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Comcast Cuts Off Users Who Exceed Secret Limit
Journal written by SEWilco (27983) and posted by
kdawson
on Mon Aug 27, 2007 01:22 AM
from the we-won't-tell-you-and-we-won't-tell-you-why dept.
from the we-won't-tell-you-and-we-won't-tell-you-why dept.
ConsumerAffairs.com has an article up spotlighting Comcast's tendency to cuts off heavy Internet users without defining in their AUP exactly what the bandwidth limit is. Frank Carreiro of West Jordan, Utah, got cut off by the mystery limit and started a 'Comcast Broadband dispute' blog.
Related Stories
[+]
Broadband Providers' Hidden Bandwidth Limits 443 comments
An anonymous reader sends us to the Boston Globe for a story that will come as a surprise to few here: broadband suppliers will cut you off if you download too many bits. It tells the stories of several Comcast users who were warned — without specifics — that they were using "too much" bandwidth, then had their accounts summarily cancelled. Looking into the future: "...even if only a tiny fraction of customers are downloading enough to trigger the policy, that will probably change as more entertainment moves to the Internet."
[+]
Your Rights Online: Comcast Hinders BitTorrent Traffic 537 comments
FsG writes "Over the past few weeks, more and more Comcast users have reported that their BitTorrent traffic is severely throttled and they are totally unable to seed. Comcast doesn't seem to discriminate between legitimate and infringing torrent traffic, and most of the BitTorrent encryption techniques in use today aren't helping. If more ISPs adopt their strategy, could this mean the end of BitTorrent?"
[+]
Comcast Slightly Clarifies High Speed Extreme Use Policy 618 comments
Alien54 writes "Comcast has finally clarified what 'excessive use' is when it comes to their cable internet service. A customer is exceeding their use limit if they: download the equivalent of 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures or 13 million emails in a month. '[A Comcast spokesperson] said that Comcast's actions to cut ties with excessive users is a "great benefit to games and helps protect gamers and their game experience" due to their overuse of the network and thus "degrading the experience."'" Maybe they could put that limit in terms other than 'email' or 'songs'?
[+]
Comcast Confirmed as Discriminating Against FileSharing Traffic 532 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Comcast has been singled out as discriminating against filesharing traffic in quantitative tests conducted by the Associated Press. MSNBC's coverage of the discovery is quite even-handed. The site notes that while illegal content trading is a common use of the technology, Bittorrent is emerging as an effective medium for transferring 'weighty' legal content as well. 'Comcast's technology kicks in, though not consistently, when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user. Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer -- it comes from Comcast.'" This is confirmation of anecdotal evidence presented by Comcast users back in August.
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I know the limit! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I know the limit! (Score:5, Funny)
Maynard: It reads, 'Here may be found the last words of Joseph of Arimathea: "He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of Aaaaarrrgh"'.
[pause]
Arthur: What?
Maynard: '"...The Castle of Aaaaarrrgh"'.
[pause]
Bedevere: What is that?
Maynard: He must have died while carving it.
Lancelot: [incredulous] Oh, come on!
Maynard: Well that's what it says.
Arthur: Look, if he was dying, he wouldn't bother to carve 'Aaaaarrrgh'. He'd just say it!
Maynard: Well, that's what's carved in the rock.
Galahad: Perhaps he was dictating.
Parent
Re:I know the limit! (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:I know the limit! (Score:5, Funny)
That's "No Career".
It's when you reach your company's limit of posting to /. on company time.
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Re:I know the limit! (Score:5, Funny)
+++ATH0 used to work sometimes, too.
Good times, good times...
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In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Informative)
In many places, such as in Pennsylvania, often the state troopers will give a +15 MPH leeway
On a related note, in some states, such as Pennsylvania, some speed detection methods, in particular Vascar (timing), has a +10 MPH leeway
Of course, if the driver admits speeding even 1 mile over than that above stated leeway likely won't matter... also, some states have "absolute" speed limits - there is no leeway so to speak
Often an officer will try to get the driver to admit to speeding and then play nice cop by offering to write a ticket for only going x over the limit, etc.
Digressed, but there really is a "secret" speed limit in most places, though many drivers quickly figure it out over time...
