ptyork

Well, probably yes. Though given his setup (a questionably intelligent "open" access point for guests), that would've been my first thought--close that down and see what happens. Of course now I'd know to look at uploads too, but given Comcast's complete inability to publicize their policies (only in a hard to find FAQ page), to provide ANY form of proactive monitoring or warnings, or to even tell the poor fellow WHAT kind of traffic had caused him to go over his limit, I think I'd have been in exactly the same position. The evil here is not bandwidth caps, per se, it is Comcast's implementation of bandwidth caps and their draconian two strike policy.

No they don't, though I've consciously avoided switching to Comcast for this one reason. My Cable/Internet provider is slower and generally inferior technically to Comcast, but they aren't evil. Comcast does at least offer a "Usage Meter" that is accessible with enough effort at finding it. But it takes quite a bit of effort. Would it not be easy to email someone if their current usage patterns will likely cause them to hit the cap? You know, BEFORE they hit it? How hard is it to tell them that x% of your bandwidth is coming from YouTube or Netflix or going to a backup provider? Short of this, perhaps even on the first strike, Comcast might have followed their written policy (http://customer.comcast.com/Pages/FA...3-70abe3b295e6) and helped the guy figure out the culprit.

The bottom line is that this kind of thing affected a pretty "average" user. I.e., one who has a pretty decent sized media collection (> 250GB is EASY to attain in the digital photo and personal HD video era) and just wants to leverage a well established cloud service to provide backup and perhaps a few other services. That person is not necessarily network savvy. They're just using a service that they pay for. And now they're cut off for a year. My anger here is that we've now reached the point that this policy is affecting Joe User and is not changing to reflect the realities of the Internet today. And there is not competitive or government pressure to affect such change.

We can look at this particular person and question whether he did all he should and/or could have to avoid the problem. But it WILL affect more and more people without his level of technical skills. And I just don't think being an apologist is justified. It's like defending T-Mobile when they bill the unsuspecting Haiti relief worker $35,000 for data roaming. "Sure they had offered free international roaming, but the stupid chick didn't check the fine print to see that text messages and data was not included so shame on her." Only expect it to become a mainstream occurrence very soon.

Maybe I'm being alarmist or overreacting, but it really, really bugs me. Could you tell?