A story came out today in USA today that said consumers by and far are ditching their land-line phones, instead going wireless or using Internet net based phone technology, such as the digital phone packages offered by companies like Comcast. According to the article in New York land line usage has plummeted 55% since 2000 and Texas has dropped 20%. 20% may not seem much but considering how fucking big Texas is, I would consider even a 5% drop significant enough to mention.
But how you answer your phone or make telephone calls isn’t really the point of me writing this story. It’s actually about your cable company. With more and more consumers moving away from dealing with the phone company and to using the Cable company for multiple services, we run into a tiny problem. Cable companies now offer not only Cable TV, digital telephone service but also Internet Access.
Some people enjoy the high speeds of cable Internet, but what they don’t realize is that Big Brother (that would be the cable company) is monitoring their ever move and every click!
Comcast is the nation’s second-largest Internet service provider. They are not stepping in and deciding what you can and can’t do with your Internet usage. More important …….
SOMEONE CALL THE MORALITY POLICE
they are only one step away from cutting you off from porn all together. How it all began is that Comcast decided certain people were using the Internet far to much. So for those excessive users, they set a cap. Anyone who went over will have to pay additional fees, pretty much doubling your Internet usage bill and for those REALLY into downloading movies, porn, etc. they can expect to surpass that cap often and pay WAY more. Maybe as much as an additional $45 to $150 per month. Or even worse HAVE THEIR INTERNET ACCESS COMPLETELY CUT OFF. Their excuse?
As more consumers download movies and music online, Internet service providers have to grapple with how to manage their traffic so that bandwidth hogs don’t slow down the network for the lighter users among the company’s 14.1 million subscribers. For years, Comcast directly called customers who used up several times more bandwidth than the typical subscriber’s 2 gigabytes per month — for instance, by downloading hordes of movies. The big users were asked to reduce their use or have their accounts canceled.
Comcast is currently considering an option to cap the bandwidth usage at 10, 20 or 40 gigabytes per month. And by currently considering I mean ALREADY IN TESTING IN SELECT CITIES. Hence the given nickname of CAPcast by their adoring customers. Anyway how it works is if users exceed that cap, they could be charged $15 for every 10 gigabytes they go over. This new system has already started in some cities and yours could be next. If you aren’t aware of just how little 10 gig is, be prepared to be hit with a ton of $15 overage charges. Some ideas being thrown around would be a fee of $1.50 per gigabyte. By today’s porn standards that’s a lot of fucking overage fees. I thought we got rid of this shit when we all stopped using AOL?
I decided to monitor (as best I could) my download usage yesterday. I downloaded 6 wordpress templates. I wanted to try them out and see how they looked on one of my sites. That was about 15 meg in all. I found a new script that helps manager images but downloading that cost me 34 meg. It’s a great program but it cost me 34 meg of my already limited allotment (had I been with Comcast and thank fucking god I’m not with those cock suckers).
I downloaded a new movie to review. That was 119 meg. I downloaded a few episodes of Chuck I missed over at NBC.com. In all probably about 6 episodes which each one might have been about (estimating here) 40 meg, so that’s another 240 meg gone. And this is all just in one day.
During research for articles on LukeFord.com, I probably visited about 19 porn star fan pages and siffed through about 3 to 5 pages each. Each of those pages had graphics on them that ranged in sizes so we’ll have to give a rough estimate of about 3 meg per website (some more, some less). That’s another 57 meg of my allotment gone.
So what are we at so far? 465 meg and that’s just what I was actually keeping track of. I’m sure it was significantly higher overall but the point is, if this is a typical day for me and it is, I would have went over my monthly allotment by 3,950 so I would have had to pay at least another $15 to $29.95 as a penalty fee for that. In reality I download more than 1 movie a day. If you count the days I download 10 or 20 movie trailers, that shit adds up too.
But maybe you aren’t like me. But that doesn’t mean you are in the clear. Every single website you visit that has images counts against you. Every time you download a picture of your favorite porn star, that counts too. Some of those pictures are 1 to 2 meg each.
So the question is, who is Comcast really hurting my capping what you can download? Hopefully not you because I hope you are smart enough to cancel your account with them and move over to DSL. Look into programs like uVerse through AT&T.
Next thing you know they will decide we are watching to much TV and start charging each household for every 30 minutes to much they watch over your alloted 2 hours a day. Then they can decide adult sites all together are naughty and block anyone using their Internet from seeing any adult related material. Think it won’t happen? FoxNews who owns Myspace already agreed to such a thing for Myspace usage and later Facebook agreed to it, so why is it such a stretch that they don’t start asking Internet companies like Comcast to do the same?