I'd imagine similar is true for high-bandwidth users
Ron
Parent
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not so much a "secret", as it is the 85% rule. That being, if if you travel at about the same speed as 85% of native traffic, you'll generally be ok. The thing about traffic cops is that they typically target people that stick out, not necessarily people that are merely breaking "the law". So, if average traffic is flowing at 20-over the limit, and you're traveling at 35 over the limit, then you're more likely to get tagged than the average traffic.
Then throw in your choice of vehicle, and it's even more interesting. A bright yellow porsche is more likely to be pulled over going 30+ in the left lane than the black sedan going 30+ in the lane right next to it. Again, because the first car stands out more. Between two similar sedans, the car traveling 30+ in the far left lane is more likely to be tagged than the car traveling 30+ in the far right lane. Why? because the left lane is the "fast lane".
I'm not saying it's right, I'm not saying it's fair, I'm just saying that's how it is, given my years of driving experience. And I agree: understanding the ground rules for driving conditions (i.e. especially that they're not "ideal") is the best way to avoid tickets.
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Re:In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:+/- 5 or whatever is not a secret limit. (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:+/- 5 or whatever is not a secret limit. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is one of the reasons why you almost never get stopped for doing 70 in a 65 zone -- if you have new tires with high pressure, have driven for a while, and the weather is hot, the speedometer might show less than you're actually doing, but a few months later in the same exact car, with more tyre wear, less pressure and colder weather, the indicated speed might be higher than your real speed.
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Re:+/- 5 or whatever is not a secret limit. (Score:5, Informative)
Installing tires that are one inch larger in diameter will only add about 2 MPH around 70 MPH. A one inch change in diameter is a far bigger difference than you'll ever see due to wear and temperature. If you're bored, you can see this using a calculator here [discounttiredirect.com].
In fact, you can game the inputs to reflect changes due to tire wear. For instance, a regular new car tire's tread depth is typically about 10/32", and the legal minimum in most US states is 1/16" so at most your overall lifetime diameter change due to wear should vary about half an inch, which equates at most to a 1 MPH difference at 70 MPH.
I race cars for a hobby so I'm very aware of tire pressure and temperature changes and how they relate, and the change in the overall diameter of a tire because of these factors would be too small to warrant discussion. There are specialty racing tires made from very soft compounds that would create a small but measurable effect but a heavy steel-belted street radial isn't going to change enough to matter.
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Re:+/- 5 or whatever is not a secret limit. (Score:5, Informative)
From there on the staff which processes offences got trained not to try to prosecute if the offence is within the camera precision limit (which for classic Gatso with double photo verification is around 5%). This is where the 5% comes from. The new cameras have considerably better measurements. The speed averaging ones can probably measure better than a car speedo.
Coming back onto the Comcast topic I do not see what Comcast problem is. Their AUP are a classic case of tehcnical incompetence being compensated via admin measures.
1. Downstream they can police at the CMTS. I have yet to see one that cannot do QoS. Even the "Dear Cretins" wankers over here have shown capable of doing that.
2. Upstream - DOCSIS past 1.0 allows the CMTS to tell which station can speak at which particular moment. As a result any station can be throttled and controlled and made to comply to the policy. All it takes is to program the CMTS to start filling the MAPs with some meaningfull information and decrease the part which is "free for all".
3. On top of that they provision the modems and what they do not want to do on the CMTS can be done by simply tftping a new config onto the modem which is something the management system should be able to do in bulk per product category (you do not even need to click on individual stations).
So this is a classic case of "cable and brains do not mix".
Parent
Re:+/- 5 or whatever is not a secret limit. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's amazing how brilliant they made my previous cable provider look. It seems to me that a cable company that is unable to provide decent cable services shouldn't be allowed to provide internet service, much less home phone service.
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Re:+/- 5 or whatever is not a secret limit. (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:+/- 5 or whatever is not a secret limit. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:In other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
Add GA (10 MPH) to that list.
That's probably a reflection of the individual cops, not the jurisdiction. Just the other night, my girlfriend's brother had an accident (swerved to avoid an oncoming car that had crossed the center line and hit the curb hard enough that the airbags deployed). I had driven his mom out there to keep him company while waiting for the tow truck.
