Thou shalt not question Comcast

[Matthew Gillen]

jkinz-+hffLmS/kj4 at public.gmane.org wrote:
> So my final thought is that ISP's are just using an arbitrary 
> label of server to give themselves a simple tool for controlling
> excess bandwidth use and stopping undesired traffic/uses of their
> network.

I don't buy the excess bandwidth argument, at least in Comcast's case.
They've already decided that they're going to go with aggregate usage
tracking, and anyone who uses more than 250GB of transfer in a month will be
cut off, regardless of whether you were sending email or downloading songs
(their FAQ says the 250GB limit would allow you:
    * Send 50 million plain text emails (at 5KB/email)
    * Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
    * Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
    * Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)
)

So there's no longer a 'bandwidth' reason for the no-server-rule.  And yet all
of a sudden they've gotten a lot stricter about it (I ran all my servers
happily on their residential service for over 3 years).  Curious, no?

As a side note, I think it's pretty amusing that one of the biggest
spam-originating networks in the world uses the example of being able to "send
50 million emails" and still stay within their bandwidth cap.  :-)

Matt