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Comcast Launches Broadband Meter
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jan 12, 2010 07:18 PM
from the cap-and-do-not-trade dept.
from the cap-and-do-not-trade dept.
nlawalker writes "Beginning on Tuesday, January 12, Comcast high-speed internet users in Washington state will have access to an online tool that displays their bandwidth usage for the most recent three calendar (not billing) months of usage, including the current month. Washington is the second market to receive access to the tool, following its introduction in Portland. 'For the fraction of less than 1 percent of our customers who are concerned about exceeding our excessive use threshold, we believe this meter will help them monitor and calibrate their usage,' said spokesman Steve Kipp. Perhaps those who aren't using 250GB a month should take it as a challenge."
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Honey... (Score:2, Insightful)
> Perhaps those who aren't using 250GB a month should take it as a challenge.
"Honey, I have been to that new page on Comcast site and I realized that we are using only 0.5 GB of bandwidth a month while we are paying for 250 GB, we need to find a way to make this more profitable, download more recipe books and travel agency pamphlets, I don't know, but we have to find some way. Maybe we should just forward emails with silly jokes or hoaxes to more friends..."
"Let's phone that nerdy guy we know to ask him
Metering the "unlimited"? (Score:2)
"Honey, I have been to that new page on Comcast site and I realized that we are using only 0.5 GB of bandwidth a month while we are paying for 250 GB, we need to find a way to make this more profitable, download more recipe books and travel agency pamphlets, I don't know, but we have to find some way.
Or just watch a few HQ videos, participate in some [legit] torrents, etc. We easily go far past 250GB per month on our fiber connection (which is uncapped, unthrottled, etc.). Of course, a couple of kids help to push the usage up, but I do enough by myself: last November, I uploaded more than 250GB of Ubuntu torrent. Downloads of various kinds pushed our throughput to well over double that.
Does Comcast still advertise it as an "unlimited" service?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No. I think they stopped calling it unlimited two or three years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
Hello AliasMarlowe, I was talking about yourself in my OP, I knew that you would come up with a solution very quickly, Many thanks !!! ;-))
> "Let's phone that nerdy guy we know to ask him what we can do about this..."
All You Can Eat (Score:3, Insightful)
Fine print is a common business practice, only because people are so unreasonable sometimes. I ran a restaurant where we had all you can eat specials, and we had to put a little fine print to say you couldn't stay longer than two hours, since the first weekend a couple of people stayed for nearly four hours, and then tried to refuse to leave.
Or just watch a few HQ videos, participate in some [legit] torrents, etc. We easily go far past 250GB per month on our fiber connection (which is uncapped, unthrottled, etc.)
250GB is more than eight days of Netflix movies streaming, or two months of non-stop standard def Youtube watching, or downloading 64,000 songs. If you're hitting the u
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm disappointed in all the geeks on this site misusing the term "bandwidth." Bandwidth is a measure of rate, not of volume.
I can understand a Comcast marketing droid calling it a "bandwidth meter" because it's a non-geek selling it to non-geeks. But we shouldn't use the word improperly just because some stupid people do.
Earning my karma today, that's for sure.
Someone's not doing their share! (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps those who aren't using 250GB a month should start sharing more porn! Darn leechers!
Re:Someone's not doing their share! (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps those who aren't using anywhere near 250GB a month should start paying less.
If the price is a flat $45 (or whatever) for unlimited use, that is fine. But if they can quantify usage and affix a more specific pricing scheme to it over and above 250GB of usage, then they can due the same but in reverse for usage under 250GB a month. But they won't. This isn't about fairness or network congestion, it is about making as much money as possible, nothing more.
Opinion of Comcast and Time Warner: "Some folks download a lot and will continue to do so, so let's wring every last penny from them!!! What are they gonna do, get some crappy DSL connection? Haha, let's see them get comparable download speeds. Some of them can't get DSL at all. Screw 'em, it isn't like we have competition. Oh, and we should probably raise TV rates again, just for the hell of it (but no reason to improve service). Thank you, local monopolies!"
Parent
Convenient (Score:2, Insightful)
"Here's a fake metric that has no meaningful relation to what we're going to bill you for."
