06
Am I Going to be Black-Listed?
Filed Under (geek, internet) by Javier Plumey on 06-06-2008
Tagged Under : geek, internet
I don’t download illegal movies and music and I don’t upload anything illegal (or even that large) via BitTorrent, but I do upload about 4-8 GB a week:
- I run a backup of my three systems up to JungleDisk
- I upload at least 2 GB a week of pictures to my Smugmug account
- During podcast season, I upload 120 MB+ of audio, images, etc. (for the final podcast) and 600MB for a backup of the lossless AAC file.
Will Comcast target me and list me as a black-list user? I don’t know but it makes me worry. Oi.
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Infrastructure/Comcast-Tests-User-Throttling/
Comcast claims only a handful of users are clogging its broadband network and slowing it down for the vast majority of users.
In testing beginning in three markets June 6, Comcast plans to compile a blacklist of its heaviest users who may find their Internet speeds
slowed during peak network hours, regardless of the software used to
download files. Comcast insists most users will not be affected by the
approach.
I prefer Time-Warner’s tiered approach where heavey users are charged somewhere in the order of $1-2 US a GB for going over their alloted amount.
What do you think? Are you going to be black-listed?
What bothers me the most here is I do download a LOT of podcasts mostly SQPN in nature. I’m worried that my podcast downloads might put me on the blacklist. Then there is my watching of Battlestar Galactica on Hulu and iTunes movie rentals. Our weekly Tupelo Catholic is about a 30-40 MB upload so that is not too much I guess. But yeah, I am concerned myself.
Rob, I’m not so sure you have to be concerned. I think the bulk of their “abusive” users are going to be heavy uploaders, not downloaders. The download stream is not really the problem, since they have more then adequate capacity. It’s the upstream pipe that’s causing all of the problems. Now, that being said, the original issues that were raised did have to do with BitTorrent downloads, so your guess is as good as mine.