A New Genre: ISP Data Cap Policy Killed My Internet

In Data Caps Are Screwing Things Up, Public Knowledge blogger Michael Weinberg writes "[t]he story of Andre Vrignaud may well end up being the template for the soon-to-be-popular genre of 'I just hit my data cap and now I cannot access the internet' stories.'"

It turns out that he was doing a lot of uploading (remember, downloads and uploads count against data caps).  He was backing up 20 years worth of pictures and music to an online backup service.  Since he stores all of his pictures and music in multiple lossless formats, it was a lot of data.

We do not have a way to independently verify what Vrignaud was doing to hit his cap.  In some ways, it does not really matter.  The activity he is describing is both plausible and legitimate.  As more and more consumers look to cloud services for storage, streaming, and applications, they are likely to run it this same problem themselves.

See also Mark Giangrande's March 15, 2011 LLB post, Some Thoughts on Data Caps ("The trend to moving to a streaming or cloud-based ecosystem will impact subscription costs in the long run.")

Andre Vrignaud's Experience and Thoughts in His Own Words. Check out Vrignuad's blog posts:

• The Day Comcast's Data Cap Policy Killed my Internet for 1 Year (July 11, 2011)
• Follow up: The Day After Comcast's Data Cap Policy Killed my Internet (July 13, 2011)
• Comcast Data Cap Policy News Coverage (July 15, 2011)
• A Cloudy Future (July 19, 2011) ("[S]hould ISPs be able to limit or cut off your internet access for “overuse”? We won’t get to the heart of this matter until people start asking the right questions. And so with that in mind I wanted to summarize the key issues.")

[JH]