Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

I'm of two minds about this -- obviously, I don't like it when my torrents of Mythbusters and 30 Rock trickle in slowly (especially when it causes the rest of my network to bog down), but at the same time I don't want my entire community's shared pipe clogged up by the guy next door downloading 500 gigs of Swedish porn a month (and paying the same price as me). Maybe the solution is a modified version of what Comcast advertises. Have a more reasonable "average" download speed (say 1MB) with "speed boost" applied to the first e.g. 2-3 minutes of each spike in your downstream traffic. That way, "lighter" users who are just getting web pages and the occasional iTunes store download or even Unbox movie get most of their content at a faster rate (say 5MB or even 10) while "heavy" users get their gigs and gigs of torrents fast for a minute or two, but can't hog the pipe forever.

I know it sounds harsh to favor anybody over anybody else, but the fact of the matter is that even with recent capacity upgrades, there's still a limit to the size of the pipe and bandwidth still costs money in the end. I for one would rather pay 40 bucks a month for legitimately high-speed access that slows down when you use it a whole lot (for sufficiently generous definitions of "a whole lot") than pay 80 bucks a month for truly unlimited use that stays at the same high speed all the time. I at least want that *option* available to me.