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After being hit with heavy criticism over its throttling and/or blocking P2P traffic over its network, Comcast now wants to limit traffic to 250 GB and terminate service to those customers who top 250 GB/month twice in a six-month timeframe, starting October 1st.
The company alleges that it needs to take steps in order to keep up the quality of service and avoid downloading speeds being degraded by a so-called minority of users who take up a lot of bandwidth. What this means in clear language is that Comcast wants to make profit off each and every customer it has. In the case of heavy users, the company's margins are slim, whereas a person who just browses the net from time to time and sends a few e-mails doesn't cost the company almost anything, which means Comcast's access fee is basically just profit. It is like health insurance companies only insuring healthy people.
Our country is left behind in high-speed Internet lines and most European and Asian developed countries have significantly better connections than the very country where Internet was invented, precisely because Comcast and many others like them are trying to maximize profits at all expenses.
It's high time that ISPs start working continuously on improving the infrastructure and stop just charging money for technology which was put in place a decade ago. This is why the United States needs Internet traffic to be unregulated, forcing ISPs to build up a high-performance network rather than throwing money away on traffic-blocking technologies.
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