Gigaom Bandwidth Caps Watch (8 out of 15 ISPs on the Black List)

Stacey Higginbotham ("Over 60% of US Broadband Subscribers have Data Caps" - here)  [pictured] explains that "We’re not fans of ISPs capping broadband here at Gigaom, so we’re keeping a close eye on how those caps evolve and who they affect. Check out our updated list on who’s capping your broadband .. In most cases, the companies implementing caps maintain that 99 or 98 percent of their users don’t go over them and have median usages that range between 12 and 18 GB per month. So here are the top broadband providers in the U.S. and their caps. Last year we included a column for exceptions to the cap, but this year there aren’t any, so we took that column out". 

ISPs with no caps: TWC, Verizon, Cablevision, Frontier, Windstream, Fairpoint and Cincinnati Bell. 4 ISPs have overage costs - Comcast (see "Comcast Response to Recent Claims: Higher Base Cap w/Tiered Plans or Overage Fees" - here), AT&T, Suddenlink and MediaCom.

See the full table - "Want to know if your ISP is capping data? Check our updated chart" - here.

GigaOM: Over 60% of US Broadband Subscribers have Data Caps

Stacey Higginbotham [pictured] writes to GigaOm about the recent developments in usage-based billing policies in the US broadband market:

"Comcast is expanding its usage-based broadband trials. Given the larger roll out, it looks like a 300 GB cap plus a $10 overage fee that gets you 50 more GB is the winner .. which translates roughly into 40 cents per hour of HD television streamed via the internet .. And it’s not alone. Caps are on the rise in the U.S.:

[see also "Comcast Response to Recent Claims: Higher Base Cap w/Tiered Plans or Overage Fees" - here]

"Look, I’m sick of writing this same story about how caps aren’t necessary, how they act as a curb on innovation, how they protect a television business that won’t adapt and how the cable companies don’t actually have a profitability problem when it comes to investing in their networks. What’s happening here is a five-year erosion of unlimited broadband brought about by a fundamentally uncompetitive market. And this massive shift on broadband policy was utterly ignored by the FCC, which refused to even gather data about caps for years?.

See "Looks like Comcast is quietly pushing a 300 GB cap and overage charges" - here.

Akamai CEO: "Our CDN will Need 100x Expansion in 5 Years"

Mathew Ingram reports to GigaOM on Akamai's CEO, Paul Sagan (pictured), presentation during the GigaOM Structure event held in San Francisco:

"[The Internet] is still growing at a phenomenal rate — thanks in large part to streaming .. the already enormous content-delivery network his company runs will need to expand by a factor of 100 times in the next five years just to keep up with the demand for real-time video"

"the complicating factor for Akamai is the multidevice, multiplatform world, where the company doesn’t know what kind of content it is going to have to deliver to a user, or where it is going to come from, or what device or network it is going to have to be delivered to — but people just expect it to work"

See "You think the internet is big now? Akamai needs to grow 100-fold" - here.