Comcast Slightly Clarifies High Speed Extreme Use Policy

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'?

They still don't give the exact byte downloadlimit

[danwat1234 (942579)]

An e-mail I sent to gamedaily.com about this article. I have a question about the article on your website named:: Comcast Clarifies High Speed Extreme Use Policy The article says the equivalent bandwidth usage may cause Comcast to cut the user off from their High speed Internet service:: "the equivalent of 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures or 13 million emails in a month." Ok, why did they not actually give you an actual # of bytes that the Internet connection would have to download through Comcast's Internet service before it is cut off? Should I assume that an average song is around 3 megabytes each, and so that the actual limit is 90 Gigabytes per month? They are not clarifying anything because Comcast has not released the exact limit..and I don't know why.

Re:They still don't give the exact byte downloadli

[by Anonymous Coward]

Those bastards don't state the limit for 2 reasons:
1) they don't want it to be a factor in user-choice - naturally the limit is not generous as otherwise they would have published
2) they must have variable limits in different places depending on load (or more exactly - oversell) - so they want to be able to kick out local top 1% of users regardless if they breach some global limit.

Re:They still don't give the exact byte downloadli

[InvalidError (771317)]

My current ISP recently announced a 100GB/month cap on its version of Extreme service. At ~3MB per MP3 and 30k songs/month, Comcast's vague limit also falls in the 100GB ballpark... that's the same limit as the vast majority of service offers in my area.

When one of my friends who was on said Extreme service got pissed off about paying ~$80/month for unlimited and getting suddenly capped to 100GB, I looked around to check out what sorts of alternatives were available in my area - something I had not done in years. From what I have seen, there are dozens of DSL resellers who are offering a choice between 100GB/month low-latency or unlimited low-priority traffic for only $30/month at 5000/800 speeds. (Well, with DSL, mileage may vary - even more so with third-party service that may be routed through auxiliary networks between the DSLAM and global internet.)

Since my current service contract costs $40/month for only 30GB/month, I will soon start sampling DSL service in my area until my contract expires - the ridiculously low limits make the extra speed seem superfluous... I have about four months left to pick my new ISP and there are about 40 (mostly ADSL) to choose from.

I am guessing Canada must have a law/rule requiring ISPs to declare limits since all ISPs I have seen do state the limits somewhere on their product pages... though sometimes they are a little obfuscated such as being written in an expandable page section that is collapsed by default made to look like a simple paragraph separator line until you pay close attention to it and notice the '+' sign at one end. I suppose this means the law/rule, if any, omitted to state how visible/accessible data on those limits must be.

My current ISP might be too expensive for the ridiculous limits it has on my package but at least I have always known what the limits were... if I were a Comcast customer, I would go for a class-action suit to force full disclosure of this mysterious limit and the methods behind it - customers should not have to guess what the ToS are no matter what lame excuse Comcast may have.

Re:They still don't give the exact byte downloadli

[erroneus (253617)]

I don't think there's any room for interpretation of the word "unlimited." If they use that word, they need to be sued.

But by and large, this is the reason the utilities commissioners need to push for higher global infrastructure standards. These clowns don't want to upgrade their systems and when users begin to push the limits of their infrastructure, they tax the users rather than upgrading their network as they should.

These monopolists do everything they can to keep the willing competition from delivering what the people want, pay the politicians and commissioners so they don't have to upgrade their infrastructure and then over-charge the users. It's time the people got some representation for a change.

Re:They still don't give the exact byte downloadli

[ucblockhead (63650)]

Plus the last thing they want is people downloading exactly the limit every month. By making it vague, they ensure that people will stay significantly under the limits that would give them trouble.

Re:They still don't give the exact byte downloadli

[MobileTatsu-NJG (946591)]

"Plus the last thing they want is people downloading exactly the limit every month. By making it vague, they ensure that people will stay significantly under the limits that would give them trouble."

It's not just that. When they say people are being 'excessive', that's different from saying "They downloaded n gigs of data even though it says unlimited in our plan".

Re:They still don't give the exact byte downloadli

[watchingeyes (1097855)]

Canadian ISP's publish precisely what the limit is, and my ISP, Shaw, even provides graphs update bi-hourly showing your exact MTD usage down to the MB, so you know almost exactly how much is remaining for the month. I merely go to http://secure.shaw.ca/ [secure.shaw.ca] , type in my account info, and I can view them. They, directly on their product page, give the exact difference between download caps between their different offerings, with the lowest one having 60GB a month, and the highest having 160GB (the middle one has 100GB).