One cop stopped behind us, blinded us with the spotlight on his cruiser, yelled at me when I tried to walk over to ask him what he wanted, accused us of tresspassing (we were on a main road, on the publically-owned easement), and then drove off when he found out what the situation was.
Then, not five minutes later, another cop showed up, immediately walked over to see what the problem was (instead of mysteriously sitting in his car, shining lights on us), called a new tow truck for us (because we'd been waiting for a very long time -- here's a tip: tow trucks summoned by cops arrive much faster than those summoned by the insurance company!), and then waited with us until it came, all the while making friendly conversation.
The first cop was old (gray-haired) and employed by the county police. The second was young and with the sheriff's department. Were either age or agency a factor in their demeanor? Nah, I think the first guy was just an asshole.
Parent
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't have responded (and from the subject, thought one of your child posts had already made this point), but apparently some people don't "get" the problem here...
When you stay within more-or-less "tolerated" speeds above the posted limit, you do so knowing the posted speed and that, at least theoretically, you could get a ticked if a cop wants to give you a hard time (someone mentioned a few states officially allow a certain headroom - True or not, police always have the nebulous "reckless driving" or "driving to endanger" charge when they can't stick you with anything else).
With arbitrary broadband caps, what "official but rarely enforced" limit could we stay within to avoid the problem? 5GB/mo? 50? 500? I have no idea, and neither does anyone else in this thread, and that causes the problem here.
If I violate the TOS, however arbitrary they seem, I can at least take some comfort in the fact that I chose to do so. If I exceed a magical unpublished number, the situation goes from "irregular enforcement of a written policy" to "we don't like you, go away".
Making this even worse, the local cable franchise almost always has a monopoly or at best a duopoly on broadband service. Imagine if the phone company could drop you because you actually use all that free local calling they offer.
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Re:In other news... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Only a 100 GB cap? (Score:5, Insightful)
not sure (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words - digging into the details, it became obvious that one very strong possibility was that (again, no one REALLY knows (which is the problem)) the person who got contacted was not the person who generated the bandwidth. In other words, Comcast keeps asking the poor fellow to cut back, they're looking at 250-300 gigs on their end, while the poor fellow is actually doing about 20-30 gigs and cutting back to even less than that. No matter how much the subscriber cuts back, the next month, erroneous data comes in again - Comcast's info is that he's done another 200+ gigs that month. So this ends up where they cut him off for 12 months (true story). There was no other logical explanation (other than the subscriber lying (which is a possibility, or course)).
This is where the secrecy creates problems, really. Sure, maybe an invisible something or another is better than a low explicit one, but you can't defend yourself if they've got it wrong, because there's no documentation. They don't even always tell the subscriber how much the subscriber has downloaded, and it appears that they may even lie about that. They don't want anyone knowing anything, basically. "Just cut back".
But "Just cut back" doesn't cut it when it's not you, now does it?
It's one thing to have rules, it's another thing to have flexible rules. But no matter how flexible those rules are, if you have this absolute secrecy thing going on, you stand no chance of defending yourself if you actually haven't done it and someone gets something mixed up somewhere.
Having a "counter" on your account - where you log into your account online and see how much you've downloaded, for instance - if you see data on there that isn't you, or if it's going up too fast, you can be proactive and call in and say "something's wrong here". If, for instance, the gigs are accumulating, and you disconnect your modem - pull it out of the wall -- and the gigs are still accumulating, then you can call in and notify. This isn't ME doing it. But if they won't even tell you how much you downloaded to get the call, or if they lie about it, (again, no one REALLY knows what happened (which is the problem)), how are you to trust that data is actually accurate? That it's not a mixup somewhere?
In that one particular situation, it did in fact appear that Comcast got the subscribers data mixed up (they actually turned the subscriber's internet back ON). They cancelled the 12-month cancellation because they reviewed their records and they figured out that it wasn't him doing it - they got it mixed up with someone else. The subscriber was downloading 15-30, and their data was saying 250-350. Month after month after month. Try cutting back on that!
It's creepy, is what it is. It's too secretive - you can't defend yourself. There's no data - no documentation.
They really ought to change the way they do this - it's very, very creepy.
Parent
Re:Only a 100 GB cap? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't wait for the day Cox pisses at me over doing 300GB+ a month on my connection though. It's a more pricey business account, but I know they'll do it eventually.
