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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (14391)	3/28/2006 4:50:47 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

[Two Articles re:] BT Halts Excessive Downloading Wired, 3/28/2006 [FAC: How nice is it of BT to be calling its customers hogs? After all, they got where they are by "allowing" customers the "privilege" of using what they now say they have been abusing. No? I happen to believe that they may actually have an economics argument that does, in fact, need to be worked out. But surely the telco could find a better, more civil approach to extorting more money from the people who actually paid for the network, wouldn't you think. BTW, I linked this message to the previous discussion upstream that dealt with QoS, the Whitacre tiering concept, etc.] blog.wired.com British Telecommunications (the broadband giant of the UK, known simply as BT) has sent warnings to "bandwidth hogs" on its network, encouraging them to either pay a higher monthly rate or switch to a different broadband provider. As reported in this CNet story, the broadband provider has sent notices to 3200 of its customers who have been pegged as bandwidth hogs. So what exactly is a bandwidth hog? In BT's user agreement, they tell customers that they will face penalties if their download usage exceeds 40GB per month. They have been pretty lax about enforcing this policy in the recent past, however, so some users have taken advantage of the situation and downloaded as much as 200GB per month. Reporter Will Sturgeon has an idea of how one can rack up those big numbers: "Such high levels of downloading are certainly far from typical for the average person and are likely to indicate a heavy diet of large media files such as music or movies. "If these customers were downloading music, for example, at a rate of 200GB per month, they could nearly be filling an iPod Nano twice over every single day--or 50 times over in just one month. That's approximately 50,000 songs." Apparently, the last time BT cracked down on the excessive downloaders was last October. They used the same strategy — pay more money or take your business elsewhere — and only a small fraction of users chose to stay with BT. It appears that this type of action will make its way over to our side of the pond soon enough. With millions of pirates using BitTorrent to share huge pieces of data like games and movies (which average a little over 4GB each), the telcos are more than likely seeing dollar signs in their eyes. Even with gigabit connections becoming the norm in some areas, we can expect broadband to become more expensive for heavy users down the road. Just last week, FCC chairman Kevin Martin expressed support for a so-called "tiered internet" pricing structure for broadband subscribers. Much like cable television's pay-per-view or premium channel services, users who want more than just a basic internet package will be required to pay a premium rate for the extra bandwidth. While this shift appears inevitable, it will be interesting to see which strategy U.S. broadband providers adopt to handle the migration to a new structure. ------From CNET: BT cracks down on 'broadband hogs' By Will Sturgeon news.com.com Mar 27 2006 BT is cracking down on heavy Internet users who are habitually breaking its monthly download limit, suggesting that they either pay more or shop elsewhere for their Internet access. BT has agreements in place with users of its ADSL broadband service that limit them to up to 40GB of downloads per month. However, although the incumbent telecommunications company claims to be relaxed on occasional breaches of this limit--and has no automatic blocking in place once a limit is exceeded--it reports that some customers are taking liberties and regularly downloading up to 200GB each month. "I think it's fair to characterize these people as broadband hogs. You would have to be downloading pretty much all day, everyday, to manage that level of downloading," a BT representative told Silicon.com. BT has contacted 3,200 customers identified as excessive users. The letters offer customers the chance to pay for their excess bandwidth consumption or seek service from another provider. Last October, BT sent a similar letter to 1,800 customers, and while "a small percentage" of them agreed to a new payment plan to cover their monster downloads, the majority saw their contracts with BT terminated. The company representative suggested that "it would probably be fair to extrapolate out those results," in terms of a prediction regarding the likely outcome of the current crackdown. Such high levels of downloading are certainly far from typical for the average person and are likely to indicate a heavy diet of large media files such as music or movies. If these customers were downloading music, for example, at a rate of 200GB per month, they could nearly be filling an iPod Nano twice over every single day--or 50 times over in just one month. That's approximately 50,000 songs. Will Sturgeon of Silicon.com reported from London.