I've also gone up to 10% over on a few months, and even then they didn't do anything.

Furthermore, most of the people whom I've talked to (which is many considering I work for a Canadian ISP) don't know what their bandwidth cap is, and don't come CLOSE to using it. This isn't surprising, considering most customers use the internet primarily for web browsing/online shopping, MSN (MSN is easily the most dominant IM service in Canada), gaming and music sharing. Movie sharing is still relatively limited and not used by most people, and any video service outside of Youtube has a rather limited reach.

Slashdot readers may use a whole giant crap-load of bandwidth, but the vast majority of the other 99.99% of the population don't use all that much.

When services like Joost and other HD services that use bittorrent, or even ones that don't, become more pervasive and mainstream, thus bringing higher bandwidth usage to most consumers....then the ISP's are gonna be having problems. Right now though, any fears that people will intentionally use up all of their bandwidth are, quite frankly, ridiculous.

Re:They still don't give the exact byte downloadli

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

They are not clarifying anything because Comcast has not released the exact limit..and I don't know why.

That's obvious. If they issue an actual hard limit, customers would hold them to it. I know I would ... I have bandwidth monitoring on my network and if they cut me off too soon I'd scream bloody murder, believe me. A few hundred thousand customers clogging their support lines is what they absolutely do not want. This way, however, they can maintain their long-term SOP of vague threats and unspecified "limits" and continue to nail anyone they want to, any time they want. All this does is create uncertainty among their customers, which is exactly what they want so people will be afraid to use their connections "too much". Let's not forget that once they say "this is how much capacity you can use" they would have a hard time justifying the promises made by their marketing department.

I suspect there is also another determinant

[rolfwind (528248)]

and that is how much they oversell the line you are on.

If you are the only customer of 30 on a loop, there would be a lot leeway to give you bandwidth than if you were one of 500.

If they had a hard limit, they would be kicking off profitable customers in more rural areas and keeping perhaps unprofitable customers in high load areas (due them "hogging" bandwidth and chasing other customers off due to a poor experience).

Re:I suspect there is also another determinant

[rolfwind (528248)]

I haven't mispoke, perhaps I was not clear. I don't think the bandwidth used is the problem because bandwidth to the Internet backbone is relatively cheap and I'm sure the Central Office has high bandwidth Fiber Optic connecting them to the rest of the world.

But bandwidth on Cable is comparitively PHYSICALLY limited. So, considerations are weighted on conditions of the local loop.

For example, if you are 1 of 30 customers on a local loop and you download 300 gigabytes per month - you still might have a very minor impact on fellow customers. As such, since you bring an extra $60 per month to Comcast, might be good word of mouth advertising in the local area, might use other comcast cable services, it would make little sense in kicking you off since you'd still be a profitable customer.

But, if you are 1 of 500 customers on an oversold local loop, and you download 200 gigabytes per month - you could be a major impact on this line on fellow customers. Keeping you as a customer may drive off several others who find the browsing too slow. In this case -- even though you download LESS than the previous example - you would still be less desirable as a customer.

There could be other considerations too - if you do the bulk of your downloading at night when most people sleep - perhaps they factor that in as a consideration rather than someone who downloads during the day - especially in the evening when EVERYBODY else is on. It isn't unheard of - electricity is cheaper during off-peak hours as well.

More to the point...

[Kythe (4779)]

They don't give an actual limit for marketing reasons.

Up until a couple of years back, Comcast used to advertise their service as "unlimited". They quietly stopped doing that, and certainly never made any effort to inform people that they were no longer advertising an "unlimited" service. But I think it's more than just neglecting to tell customers and potential customers about the shift.

When most people are told about Comcast cutting people off, they still think Comcast is advertising an unlimited service. I believe Comcast benefits from this impression. At the same time, they can claim, when push comes to shove, that they don't advertise an "unlimited service" and feign ignorance as to from where that impression comes. It's the best of both worlds.

Put simply, if Comcast published a limit, it would destroy the myth that their service is unlimited -- a myth from which they still benefit immensely. They'd much rather take the PR hit of a few people complaining of cut-off's by claiming these people were "abusing" the service.