On a side note pfsense keeps track of this for you, and I'm fairly certain the majority of those cheap shit Linksys or Dlink "routers" do as well. You can even match them to your billing cycle. Yay.
Re: (Score:2)
That won't help you all that much. Not all traffic contributes to your usage for the purposes of billing. For example, on Internode in Australia, downloading from Internode's software mirror archive or watching ABC streaming TV doesn't contribute to billed usage, so you'd need to do some funky configuration of your router to account for that.
or... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sure you will be really successful arguing that you are at 249gb when they show you at 251.
Comcast has always been know for their level-headed, even-handed approach to customer service.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's all about timing (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's all about timing (Score:4, Interesting)
Haha, I'm currently at Penn State. They just upped the bandwidth limit this year - we now get a whole 10GB :)
And yea, there are all kinds of ways to get around the system. I'm not sure about Comcast and how they're measuring it, but Penn State only measured bandwidth out of their network - and they also had a proxy run by 'Academic Services and Emerging Technology', so people always just use that. Since your traffic is only going to the proxy, which is on the PSU network, anything that goes through that proxy doesn't count against your limit. And then there's always the wireless network - they try to make it unavailable in the residence halls, but you can get it in a lot of them, and they don't count your bandwidth on the wireless network.
As a final thought: What I thought they meant when I read the article was that they were creating a physical broadband meter. That I would actually think would be a good idea. I mean if you're going to limit how much people can use, you should give them a simple way to measure it. And what's better than something similar to the water/gas/electric meter they're already used to? Of course it'd be inside near their computer, but if you're going to limit or charge for bandwidth, that's the only fair thing to do.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
10GB? I call that "Thursday afternoon with nothing to do."
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Haha, I know. But last year it was 4GB. Now _that_ was painful.
Re: (Score:2)
I remember back when I was on another ADSL provider that had pretty strict limits (10 GB a month a few years ago), me and some friends that were on the same provider would push that limit as far as we could. They had a traffic meter that reset at midnight on the first of the month, and if you went over 10 GB (up+down) you were set back to below dialup speeds. The good part was they could only change your speed when you weren't connected, and you could stay online for 36 hours before your connection was brok
Re: (Score:2)
I would anticipate this will only encourage similar behavior.
I expect a similar ultimate result - more bandwidth usage - but for a different reason. People don't have to worry about going over the limit without realizing it - they no longer have to keep any sort of margin of error. They're free to use every last drop of service they're paying for without worry of accidentally going over and getting punished.
I've had, uhh, "husky" friends who went on diet and exercise regiments that worked quite well *before* they started counting calories and setting hard limits
Sounds about right. (Score:4, Informative)
Basically, they're saying for 5% of the price of a T1 you get 5% the capacity over a month.
So, continuing on about the tenth year in a row, I continue find it very hard to give a shit.
it's not enough (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I agree, they should break it down into broad categories
Email
Instant Messaging clients
Linux ISOs
Pron
Lolcats
WoW
Other
Re: (Score:2)
If ISPs tried to "itemize" your bandwidth people would complain about privacy.
Re: (Score:2)
Except that it's not so easy to summarize like that.
Also, no one I know needs an eye-opener like that.
Sorry, Comcast, but it's not enough (Score:3, Insightful)
This is just Comcast trying to legitimize their practice cutting off users who exceed their data transfer cap.
I suppose it's better than not being told how close you are to having your service suspended for a year, but I'd prefer it if their service were clearly advertised as metered service and had reasonable fees for overages instead of suspending users' accounts.
What I've learned.. (Score:2, Interesting)
So what? (Score:3, Informative)
For all this handwringing, I've never seen this feature on my Comcast account. Yes, I live in Portland.
Maybe it's because I pay for the higher tier?
Good for them, but... (Score:2)
Exactly. (Score:2)
I'm on Comcast. Tomato reports the following usage:
2009-12 105.87 GB
2009-11 546.60 GB
2009-10 299.63 GB
2009-09 248.94 GB
2009-08 222.14 GB
2009-07 76.76 GB
FWIW, I've yet to hear a peep from Comcast about the months that exceed 250 GB.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
They won't bother you unless they're having performance problems on that node, and even then they only bother the top n% (not sure what n is) which is not necessarily 250GB.