Parent
Re:Only a 100 GB cap? (Score:5, Interesting)
With an invisible limit, you have no idea what to tone down.
With a cap, at least you know what to hover around.
A lot of people argue that if you tell people what the limit is, they'll just abuse that limit to the max all the can. But if you're already using more than they want you to use and they're notifying you to reduce your usage, then telling you a limit to stay under can only HELP.
I telecommute and I'm online 24x7. I stream high quality radio all day long. I watch a lot of streaming movies. I download a lot of stuff. I play a lot of games online. I download a lot of (legal) downloads from bit torrent. Just a high quality streaming radio station running during business hours over the period of a month will easily reach 80gb. They advertise all these "high media uses" for their fast download speeds, yet then they penalize you if you actually use it for that? If two people in your home listen to a lot of radio, that's 160gb/mo. Don't even think about video.
My internet usage has remained relatively the same for the last three years. Unlike your grandma who uses her 8mbps connection to check her email and the whether, I actually make heavy use of mine. Probably more than most people I know. I don't want to abuse anything. But I don't want to be denied internet access for an entire year, either (and in America, cable has a monopoly on broadband unless you live right down the street from a central office for DSL).
Anyway, my usage has remained the same for about three years. Then out of nowhere I get a call a couple months ago warning me that I will be terminated if I don't reduce my use. I ask them what I should stay under and they said "there's no set limit". I asked them to at least GIVE ME AN IDEA. They said they could not. However, they did warn me that if I ever go over this limit that they can't tell me about again *EVER* they will ban me for a year.
I'm not looking to abuse services. I'm not looking to rip anyone off. I'm not looking to piss anyone off. My usage needs are higher than the average persons, what with my VPN use and streaming services and such. Fine. But don't tell me "if you go over this limit again, we're cutting you off -- but uh.. we can't say what that limit is". I asked if I needed to cut it by just a few percent. Or by half. Or by 80%. Or what... no answer. They refused to say.
So, I asked if I could buy additional services. A bigger account? Pay for extra bandwidth? Buy a second broadband account to the same address for another $60/mo? Nope. They just have the one service. That's it. If you want more -- even if you're willing to pay for it -- fuck you.
So I keep a very close eye on the bandwidth reported by my router every other day and come the end of the month -- I get jittery. I think they ban you based on if you're in the highest usage percentage for that month in your area. By that logic, someone is ALWAYS going to be in the top 10%. Period. So every month SOMEONE is going to get banned, right? So if everyone is at home playing on the internet last month, my usage may be fine. But if everyone in the region is on vacation or busy at work and not using their connection at home, that same usage *this month* might get me banished.
And as you pointed out, they won't cut you off the first time. But they won't tell you what to reduce it by, either. And what is fine one month -- since you're compared with the current average use in your area -- might get you a second notice (and a ban for a year) the next month.
I'm quite pleased my taxes go to assist in monopolies such as this.
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Re:Only a 100 GB cap? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Only a 100 GB cap? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sounds like a breach of contract (Score:4, Insightful)
This sounds like a good case for breach of contract. Why has nobody sued?
Ruled unconscionable for AT&T already (Score:5, Informative)
And frankly, while IANAL, it should have been obviously so all along, even in corporation-owned USA. A clause saying "if you have any grievance with me, I'm the sole judge, jury and executioner on that" just isn't how the rule of the law was supposed to work. It's not just a blatant conflict of interest all the way, it's essentially proclaiming someone exempt from the laws and rules that bind everyone else.
The contract is _not_ sacrosanct and doesn't override laws in any civilized country. E.g., you can't sell yourself into slavery even if you wanted to, because there's a law against that. Otherwise everyone would sneak "you are now my property" in the fine print or some would go beat someone up until they sign such a contract.
Heck, AFAIK even in the USA there is this provision that contract clauses that are unexpected and unreasonable to a normal person, are essentially worthless. If you rent a car from my hypothetical car loan shop, I can't come afterwards and say "ha ha, in the small print says I now own your home and I just adopted your firstborn too", because that's clauses which don't belong there and aren't expected. I certainly can't see how an "I'm above the law" clause would be any more allowed.