Re:They still don't scare the abusers.

[Enlightenment (1073994)]

So heavy use is "abuse," now? Thanks for clarifying that. I was under the false impression that when you pay for access, you're allowed to make the most of it.

Re:They still don't give the exact byte downloadli

[watchingeyes (1097855)]

Mod parent up. The explanation of the grand-parent, that GB is too technical, may be the actual reason, but is still downright ridiculous. As I've said elsewhere in this discussion, Canadian ISPs publish their limits in GB, and some also AFTERWARDS provide analogies to songs or pictures.

Hell, Apple, the king of simple, does this. Apple provides an estimate of how many songs or video their iPods will hold, but right there on the back, and on the box, is the precise amount of storage. This is Apple, a company that simplifies their marketing materials so much it sometimes makes my head hurt.

Comcast is being deceitful and dishonest, end of story.

If, after having this controversy brew for years, Comcast's PR department still doesn't get it, they do, in-fact, need a new PR department.

Re:They still don't give the exact byte downloadli

[Spy der Mann (805235)]

Because if they give a Gigabits or Gigabytes number, you can calculate the true bitrate you can use (just divide over 30*24*3600 and voila), and they'll open the door for their competitors.

Re:They still don't give the exact byte downloadli

[Achromatic1978 (916097)]

I ... do ~150gb of usenet each month for some time now

Yeah, that sounds legitimate.

lets do the math!

[Gabest (852807)]

30000*songs = 250000*pictures = 13000000*emails 1 song = 3MB => 1 picure = 360KB => 1 email = 6.92KB Seems right, unless you want to send pictures or songs are email attachments :)

Re:lets do the math!

[Seumas (6865)]

A song is 3mb? What crappy bitrate do they think people encode to? A decent quality rip is going to be around 7mb. Possibly more.

They need to get off it and stop being so cryptic. They also need to realize that "excessive use" can be easily exceeded by completely reasonable means.

Today, I downloaded some demos on XBOX. That was about 10gb. I downloaded some video/demo/subscription content via both XBOX and PS3 this past month, too. So that's another 10gb (all of the TGS content from Microsoft via XBL alone is about 3gb).

I downloaded my weekly podcasts (video and audio). That was about 3gb.

I am 1500 miles from my home town, so I stream the local radio station (256kbps) all day every day (about 30gb/mo, probably).

My roommate also streams his favorite radio station most of the day. Another 20gb or so per month.

I streamed several movies from a pay service (like vongo) this week. Figure that's another 15gb/mo.

My roommate watched a few movies the same way. Another 5gb.

I downloaded three linux ISOs via torrent and seeded them to 100%. That's another 5gb.

I uploaded about 20gb of MP3s to my mp3tunes account.

This doesn't count surfing or watching youtube style content or FTPing to my remote server or connecting to my machine in the office via VNC and VPN. With completely reasonable uses, I've just accounted for 118gb between two people on one residential account. I presume the use would be higher if there were more people. Say, a four or five person family, for example.

And of course, the biggest issue here is that they've simply avoided answering the question altogether. The title of this submission is inaccurate. They didn't answer anything, yet offered a response that can be turned against any user by simply adjusting how big these pictures and emails supposedly are supposed to be for this calculation.

Even stupider, they show just how far behind the times they are by measuring things in "emails, songs and pictures". Welcome to 1998, friends.

Re:lets do the math!

[Cid Highwind (9258)]

Even stupider, they show just how far behind the times they are by measuring things in "emails, songs and pictures". Welcome to 1998, friends.

I prefer to have my bandwidth cap quoted in station wagons of DLT tapes per month...

Re:lets do the math!

[Matey-O (518004)]

I prefer to have my bandwidth cap quoted in station wagons of DLT tapes per month...

You get all the data that'll fit in the passenger door map-pocket.

Re:Song of 4:10 times 128 kbps = 4 MB

[Jeremy Erwin (2054)]

One of their ads for powerboost reads

Imagine you're downloading a 20 Megabyte file with 5 MP3 songs. It would take almost 3.5 minutes with a 768 kbs DSL connection. Compare that to just about 20 seconds with Comcast High-Speed Internet with Powerboost.

This comparison isn't meant for the high bandwidth user. It's meant for people who have trouble understanding why anyone would download anything as large as a linux distribution.