250GB is just the floor for "we won't bother anyone under this amount".
Trust me, Comcast doesn't WANT to lose customers, and won't get rid of you unless you're causing real, actual problems. They may be greedy at times but they're not entirely stupid. $40 a month is better than $0.
Not using all 250? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now users can band together and sell off their "quota credits" to each other the way corporations do with carbon credits.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
WOW... (Score:3, Insightful)
Less than 1% use that bandwidth and it affects their network, isn't that absurd? Isn't that an indication of a terrible network? I honestly don't know the answers to these questions, but if you can't support 1% of your users at that level then IMO you have a crap network.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope someone at Comcast finds your post and offers you a job, you sound like the network architect they've been waiting for!
Re: (Score:2)
lulz...yeah well I honestly don't know but it seems really bad to me.
Emphasis on very few people (Score:2)
For the fraction of less than 1 percent of our customers who are concerned...
For the very extremely low and small fraction of far less than 1 percent, seriously there are like so few of you that I can't believe I'm issuing a press release, I mean I could just walk around to the insanely lonely few of you who are concerned about this thing... I'm sorry, I just want to emphasize how little this policy affects anyone besides like a small handfull of our customers. Because so few of you will be affected by this trivial little thing. Seriously, there aren't many of you. Lets not make
Freakonomics (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps those who aren't using 250GB a month should take it as a challenge.
You're not kidding. There's a story in Freakonomics about a daycare center that had problems with people not picking their kids up on time. So they figured they would charge a fee; penalize people for leaving their kids and they'll stop, right? Instead, more people started showing up late. Turns out that paying a fee assuaged peoples guilt for not showing up on time. Before they felt like jerks for being late, now they could just pay a fee and feel better. Moral of the story, incentives don't always work the way you think they will.
So when you give people this new information, what's going to happen? 90% of people are not using that much bandwidth already. Comcast is giving them a chart that says "look how little bandwidth you're using, you could use a lot more and not get in trouble". Some of those people are going to start using more bandwith, and I'll bet those people will more than offset the minority of heavy users who might curtail their usage.
The real solution to this problem is for Comcast, and every other ISP to invest more into infrastructure.
Step 2 solved at last! (Score:2)
2. Charge parents a late fee. Even more parents arrive late.
3. PROFIT!!!!!!!!!!
Dear US, (Score:3, Insightful)
If the metre is half way decent this will be a valuable tool in tracking and assessing your own download habits, but given the level of competence displayed by US telco's something tells me this wont be the case.
Re: (Score:2)
Whenever I go to view mine it always comes up to 0.
Which either means that the system doesn't work, or my computer can majestically use the internet without any bandwidth cost at all.
Either way - if they complain that I go over, I'll just take my printscreen and be like "NO I'M NOT. LOOK!"
Re: (Score:2)
Which either means that the system doesn't work, or my computer can majestically use the internet without any bandwidth cost at all.
Probably the latter, because come on.
Re:Old... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Transpacific bandwidth (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Monopoly rents (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
i dont see why Comcast has taken so long to give its users access to a monitoring tool.
Because they didn't have a cap before. With no limit, knowing how much you've used has limited utility.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
On the Technical side, this isn't any major feat. You're correct.
However, this is a tool that they'll start using to socially condition people into tiered plans. Imagine an ad from comcast in the near future, "Be Green! Lower your monthly usage! To find out how, check our Tips and Tricks section, and track your online usage using our 'IntelliGreen Online Usage Tracker'*"
*use of the IntelliGreen Online Usage Tracker will count toward your monthly usage cap at 1/2 the byte rate because it's Green!
Re: (Score:2)
Back to T1s, DS1s, and unbridled fun.
Maybe NBC downloads are exempt.
Re: (Score:2)
that's my personal favorite these sights not only use tons of ads, javascript, and images so they come in at a couple of megabytes to down load, they are often on the companies servers in a mass pool in another state.
the next thing they like to say is that emails are small. I guess they don't get spam which contains images (which if you download to your local email program gets charged to your account. I guess they don't get up mouse over ads that are a half a meg in size.
the web of 1999 is what comcast i