SOUND EFFECT
>> On October 1st, Comcast introduced bandwidth caps of 250 gigabytes on all residential customers. Does Qwest have any plans to follow suit and introduce similar limits?
>> Currently we do not have any, any plan along the lines of what Comcast is doing, but I will say that the larger issue in the industry is how do you continue to manage and keep the internet affordable for all when there is great disparity in how some are using the internet? Let me give you a couple of data points that I think show this out. First of all, on the Qwest network, and this is fairly typical for a residential customer, you see about 40 percent increased usage per year in the amount of information that is downloaded. So if someone is doing one gigabyte this year, it's 1.4 gigabytes that they're projected to do next year. So you can see that for carriers if your costs for IP are not coming down at the same rate, 40 percent per year, you are in a room, the water level's going up, and it's only a question of when you're going to drown. So the question is how do you manage that, and how do you manage that also in an environment where the top 1 percent of users are in fact generating 20 percent of the demand? The key goal is to keep the internet affordable for all, and so I think what you see in Comcast and others is a recognition that you're going to have to start doing some form of traffic management to keep the internet affordable for a large number of customers.
>> So in other words, you're not ruling out the possibility of bandwidth caps down the road.
>> We're not ruling out the possibility. I mean, Qwest, like most providers, has what is called an acceptable usage policy. Our acceptable use policy is not based directly on a cap, but is rather based on a top percentile, and we're talking about .001 percent of our total subs for which we suggest that there are things other than residential broadband that are a more appropriate service for what they're doing.
SOUND EFFECT
==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====