Re:They still don't give the exact byte downloadli

[ResidntGeek (772730)]

Like FLAC?

Re:Well think about it....

[mr_matticus (928346)]

They do give you a ticket whenever they feel like it. All a speed limit does is serve notice that exceeding that speed puts you in the "eligible for a ticket" category. Given that speed limits are set at an 85% rule (at least in CA, but this is derived from the Eisenhower Interstate System plan), 15% of people are by definition expected to be driving in excess of a given speed limit. Simply exceeding the posted speed is not itself illegal, but this is too complicated a rule for the masses, and publication of exact threshold policies would lead to the average speed maximizing to the maximum legal level (that is, above the speed limit).

The same approach works here. There is a general notice which you should be aware of if you're anywhere near crossing that threshold. They're not required to kick you off for exceeding it, and instead reserve the right to manage traffic by isolating egregious offenders as they see fit to preserve the smooth, safe, and efficient flow of vehicles (or data packets).

Bright line rules are extremely rare. It's absurd that Slashdotters expect a hard limit here, where everwhere else they complain about how black-and-white rules don't take circumstances into account. Here's the moral of the story: situational and relative rules are unclear by definition!

If they provided a rule that said, 150GB monthly limit, period, there'd be an equal amount of bitching. Since Comcast is run with regional franchises, and each community has different infrastructure limits and customer loads, it doesn't make sense to force a hard limit. You'll get cut off if you're causing a problem for other users. You'll be notified if that occurs. What is unfair about that?

The obvious units

[Colin Smith (2679)]

Libraries of Congress...

Or British Libraries for Imperial.

Re:The obvious units

[ScentCone (795499)]

Libraries of Congress

No, no. It's Libraries of Congress per fortnight.

Abuse Definition v2

[Jah-Wren Ryel (80510)]

What's their problem? Why didn't Comcast use standard units?
Everybody knows data transfers are measured in LoC's - Libraries of Congress.

Re:Abuse Definition v2

[wizardforce (1005805)]

well according to wikipedia the LOC :

is the largest by shelf space and one of the most important libraries in the world. Its collections include more than 30 million cataloged books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 58 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America, including a Gutenberg Bible (one of only four perfect vellum copies known to exist); over 1 million US Government publications; 1 million issues of world newspapers spanning the past three centuries; 33,000 bound newspaper volumes; 500,000 microfilm reels; over 6,000 comic book[3] titles; the world's largest collection of legal materials; films; 4.8 million maps; sheet music; and 2.7 million sound recordings.

rough estimation of its data storage: ~90 million total*5 megs ave guess= 450 terabytes. comcast's limit was supposed to be about 300 gigs [if you download really fantastic songs] so 300gigs/450 terabytes= 1/1500 LOC. in short, the LOC is MASSIVE

Re:Abuse Definition v2

[Chandon Seldon (43083)]

in short, the LOC is MASSIVE

That's why we have standard S.I. prefixes. They're allowing around 400 microLOC per fortnight.

Limited downloads

[teidou (651247)]

I think it's kind of suspicious that they don't put the value in terms of number of Slashdot comments. I mean, you could get cut off right in the mid

Re:Limited downloads

[Incadenza (560402)]

That sure would be a

Re:Limited downloads

[EvanED (569694)]

Now stop that! How are we supposed

Re:Limited downloads

[Enlightenment (1073994)]

I think you took the joke too f

Re:Limited downloads

[Bender Unit 22 (216955)]

Yeah, they did, but it is a luxury problem. I am on a dialup, So I don't have to deal with that, since there is no chance I will hit t "]5d[7d£4±A"2@ NO CARRIER

Songs/Emails vs Kbytes/MBytes

[stratjakt (596332)]

The reason they don't give you a simple cutoff limit measured in bytes is, there is none.

It's a moving target, and at some point in the process, it's subjective. I'm sure there's some traffic analysis done, and I'm sure when it's time to free up resources by booting the hogs they make some calls along the lines of "24/7 torrent server vs VPN client"

I'm sure, and this is something I've never seen mentioned in any slashdot threads, they include your credit history with the company in the decisions, as well. If I have to choose between two customers, one who's consistently late, who wastes my collections teams time every month, and one who pays promptly every time - guess who I'm choosing?

