Comcast Cuts Off Users Who Exceed Secret Limit 574
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.
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.
Dupe (Score:2, Informative)
I think they should specify what those limits are, but lots of limits in life are not strictly specified, basically be reasonable. speed limits might have a specified limit, however everyone goes at a speed of whats reasonable and ignores the hard limit.
this is a dupe because it is now known comcast does this. it isnt news, it isnt shocking, it is well known, it is stupid but it isnt gonna change.
they should just specify somethign in their agreement and be done with it, "250 gig transfer per month"
no one really gives a shit if its called "unlimited" anyways, all they care about is how fast it is.
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
Re:Sounds like a breach of contract (Score:2, Informative)
Nut-shell: Unless you opt out, you are bound to arbitration only by their 2007 Residential Agreement. There are restrictions and exceptions, but you have to overcome them before you can consider legal recourse.
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.
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).
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)
Re:+/- 5 or whatever is not a secret limit. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:_Only_ 100 GB?? (Score:2, Informative)
Add streaming videos, downloadable videos (vongo, anyone?), streaming music services (Rhapsody?), VPN connections, surfing, downloading any other stuff like games, linux, porn, etc. Add online gaming from your systems or consoles. And that's just one person. What if you have two people in the household? Or a family of four or five?
Just because you only use your car to drive to church on Sundays doesn't mean the rest of us don't drive to work, the gym, vacations, joy-rides and the store.
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".
Re:13. BINDING ARBITRATION (Score:2, Informative)
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/19/2
Yeah, there it is. So the hard part of setting a precident has already been done, though someone still has to jump through the hoops of challenging comcast's version.
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.
Re:Not that bad... (Score:1, Informative)
if 100 is the product which they're selling, then so what? Bandwidth available isn't a "mystery prize".
"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."
You mean, competition?
Re:Serious useage (Score:3, Informative)
FYI a T1 is something like 1.544mbps. 1544/8 = 193kBps.
I regularly sustain 1200kBps on my cable connection when downloading, and even average cable speeds are 600kBps (~5mbps) or better. So, whether you realize it or not, you're going to notice a significant reduction in browsing and casual download speeds.
T1s used to be the "rave" because of their increased reliability, and significantly lower latency than traditional consumer options. Today, though, not so much. I haven't experienced an outage from my cable ISP (Cox) in about a year, and my latency to my colocated box in LA (35 miles, 4 networks of peering away) is 15-25ms on average.
In regards to your comments about service availability: T1s are sensitive to distance just like DSL is, perhaps not to the same degree. I'm not sure of the specific ranges, but suffice to say you cannot get a properly performing T1 50,000 feet from your CO (the servicing Telco's "Central Office").
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".
Re:Dupe (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:I know the limit! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:If it really is 300GB (Score:3, Informative)
Re:+/- 5 or whatever is not a secret limit. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I know the limit! (Score:3, Informative)
You are not allowed to watch porn with Comcast.... (Score:2, Informative)
Prohibited Uses and Activities
Prohibited uses include, but are not limited to, using the Service, Customer Equipment, or the Comcast Equipment to:,
ii. post, store, send, transmit, or disseminate any information or material which a reasonable person could deem to be objectionable, offensive, indecent, pornographic, harassing, threatening, embarrassing, distressing, vulgar, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive, or otherwise inappropriate, regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful;
------
So what are most people with Comcast real doing, if not looking at pornographic material...
Re:In Belgium, they all cap. (Score:2, Informative)
Probably several factors at work here (Score:2, Informative)
1) It informs their competitors
2) It may not be a hard cap but may be looking at the top 1% of users month to month and seeing if they're consistently high, or just spiked.
3) They could be looking neighborhood by neighborhood, explaining why one poster lost his net and a little while later so did his neighbor. The neighbor was probably close to being in the top 1% and then was when the first person lost their connection.
4) I could see them wanting to limit illegal downloads because of past cases seeking to sue the carriers for illegal data being sent on their network. The largest downloaders are most likely (though not necessairly) transmitting/downloading illegal content.
5) There are several people who posted that they are running their business, or are logged into their business 24/7, and that's not what residential accounts are for. I do use my residential account for work once in a great while, and for less bandwidth than downloading a TV program for iTunes, but if you're VPNed in constantly and transferring large files for work, your employer should be getting you a business account.
6) The other issue I haven't seen mentioned is that really large use could be an indicator to Comcast that multiple people are sharing a connection. With wireless routers and bridges it is possible for multiple appartments/condos/and even some single family dwelling users to share a connection (I get my neighbors unencrypted router at full strength and full speed). I don't know if Comcast would have a better method than 'huge overages' to be able to tell that this is the case. It truly wouldn't be fair if a bunch of my neighbors were splitting one connection and degrading the quailty of my service with only me using it.
7) This could also be a sign that someone's router is hijacked and performing illegal activities without the owner's consent. Sadly, they should be helping the user fix it, but most people at the helpdesk at multiple cable proviers indicate a low level of technical expertise.
8) It's been a while since I checked but I think the agreement says you won't run servers off the residential line. They might be assuming that the large useage is resulting from something like that.
Since joining the corporate world I usually find that strange and illogical policies like, "Unlimited usage within reason" are the result of some kind of assumptions being made that don't translage well into policy. It could be as simple as a consultant saying, "A 300 GB/month user HAS to be hosting an illegal HD-DVD sharing site and you could get sued by Hollywood for not doing something about it," or, "Those limits are being hit by multiple units sharing a single connection and costing you money while degrading their neighbors service."
They should just work with the customer rather than, I suspect, assuming you're a criminal and cutting the service. "Cut down the usage," is probably corporate relations way of saying, "We know what you're REALLY doing, now knock it off." Clearly if you stop illegal file sharing your usage would snap in line with the 'average' user.
As proof of the corporate simple thinking I offer this personal experience: I once lost my cable the day after a windstorm. Calling the company I was told, "We're showing an outage in your area." Ok, windstorm was bad and a temporary loss is ok in cases like that. Days and then weeks go by and they keep telling me, "We're showing an outage in your neighborhood. I then find my neighbors (in a condo complex) are connected. Apparently "area" is your box in your house only. I realized that my neighbor across the hall moved away without telling anyone. Several phone calls later I convinced them to come make sure they hadn't disconnected my cable when disconnecting the neighbors cable. "Sir, that doesn't happen, but we'll come check but if that's not the case you're paying for the visit." Sure enough, wrong switch, and they reimbursed my lost time.
Measure Your Usage Yourself (Score:1, Informative)