Dec. 5, 2009
Telco analyst calls out the lying ISPs about bandwidth hogs
Benoit Felten, an Telco analyst Yankee Group, calls out ISPs for claiming to suffer the effects of users who hog their precious bandwidth. He points out that no ISP has ever justified the existence of this class of users, nor have they ever released data about the usage of these hogs nor any other subset of their user population. Yet Time Warner Cable, amongst others, uses the "existence" of these users to justify arbitrary, and I would claim exceedingly low, bandwidth caps after which they gouge users with additional fees. It's nice to see someone close to the industry finally saying what a lot of us on the outside have been thinking and trying to shed light on for a long time.
He also lays down a gauntlet in front of the ISPs challenging them to provide him with usage data that he could analyse to understand their assertions a small number of aggressive users have such a large impact on the experience of the many. So he's not just throwing stones, he's asking the ISPs to provide real, raw, hard data to back up their assertions via independent analysis.