Just saying, I pay my bill on time every month, I use all the bandwidth I possibly can, and I have never had an issue. If you want to "push the envelope", it's the least you can do to keep on the cable co's good side.

13 million emails in a month, eh?

[AnonymousDivinity (778696)]

Well there's an easy solution:
BitTorrent via SMTP!

Gotta use all that GMail space somehow...

Do the math

[Spazmania (174582)]

30k songs @ 6 megs / mp3 = 180 gigs
250k pictures @ 1 meg/jpg = 250 gigs
13M emails @ 20k/email = 260 gigs

180 gigs / 4.3 gigs per dvd = 42 DVD movies

So that's quite a bit of data for thirty bucks a month.

Re:So so so wrong.

[mr_matticus (928346)]

.2) It's not up to you to define what's reasonable.

No, it's up to Comcast, because it's their damn service. Deal with it or go somewhere else.

3) Nobody is asking for guaranteed bandwidth, so your point is silly.

The point isn't about guaranteed bandwidth. It's about your paying for a residential service and then out-consuming 95% of other customers to the point where you place an unnecessary strain on a community resource. The nature of cable requires bandwidth management in order to assure steady access to all customers. That's exactly what they're doing.

4) Internet access via comcast or verizion or whomever is not a "community resource", it's something I'm buying from an ISP like a coat, TV, or a book from WalMart.

You buy water and electricity too. They're all finite resources tied to community sources, overuse of which places strain on other users. It's a communal pool of shared access, not your private and dedicated infrastructure.

5) The electric company doesn't care how much I use. The more the merrier.

The more you use, the higher your rate plan goes. Exceeding the set baseline puts you into a higher per-kWh charge. You pay for the amount you use.

You think because you have an opinion as to what is correct and incorrect that it somehow gives you the moral high ground.

Morality doesn't enter into this. There's a finite resource, controlled by a private party. They are managing it to best serve their interests and those of 95%+ of their customers.

What's truly repugnant are people like you who fail to understand the limitations of a service and expect to do as you please without recognizing that YOUR INTERESTS are not the only ones that matter, and the trivial $30 a month you cough up doesn't buy you unilateral control and ownership of ANYTHING.

You're using too much and interfering with the use of other customers on a congested service. You can switch to a business account (they'll happily take your money, contrary to your little rant), or you can go somewhere else. You're willing to interfere with MY access by overusing your share, but you want to complain that Comcast, the OWNER of the service, wants to manage THEIR service more equitably for everyone? That's the bullshit, right there.

It is not as bad as you think...

[tgatliff (311583)]

I spoke with a comcast friend of mine who is at the executive level about two weeks ago on this... He said that the reason they do not want ot specify the exactly amount is that most of the time they do not care because they have plenty of throughput. Meaning, because their network is mostly shared (unlike the telcos) bottelnecks do occur from time to time. He saids that most of their subnets are fine (over 90% in fact), but occasionally they get a couple areas where he says they constantly have problems with getting their digital services to work well and they almost always find that it is because of huge amounts of p2p traffic. He also said that in an ideal world this would be handled at the network level, but that their p2p limiting ability does not work at this point for balancing balancing the traffic. He said he had no clue what routers they are using, though... He said that the worst part is that in some cases, if they upgrade their "uplink" (my word, not his) to fix the issue, it just means that more traffic, and the problem still is there. In short, the end result is that when they have allot of customers call in saying they are having problems with their service in a particular area, they first try to upgrade their "uplink", then if that does not work, they tell the particular customers to please stop it, and in the few cases where this does not work then they finally just pull the plug on the problematic customer. He mentioned that it rarely happens, though, which is why they are completely baffled internally on why the press is so against on them right now...

Re:It is not as bad as you think...

[kmahan (80459)]

Why are they baffled? They use the word "unlimited". To most people that means "without limit".

They like the sound of the word in their advertising. They just don't like to have to live up to that definition.

Re:It is not as bad as you think...

[westlake (615356)]

Why are they baffled? They use the word "unlimited". To most people that means "without limit". They like the sound of the word in their advertising. They just don't like to have to live up to that definition.

As much as the Geek would like to have it otherwise, "unlimited" residential broadband has never meant anything more than "always-on" access at a flat monthly rate.

As opposed to the $8-12 an hour you paid for dial-up in the Compuserve era.

Re:It is not as bad as you think...