So it's just one of those crap EULA-type clauses that's there just to hopefully scare you into believing it, not because it's actually legal or enforceable. Some corporations figured out that instead of just lobbying for more power, they'll just claw away at your rights by just telling you that you're bound to give them some powers, and hoping that you'll actually believe it.
Disturbingly enough, it seems to actually work.
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Is it still advertised as unlimited? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is it still advertised as unlimited? (Score:5, Interesting)
To summarize, "unlimited" is an old term from the days of dialup modems, and refers to the maximum amount of time you are allowed to stay dialed in and connected: minutes per session, hours per month, and so on. With today's modern broadband connections, kept always-on and connected 24/7, referring to them as "unlimited" is correct. The definition, unfortunately, is old.
However, this says nothing about the bandwidth you are allowed to use. This is today's top issue. We really need another definition to describe this.
With dialup modems, few people really cared about bandwidth consumption, as they were so slow that they didn't make much of an impact, even when continually ran at top speed. With today's fast broadband connections, you can consume a lot of bandwidth in a hurry, and to be affordable at residential prices, they are deliberately oversold.
There's a reason a T1 line still costs $600+/month. You're allowed to run anything and everything over it, no filtering, no capping, and to keep it maxed out at full wire speed, both upload and download, 24/7. Bandwidth to the Internet backbone, unfortunately, is still expensive. I wish it weren't true, but it is. I guess somebody has to pay for all that copper, fiber, and electricity....
Parent
Still doesn't make it right (Score:5, Interesting)
If it takes 600+ per month to provide the service they advertised, then they can say so. Arguments boiling down to, "but we'd go bankrupt for actually providing the service we advertised," are still just fancy wording for fraud. If you can't deliver what you sold, it's fraud by any other name. If you can't afford to provide it at that price, then just don't in the first place.
Redefining "unlimited" is bogus. That's just word play. If they wanted to mean exactly that and only that, it's damn easy to just say so. It takes at most one sentence. Heck, it just takes two extra words: "unlimited connect time." There, now it's perfectly clear what's meant.
It's like putting a shield outside a pub that says "free unlimited beer" and then getting into wordplay games like "yes, well, see, we meant free and unlimited as in speech. We're not limiting your rights to do whatever you wish with your beer." It's still false advertising nevertheless.
The truth is, "unlimited" used to mean exactly that: unlimited everything. And bandwidth used to cost a fair bit in the modem days too, because there was a lot less backbone cable laid. The problem was just the same. They just bet that you wouldn't use most of it. At the time, it wasn't that modems made it any different, it was just that there wasn't that horribly much to do on the net. And it was sorta self-throttling for everyone: if too many people try to see a web page at the same time, all of them get it a little slower. If there's anything that made a difference, it's not cable modems, it's that P2P programs came along. And those don't play as nice: they open hundreds of channels to stuff the bandwidth to the max.
They also knew what they're getting into when they kept upgrading the DSL or cable speed without actually increasing the backbone speeds. They kept advertising higher and higher speeds, while fully knowing they can't actually deliver.
Even the word redefinition falls on its face if you look at the examples and justifications they use to demonize their customers. Most are along that line of "but they kept downloading all day!" Ah-ha. So they used the connection and advertised bandwidth for actually an unlimited amount of time.
At any rate, it's still fraud. They sold a service based on an expectation that's just short of explicit.
Claiming "unlimited internet access" at, say, 1 megabit speed, is already making a claim about how much a cap you're getting. It means, 30 days times 24 hours times 3600 seconds times 1 megabit. Per month. XCalc says that's 2592000 megabits per month. Assuming 10 bits transmitted are roughly 1 content byte (the rest accounting for overhead, handshake, packet headers, etc), that's 259,200 megabytes or roughly 259 gigabytes. If you advertised more speed, that's more. E.g., if you advertised 6 megabit/s, for example, that's a bit over 1.5 terrabytes per month.
That's the underlying assumption.
For most people (myself included) it's more than they'll ever need, but nevertheless, that's the implicit quantity they sold. That's what those people bought. Not being willing and able to actually deliver it, just means fraud. Trying to demonize those who actually use all they bought is lame.
