; for the needs of a family of four that's fully tapped into the digital lifestyle, this is not going to be adequate within a couple of quick years. Limits on sizes can change very quickly in the world of computing. I still have a Macintosh IIci sitting in my garage that has an 80MB hard drive -- yes, that's an M. It was when I discovered mp3s in 1996 that it became quickly clear that 80 megs wasn't going to cut it anymore. Since then, my appetite for storage, and that of millions of computer users, has become immense as file sizes have grown for just about everything we use.

In short, I could easily see this becoming an issue much sooner than Comcast would like you to think. I'm also not happy that the company is leaving it entirely up to its subscribers to track their own usage -- something that's not a simple task for anyone, let alone an average family user. And as a longtime technology writer and Comcast watcher, I think the suspicion, already voiced by some analysts, that Comcast would love to sell you video services down the road that wouldn't count against the cap is a well-founded one. (The company has already said that its VoIP phone service isn't included in the cap.) For Comcast to shoot you video that wouldn't be counted, while counting the traffic that a competitor such as Netflix would send, would be a violation of the principle of "Net neutrality" -- the idea that everyone should have equal access to the Internet, which was a resource initially developed by the tax dollars of Americans. Net neutrality has worked well in creating the full-flavored Internet that you know today, and Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and the other big carriers would dearly love to do away with it; they've already spent millions lobbying Congress to try, repeatedly (and thus far without success). This could end up being a real inroad in that regard. For now, then, Comcast's cap shouldn't cause you much havoc -- but this bears watching as time passes, and not just for your download limits.

Elastic

The Cube is big. Really, really big. As big as I need it to be. For instance, yesterday (as it will again tomorrow) it stretched all the way to Stratford, Connecticut, in southwest CT on Long Island Sound, where is where I worked from to get the day's initial site live.

What was I doing in Connecticut, anyway? Here's the answer...

Lots of news organizations are decentralized. In a sense, they always have been; major newspapers had bureaus all over the world. Ironically, papers like the Boston Globe are now retrenching and closing many of those as they look to relocalize and keep their costs down; foreign offices are an easy target for cost-cutters. A paper like the Gazette, on the other hand, is already inherently local -- the Valley is the area, and we have to be here to cover that well. But the Web makes it simpler to do under-the-hood work from pretty much anywhere that has a broadband connection. Now, if I can find out that Tahiti does, I can lobby for a bureau there. (Although my bosses may decide that Bangalore is a better idea.....)

No forum...but broadband is on the way

Weather 1, Broadband 0. The snow has led to the indefinite postponement of today's forum on broadband solutions for Western Mass that I blogged about yesterday. So get those shovels and snowblowers going, read a few plain-text stories online, or just go with a good book.

But wait! One of those stories to read is about the very solution some non-broadband towns are seeking. Verizon has just announced plans to make broadband available in a lot of the Hilltowns, plus Valley communities such as Westhampton and Leverett, with broadband availability within the year. I assume this is the fiber-optic FiOS initiative that Verizon has been rolling out in a big way in the eastern half of the state, so that would leave consumers in those towns in good shape (although they will take out your existing copper-line connections when they replace them with fiber). Don't expect this to be universal within the towns, given the note near the bottom of the story that communities with existing Verizon coverage won't see any expansion of that. And, of course, do expect a monopoly. But still, this is a leap forward for a lot of frustrated communities in these parts. Score one for the private market.

Pipes

Readers in our larger communities may have missed, or just glanced at, the article from yesterday about how much of Western Mass is still without broadband. It's worth a read, though, and it's good to see that a couple of local state legislators, Stephen Kulik and Stan Rosenberg, are on top of efforts to extend broadband throughout the region, and that the Patrick administration is at least aware of the issue. (Kulik, at least, should come as no surprise; as our reporter Dan Crowley noted in the story, he's the only state legislator who doesn't have broadband at home.) Kulik and Rosenberg are convening a forum tomorrow with Sen. John Kerry and a couple of FCC commissioners, among others, that could yield some interesting viewpoints.

Now, does the Gazette have a dog in this hunt? No doubt. It's logical for us to want our readership to be able to access our full capabilities. This is very much a site that's been designed with broadband in mind; we want to be able to do more with sound and video, for instance, and that's just useless to anyone still on dial-up for their Net access. Those folks (and that includes more than a few Gazette employees) have to wait for a large image to download; forget about video. It's the old garden hose-vs.-fire hose problem. At least they're not downloading copyrighted music, I suppose.

But we're just one node on a very large Internet, and this is an issue of class and economics that transcends GazetteNET's efforts to boost and serve our readership. Kids at schools with broadband are getting a better educational break than kids in a dial-up area. (That ripples down into regional school districts, too; my daughter can come home to continue homework research that requires fast access, but her classmates from Leverett can't). Towns with broadband have a much better shot at attracting businesses. Etc. There's a deeper need for equity here on a town-to-town basis that the governor and legislature will need to address sooner or later; given that, "now" seems about right. And the larger towns in the Valley with broadband are only going to benefit if the region in general gets full broadband and becomes a more attractive destination.

We ran a list of towns that have no broadband access, but our brethren at the Valley Advocate also covered this story in a piece this week that notes that when you add in the cities and towns that qualify as "underserved" by broadband, the number jumps to 95 -- all west of I-495. Quite a gap between the eastern and western halves of the state, no? It'll be interesting to see if this forum generates any momentum towards shrinking that.