[Seumas (6865)]

No, the press is against them right now, because instead of saying "sir, your usage of this service is impacting the experience of other paying subscribers on this node and we request that you reduce your usage to 250gb/mo", they are addressing the problem by saying "Sir, this is the Comcast Security Services department and we are calling to inform you that we are concerned with your monthly usage for last month, totalling XYZ gigabytes. This is negatively impacting people in your area and if you ever use too much again, we will terminate you for a year".

Notice that in the second situation -- which is the reality of what they do -- they don't offer any information on what "stop it" means. I actually had to deal with comcast on this a few months ago. I told the person on the phone that I definitely don't want to cause problems for anyone else on the service, so I would like to know how much I should reduce my usage by. How many gigabytes? What percentage of the previous month's usage? They wouldn't tell me. So I just got a vague "stop doing that". Gee, how fucking helpful.

And of course, they have no way to sell me additional services, either. If I use too much, I'd gladly buy a second account. If I'm willing to pay for two spots on the node, why not give them to me?! I thought they were a corporation that was all about the capitalist ideal and not the one-size-fits-all socialism style solution? What's appropriate for the elderly couple down the street may not be appropriate for my needs. That doesn't make me a bad person or a bad customer. It makes me someone looking for a service. And since my taxes and government help allow you to own a monopoly in this region -- this preventing competition for me to turn to so I can FIND those services that do fit me -- I feel there is some degree of obligation to expand those service options.

Re:It is not as bad as you think...

[pyrrhonist (701154)]

Yeah, you tell that to Switch and Apoc...

Not really clear enough

[Dark_Nova (27836)]

Here in Australia, we have had download quotas since the early days of broadband. This is necessary due to the extremely high costs associated with international data links here (there is a duopoly on submarine telecommunication cables linking Australia to the rest of the world, so prices are high).

While nobody in Australia really likes the download quotas, our ISPs at least spell out the limits in detail, and allow users to check their current usage in real-time. A variety of Internet plan options are available, so heavy users can opt to pay extra to have a higher download quota (e.g. see iiNet's plans [whirlpool.net.au] and Internode's plans [whirlpool.net.au]).

Comcast seem to be introducing quotas without really going all the way. I guess they view this as being more "gentle" than actually imposing hard limits, but I'd say that it's just more confusing. Users need to know what their quotas are and how much they have downloaded, otherwise, the whole system just seems arbitrary.

I can see how US ISPs might want to impose some usage limits on their customers. Data connectivity is cheap there, but it isn't free... and people are getting ever-faster home connections. However, if they are going to do this sort of thing, they need to spell out exactly what the limits are, and what the consequences are for going over those limits. Vague statements like "30,000 songs" don't really help anyone.

Limits and Sharing

[saterdaies (842986)]

Comcast should have put the limits in terms of GB, but I think we can understand the limits they have put down.

Songs are considered (by non /. people) to be around 4MB. It's what Apple uses as a benchmark as well as many others. It's a decent estimation. That puts Comcast's limit at 120GB per month. If you assume 2-3MP images of around 1MB a piece, the limit is around 250GB.

Those are limits that the vast majority of people will not come up against. If you downloaded Ubuntu every single day for a month, you would hit 21GB. If you downloaded a high res Xvid movie every day for a month (1.4GB a piece), you would hit 42GB.

Suffice it to say, the limit is high. It's high enough that for almost everyone, it doesn't matter that it exists.

Oh, for comparison's sake, you would have to fully load a T1 connection over a quarter of a month to hit the 120GB limit. You would have to be using more than half a T1 connection to hit the 250GB mark. Cable is a shared resource. If you need a dedicated resource, maybe a T1 is right for you. At some point, nothing is unlimited. We're lucky that the internet adapts so well to sharing that 99.9% of people can pay very little for a lot, but some people need dedicated resources.

FALSE ADVERTISING!!!

[Jane Q. Public (1010737)]

If Comcast advertises that its service delivers downloads "up to 12Mb/s" (which is exactly what they advertise here on TV), then they are advertising that they can deliver UP TO:

(12Mb / second) x (86,400 seconds / day) x (30 days / month)

= 12 x 86,400 x 30 Mb

= 31,104,000 Mb (that's megaBITS, so)

= 3,888,000 MB !!!

That is almost 4 terabytes worth of downloads.