It's no different than if I claimed that for X$ a month you can get 1.5 square miles of land on my hypothetical third country island, on the assumption that almost noone would actually get that much land. Then when you actually buy a tractor and build a fence around exactly that much land, the ISP way would be that I coome and kick you out for being a bad community member and using that much land at the expense of others. You should have known that regardless of what the contract says, you're not actually supposed to get more than 100 acres.
That's another thing that gets my goat in that fraud, btw: trying to present those users as some arch-villains that steal from the community. It's not the IS
Parent
There's still a difference (Score:5, Insightful)
If nothing else, and this is the crux of my grievance: the airline won't call you names, accuse you of wrongdoing the other passengers, and generally treat you like a thieving scumbag for just showing up at the airport for the flight you booked. At the very least, they'll acknowledge that it's the problem they created and try to give you some compensation, as you were saying.
That's already a _massive_ difference. In and by itself. I'm willing to even forget and forgive mistakes, even motivated greed, flukes, whatever, as long as they have the decency to, you know, apologise for it and try to do better next time. Such bullshit as the ISP's demonizing the very customers they oversold to, calling them names, etc, is just unforgivable in my book. It's just bullshit.
Imagine going to the airport and finding out that the air company you booked with can and will:
A. treat you like some kind of criminal because you didn't miss at least half the flights you booked, and
B. occasionally call you various unflattering names for it, and
C. try to guilt-trip you and present you as some great malefactor that preys on the other passengers who might need that seat, and
D. might just kick you out for nothing more than not missing enough flights.
I mean, heck, I'm sure they too could make more money if they restricted their business to only people who miss 3 flights out of 4. Then they could oversell the plane by a factor of 4, instead of a measly couple of extra tickets. Should it be allowed then?
And that's just what these ISPs are doing. Trying to kick out everyone who doesn't stay below 1/5 of the capacity they thought they bought or lower.
And when I hear such other BS as secret quotas, lying tech support, etc... I can't see how that's defensible at all.
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DSL slower but I've never heard of a limit (Score:5, Interesting)
DSL is slower, but I've never heard of a monthly bandwidth limit. I believe that the slower throughput speed of DSL is self-policing. DSL is also individually wired to each customer, unlike cable, as cable's bandwidth is shared throughout entire neighborhoods. So, the only one you hurt by maxing out the bandwidth of DSL is yourself, and with a packet shaper, this becomes less of a problem.
It varies from area to area, but it appears the "secret" Comcast limit has been determined to be roughly 100 gigabytes per month. I believe this is a cumulative total of both upload and download.
This has been going on for some time, and the good people at broadbandreports.com [broadbandreports.com] have much to say about it....
Re:DSL slower but I've never heard of a limit (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:DSL slower but I've never heard of a limit (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, this being a simple dual-WAN router, it's not true load balancing, but a weight-distributed round robin scheme for new outgoing connections. However, in the long run, that causes the traffic to fall into the same pattern too.
Also, all SMTP traffic goes over ADSL, because Comcast blocks destination port 25 unless it's to their mail servers. I understand their reasoning for doing so, but I think the reason doesn't in any way justify the action. Better would be to shut down the customers who send spam instead of limiting everyone, and instead of shutting down people who may use the bandwidth they were promised for for legitimate uses.
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Re:DSL slower but I've never heard of a limit (Score:5, Funny)
I have both Comcast cable and AT&T DSL.
Wow. Have you ever tried seeding a torrent to yourself?
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Re:DSL slower but I've never heard of a limit (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, did it once. Amazing speeds. Downloaded a full movie in about the time it would take to copy it. Fantastic. Unfortunately, most of what was there I already had. Good taste in films, that tracker.
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Re:DSL slower but I've never heard of a limit (Score:5, Informative)
SATA150 won't change the speed of a file transfer from a hard drive that can only read 40MB/sec at the platter.
With cable, most areas are fed by a residential gateway that's connected back to their network through Fiber. In places that offer digital cable, the video signal is pulled off for transmission and video on demand stuff and the pure data portion is multiplexed to all the cable modems that are served by that gateway. Now I'm not sure how many homes are served by one gateway, but I've been told that they are setup to handle several thousand customers. Just like with DSL they can oversell the available bandwidth, and if they did it would behave exactly the same way.
