Eye on Winer

Dave Winer’s rant against Comcast, which cut off his high-speed Internet service without warning over excessive bandwidth use, neglects to tell Scripting News readers that he was consuming a gigantic 450GB a month of bandwidth.

On Digg, a former Comcast rep made this comment on the situation:

It pains me to defend Comcast but… I think this user is obviously breaking the ToS of his contract. First the whole 3 years I worked there I only received maybe 3 or 4 users that have disconnected due to bandwidth violations. Take in mind I took close to 200-300 calls a week, 15,000k a year and I only got one out of 1/15000 a year that hit this problem. Second, the fact is the Comcast infrastructure sucks, and isn’t setup for these super downloaders. This guy was downloading so much crap (most likely terabytes and terabytes a month) that it actually effected his neighbors download speeds. That’s the only time you get this notice when you are using so much bandwidth that you are capping your neighborhood node. The tier 2.5 will get notifications that a node in a neighborhood is hitting unacceptable numbers and when it’s mostly one user there is a problem. Instead of capping everyones download speed (i know except for bittorent) they view these on a case by case basis which is why there is no set limit. If your not ***** with your neighbors or download in off-peak times no problem. Third this guy was stealing terabytes of pictures for websites? Why? It’s obvious he is running some sort of business which is a violation of the terms of agreement by comcast. If the guy has DSL and Comcast as a backup he’s running a home business. The fact that he thought DSL was faster than Comcast proves this guy is an idiot.

Comcast is a terrible company that’s infamous for mistreating its customers, but it’s also clear that Winer’s a terrible Internet user. ISPs have struggled for years with bandwidth hogs like Winer, who degrade service for everyone else who has the misfortune to be their neighbor. There’s no way to offer residential high-speed Internet access that won’t suffer when your neighbor’s pulling down that much data. Blogger Jay Cuthrell points this out in a post titled Comcast vs. Dave Winer vs. Everyone Else in His Neighborhood.

Although Winer believes his use of FlickrFan is the cause, most people who scarf down that much bandwidth are downloading pirated movies and TV shows on BitTorrent. ZDNet’s Russell Shaw said as much last year in an item about Comcast’s hog problem.

So now I am thinking how anyone could download 550 gigabytes in a month.

Hmm. Maybe torrents of movies?

If that’s the case, these bandwidth hogs are abusing the system. Maybe Comcast shouldn’t suspend their service, but hit ‘em with a surcharge.

Winer’s a BitTorrent user who’s been obsessing lately about watching entire seasons of Battlestar Galactica. Now that media outlets are starting to take an interest in this situation, reporters should pin Winer down on exactly what he’s been downloading.

Considering how many times Dave Winer has called out others for their lack of disclosure, it’s interesting that he’s said absolutely nothing about Stormhoek, the no-name South African wine that A-list buddy Hugh MacLeod has been giving bloggers for years in the hopes they’ll write about it.

Business 2.0 names Winer and BFF Robert Scoble as two of the bloggers subjected to MacLeod’s wine-and-dine:

Recipients didn’t have to mention the wine, but many of them did; nearly 100 bloggers posted related items or comments in just six months. MacLeod then used his blog to organize more than 100 “geek dinners” in Britain, France, Spain, and the United States — gatherings of tech workers and influential bloggers who were plied with Stormhoek wine. A recent dinner in San Francisco, for instance, attracted local technorati like former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) and RSS pioneer Dave Winer (Scripting News).

Another pal, Michael Arrington, “first discovered how good Stormhoek wine is at a party I threw at my house a couple of months ago. Stormhoek donated 10 cases of their wine for the event, and people loved it.”

Bottles of blogola work much better than PayPerPost, which Arrington once compared to selling your soul. Stormhoek sales grew 500 percent and MacLeod spent only $40,000.