Now, I am not saying that one should actually get as much as the theoretical maximum, but if Comcast is actually setting a limit that is substantially lower than that, then the simple fact is that they are guilty of fraud and false advertising.

Further, if there is not a FIXED limit based on recognizable standards that is included in the contract, then they open themselves to liability for suits based on discrimination and arbitrary enforcement of their policies. (If it can even be called a legal policy, not being contained in the contract, and blatantly contradicting what they advertise.)

I think they had better clear this up like right now, or they could be in trouble of their own making.

New terms coined?

[Jugalator (259273)]

OK, so you can only download 30 Kilosongs, 250 Kilopictures or 13 Megamails?

And I thought "Megapixels" were a salesman abomination. :-(

13 million emails? OK!

[discogravy (455376)]

All my emails include 10meg attachments, so at 13 million, I guess I have roughly a 124TB limit. (maybe my math is bad, I dunno -- I never learned "emails" as a unit of measure).

I think I can live with that.

The limit should be....

[Jawshie (919956)]

This is somewhat silly. When you buy bandwidth you, in my opinion, are buying however much bandwidth per second they are willing to give you. If you buy a 3Mbps connection, for example, you are purchasing 3 megabits of data per second. How much is that in a month of 30 days? Well a day has 86,400 seconds. A month has 2,592,000 seconds. So you are purchasing the right to 7,776,000 megabits in a 30 day month. About 7,593.75 gigabits a month(~950 GB I think...). The limit should be exactly what you pay for: your bandwidth limit per second. If there's a limit within a limit (think of a car commercial that offers a 30000 mile or 2 year, whichever happens first, warranty) then it should clearly be defined. Personally, I can not imagine myself using a terabyte a month but I do feel I am over the ambiguous limit set by Comcast.
If they have not accounted for the total bandwidth capacity of a shared cable line and broken it down correctly then the fault should rest with them and they should install some extra lines or not sell it in the first place unless they agree to the limiting terms. Whatever the actual bandwidth capacity of a cable line is (tv+phone+data), surely they can divide it evenly per household or do they need a physicist to tell them what 100/3 is? I refuse to purchase cable because of the line sharing. Not only is it fluctuating throughout the day but the security is questionable. I actually consider internet availability based on where I consider living.
On a side note, could they be including in their bandwidth limits the tv and phone information as well? Certainly a constant digital tv signal would eat up a considerable amount of bandwidth.

Sorry if my math is a bit off.

30,000 songs, huh? Good thing I download FLACs

[r_jensen11 (598210)]

Good thing I download flac's when I can rather than mp3's or ogg vorbis files. Looks like all you other guys are getting ripped off.

Now some people are claiming things like "Gee, that works out to x number of DVD's per month," are missing the crucial point. The quality* of the stuff we download constantly gets better. Years ago, it was incredibly rare to find any mp3's better than 128kb/s or video files that were above 320kb/s. These days, we're pushing HD-DVD iso's and Bluray iso's over the same infrastructures. Suddenly those 42 DVD's have shrunk down to around 7 HD-DVD discs. In addition, we're also trying to get proper streaming media formats in decent quality. How much streaming HD video do you think you could watch before your quota is filled up? Then tack on all of the data that you download whenever you use Google Earth or World Wind. If you live on your own and spend most of your day at work, then you're probably not terribly concerned about having "only" 180GB/mo. However, if you live in a house with more people and each person does their own thing, that number only shrinks. Suddenly, you only have a claim to 60GB/mo because your two roommates have used up their quotas. Good luck finding an average /. user that is able to get by with only 60GB/mo.

Check your math

[tepples (727027)]

30.000 songs at 5 MB per file is about 600 MB.

30,000 songs times 5,000,000 bytes per song = 150,000,000,000 bytes, or 150 GB.

250.000 pictures at 2.5 MB (assuming holiday shots) is about 625 MB

250,000 pictures times 2,500,000 bytes per picture = 625,000,000,000 bytes, or 625 GB. But I'm guessing that Comcast is using JPEG rather than TIFF/PNG/DNG for its calculations, and the limit is closer to 100 to 150 GB/mo.

Re:So filling a 160GB iPod in 1Month = BANNED

[gravos (912628)]

3MB per song $0.99 per song 53333 songs per 160GB iPod $52800 to fill 160GB iPod And your worried about your connection being cut off?