So in reality, neither offers "guaranteed" bandwidth. One may offer a guaranteed line rate, but that means nothing without the bandwidth to back it up. It just depends on the providers when it comes to deciding which is better. I'm glad Cox has there act together here in Phoenix (my 12Mbit connection pulls over 13 from good servers any time of day)
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Then sue the Fuckers (Score:5, Insightful)
Hire a lawyer and sue the fuckers for breach of contract. Both parties in a contract must be privy to the terms of the contract. So sue the fuckers, because if they haven't revealed the limitation on the TOS, the limitation isn't valid.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Then sue the Fuckers (Score:4, Interesting)
The contract has two parties. If you are paying for a service, you are eligible for the service within terms of the contract.
The correct way to handle this would be the update the contract to include some vague clause about "excessive use" as a reason for terminating a contract or limiting use.
And yes. I could sue my provider for damages were they to drop my connection. I do most of my work from home but need almost constant VPN to the office. However, I'm pretty sure my contract is a standard private person one, where claims of damage are limited to the cost of the connection. If that clause is enforceable in my legislation is entirely different matter.
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Re:Then sue the Fuckers (Score:4, Insightful)
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How do you start a blog (Score:3, Funny)
Not that bad... (Score:5, Interesting)
"From what I know, the unspoken limits about 300 GB a month, which is more than almost any of us will touch even once in a lifetime, it takes multiple torrents running full on 24.7 . We know this cause we caught some Comcast rejects moving to our company. Sudden spikes in monthly bandwidth on our end can doom our business, to the level these guys were pulling.
The reason Comcast doesnt tell you is if they did, asshat downloaders would lawyer the total and if lets say it was 100, they'd use 99.9999 then whine if they were denied that much. The approach would backfire. Plus its a competitive disadvantage for Comcast if their competitors know what a soft limit on dl's is. You'd generate a race to the bottom over max downloads, again, the tactic would backfire.
There's always one claimed good citizen, but reading the article he has 6 kids, guaranteed not all of them is telling daddy what he left the computer doing all last night, and the night before, and the night before that. non stop DL porn? in my family's PC? Its more common than you think.
And no its not a content issue, but you'd be amazed how some of these guys have no idea what 300GB of porn or DVD looks like. Some of us with ISP careers do -- purely research purposes. And I can tell you not even our raging gamer tech supporters touch anywhere near 300 GB in a month, I've tried to get them to.
Hitting those caps is very difficult to do unless you're running non stop multiple torrents. Despite what mr. innocent citizen says."
If it really is 300GB (Score:5, Informative)
However I'm not really that sympathetic to the people hitting it. 300GB is a shitload of traffic. I run a couple web servers (business class cable account) and download anything that catches my fancy like large demos, as well as watch any video I want online, and I've never hit that. That's 10GB a day, for the whole damn month. You really have to try to generate traffic like that. I mean I absolutely don't restrict myself in any way, I pay for a business account it really is unlimited (I have an SLA) and the connection is fast 10mb/1mb. Still rare the month I even do half of that, and that's accounting the 50GB or so that the servers do.
I still think Comcast needs to state the limit, but people can't pretend like you can buy cheap access, slam it 24/7, and expect not to have someone get annoyed.
It's the same deal on the campus where I work. We don't want to do something dick like rate limit people's connections. I mean we've got fast access, it's nice to have fast downloads. You need to get a Knoppix DVD? Get on a good torrent and you'll get it at 5mbytes/sec or more. However, that doesn't mean that you are free to do that all the time. If you did, it'd suck up too much campus bandwidth. It works because people will get what they want and then go back to low usage, allowing others to have a share. If everyone tried to max it, well everything would go slow.
So, rather than rate limit connections so that you can't do it, but always put up with slow downloads, it is a situation of if you don't keep it reasonable, you'll get yelled at, or get your port shut down if you still won't comply. There's not a hard limit, it is basically a "When you are causing problems," situation. During the summer? Go nuts pretty much. When Knoppix 5 came out I got permission to seed it over a weekend and did about 1.5TB of transfers. During the year during the week? Hell no, there are tens of thousands of others using the connection, be respectful of it.
Same deal with Internet at your home. The less you are paying, the more shared it is and the more restrictions you can expect. If you want less restrictions, you can generally pay for it. I bought business cable which allows me to run servers and doesn't really cap bandwidth usage, though I'm still sharing the spectrum with other people on my segment. If I wanted I could further move up to something more dedicated like a T1, for more money. The higher up the chain you go, the less you share it.
