Note: The following article was originally written for Communicate or Die - the labor and technology blog run by Prometheus Labor Communications.


The Communication Workers of America just released their 3rd annual Speed Matters report on broadband upload and download speeds by state across the U.S. Like their last report - that I wrote about in these pages a while back - this year's report makes the rather obvious case that America needs better and faster broadband internet coverage. They indicate that we're only number 28 in the world in average internet connection speed - still a shockingly low number considering that the internet was primarily created by the American military together with American research universities with public money.

Last August, Comcast officially announced it was capping bandwidth for its residential cable broadband Internet service subscribers at 250 GB per month. In the firestorm of coverage that followed, many criticized the nation's second largest ISP for capping their customer's previously unlimited service without providing them a tool to meter their usage. One year later, Comcast still hasn't provided its customers with a meter.

This past week has seen two major service announcements in IP voice and video communication that challenge the telcos. Internet big boy Google rolled out voice and video chat integrated with its Gmail webmail service, and FreeRinger announced PC-to-phone calls in partnership with GTalk2VoIP and Talkster. Both services are free, ad supported and share no revenue with telcos like AT&T, Verizon or Comcast.

Comcast has announced that beginning October 1, they will institute a 250 GB monthly bandwidth cap for their high speed Internet customers. If you're a customer, you can now look forward to monitoring your bandwidth usage the way you do with cell phone minutes. Comcast insists the bandwidth cap is consistent with previous policies, and the publication of specific numbers is an attempt to clarify the policy for customers.