Eric Bangeman at Ars Technica hits it on the head. Read it here.
Comcast’s attempts to clarify its traffic shaping practices are having the opposite effect of what the company intends. As is the case with its nebulous bandwidth caps, customers can find themselves running afoul of what appears to be an arbitrary limitation imposed by the ISP. As a result, Comcast’s customers don’t really know that what they’re paying for, aside from a fast connection that may or may not give them access to the web sites and applications they want.
In a perfect free market, customers would be free to pack up in leave Comcast for greener and more open broadband pastures, but the competitive landscape in the US doesn’t always provide that kind of choice. More than a few Comcast customers are faced with the choice of Comcast or dial-up, leaving them with the Hobson’s choice of hoping their data packets can evade Comcast’s traffic shaping police or not having broadband service at all.
Deja vu. I was just thinking the same thing…