Sounds to me like they just want people to keep it reasonable. You don't really need to download 50 movies a month and a thousand MP3 and 10 large game demos and so on (which is the kind of thing it would take to hit 300GB). Morality of infringing on copyrighted material aside, you just need to keep it more reasonable and you'll be fine.
That or pony up the cash for a better class of service. I hesitate to recommend Speakeasy now that Best Buy owns them, and in fact that's why I switched to business class cable (Cox, not Comcast), but they don't do any restrictions at all on their high end accounts. They aren't the only provider out there that does that. However, you do pay a bit more. Expect to pay about $100/month for a 6mb/768k DSL like. That is generally equal or inferior to what you'd get with $30-40 cable service. However, Speakeasy is charging an amount sufficient that they can afford to have you run servers and and use that line fully. The cable company is not (for the consumer account).
Parent
Re:If it really is 300GB (Score:5, Informative)
I went out of my way to call comcast and say "Look, I don't want to abuse anything. I want to be a good, paying customer. I need XYZ amount of bandwidth per month and I'm willing to pay for it. I'll take a business account or two residential accounts (or three if you want). Just tell me what I need to pay to get the services I need and not be kicked off by you guys?".
The answer? "Yeah, we don't have anything like that -- sorry".
Parent
I wouldn't call them asshats (Score:5, Insightful)
That says, I'd draw the line at calling people "asshats" just because they use the bandwidth they were sold. They got sold a service on the explicit claim that it's unmetered and unlimited, and they're actually using it as such.
I'm not surprised that the text you quote comes from another ISP, because it's a widespread disease: sell based on outright lies, then try to demonize the users who actually use what they bought. And I find that lame.
It's like advertising an all-you-can-eat breakfast hour at your restaurant, then starting calling people names when they take more than a cup of tea, two slices of bread and a slice of cheese. Or like advertising that a hotel includes a free swimming pool, and then starting treating people like thieves if they're in there for more than half an hour a day. I'm betting not many people would go to that restaurant or hotel again.
Talks about what "normal people" should use or about downloading porn are just a stupid strawman there, plus some appeal to shame when invoking the downloading porn all night argument. It's just freakin' irrelevant. Those people never signed a contract that said "thou shalt not download more than thy neighbour" or "thou shalt never use it for porn", and that's certainly not the service that the ISP advertised. If they're against downloading porn, just advertise as "the family-friendly network where porn is forbidden and a termination offense" and see if that flies in the market.
Those people were advertised unmetered, unlimited access, and there was no talk about what they can't use it for, either. Period. Now deliver what you sold.
Because all the talk about "asshats" and "bad network citizens" and such is just weasel wording to justify a _fraud_. The ISP sold something he can't deliver, and now is calling the customer names when he actually wants what he's bought.
It's no different than, say, me selling you a PS3 on ebay and then starting calling you names when you actually want it. "Auugh, he's an asshat! If all people actually received their PS3s we'd go bankrupt! I bet he just wants to watch Blue Ray porn on it all night! Someone shame him and drive him away already!" It's just not right.
So basically my message to those ISPs is: fuck you, if you can't afford to really offer that kind of service, then fucking stop selling it. Because presenting people as some kind of supreme-evil arch-villains for just using the service they bought, is just lame. Go back to pay-by-hour or pay-by-MB if you can't afford to live up to the unlimited service you promised. But have the fucking _decency_ to not demonize people who just use the service they were advertised and sold.
Parent
Could really hurt work-at-home folks (Score:3, Informative)
If they include as part of the limit all the packet and port snooping they're apparently doing on their customers, I want to know.
Hidden Danger (Score:5, Insightful)
If Comcast sets a public limit, most users will try to get to that limit just to get the money's worth, and this tends to increase overall usage.
13. BINDING ARBITRATION (Score:5, Interesting)
If you don't opt out of this clause, your chances of receiving any civil compensation are greatly reduced. All of the other posts that talk about turning your team of lawyers loose on Comcast would be wise to review the entire agreement first.
http://www.comcast.com/arbitrationoptout/default.
Secret limit could be better in some cases... (Score:3, Insightful)