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]

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

[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

[ScrewMaster]

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.

Songs/Emails vs Kbytes/MBytes

[stratjakt]

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.

lets do the math!

[Gabest]

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:The obvious units

[AnonymousDivinity]

No, no. It's Libraries of Congress per fortnight. Actually I would have preferred the cap to be in much more understandable units like Volkswagon Beetles Full of Backup Tapes.

I mean everyone's seen a VW Beetle, but the Library of Congress? Does anyone even go there?

Do the math

[Spazmania]

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:Useless?

[Anonymous Coward]

why doesn't Comcast just provide an exact limit?
I want to know so I can use up 99% of my quota.

I think you just answered your own question.

Classical music?

[techmuse]

So I listen to a lot of classical music, which I encode at a high bit rate. One "song" can be 30 or 40 minutes and 50 or 60 MB or more. Do I get more bandwidth than someone who listens to pop?

The typical size of a picture on my computer is probably around 1600x1200. Do I get more bandwidth than someone with smaller pictures?

My e-mails are usually pretty small, unless someone sends me a large attachment. Which of my e-mails are we using as the e-mail unit?

Limits and Sharing

[saterdaies]

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]

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.

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

[pokerdad]

All this does is create uncertainty among their customers,

Perhaps it is just that they assumed that most of their customers would think that expressing it in GB is too technical.

Better yet, it could be that the actual value, expressed in GB, was passed on to their PR department who looked at it and said "what the hell does that mean?" Some tech gave the PR department some examples of how much data might be contained in the stated value, and the PR department released the examples (because it made sense to them) rather than the GB.

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

[kmahan]

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.

I suspect there is also another determinant

[rolfwind]

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).

It is not as upgradable as you think...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wanted to snip this portion.

"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."

So to all the people talking about "upgrade the network/don't oversubscribe"! That only temporarily solves the problem because like a gas, abusers consume all available bandwidth, and will continue to do so no matter how much they upgrade. Better to nip it in the bud than get on an neverending treadmill.

"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..."

It's not the press. It's just the squeaky wheel gets the most attention, even if it doesn't deserve it.

Re:lets do the math!

[muindaur]

I don't think there are games downloading anwhere close to 30,000 3MB if the top post is correct. Most games have a small soundtrack and the various sound files are much smaller than 3MB in size. I took a look in my DAOC sound directory as an example and the files in there were about 400 Megs of sound Spread out over 3000 files. Now if your playing 30 games, the number and size of sound files between games varies greatly, you might go over that limit. Honestly, if you do, then you need to get a life because that is too many games.

If you are downloading games that might be a few more than 9 games over a month. Considering both you won't realistically download that much if quality games realeased per month and the average amount of files updated per month in patches. I think it's very rare for a developer to patch or update the entire sound set at one time(such as expansions for older, active MMO'S like DAOC and maybe Everquest.

The only time I came close to the COX 60GB cap in a month was when I decided I wanted to DL a bunch of fansubs and in about a week had more than 30GB of Anime on my hard drive: 13-70 Episodes per series.

Grow up!

[superdude72]

Obviously they aren't going to set a hard limit. If they say everyone can download 90GB a month and everyone does that, their network will screech to a halt. But if they limit everyone to 1GB a month that's even more unreasonable, since the network has the capacity for the small percentage of customers who want to use more than that to use more if they like. The amount is bound to fluctuate. In the days when Napster was the biggest consumer of bandwith, the limit was probably higher. But now, more people want to download 8GB dvds so there is less bandwith to go around and the limit has to change. Jesus Christ, on a site as IT-oriented as Slashdot I would think people would understand that.

They shouldn't just terminate accounts without warning, though. I'm not defending the customer service of Comcast. We really need to upgrade infrastructure so that everyone can stream hdtv to their homes 24/7 without it causing a problem. And actually I don't think any of the current ISPs in the US are going to do that without government taking the lead. So, boo hoo. If you want a large amount of guaranteed bandwith you'll have to pay for it.

More to the point...

[Kythe]

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 give the exact byte downloadli

[Kythe]

I've heard this canard trotted out by Comcast and its apologists time and again. In my opinion, it's silly -- if people aren't using high-bandwidth applications when they believe the service is unlimited, why would they suddenly discover an interest in doing so when they know there's a limit?

Comcast has never provided any evidence for this excuse, and I suspect they never will.

Re:They still don't scare the abusers.

[Enlightenment]

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:I suspect there is also another determinant

[TubeSteak]

If they had a hard limit, they would be kicking off profitable customers in more rural areas

What? Maybe you mispoke.
Profitable customers = customers who use as little bandwidth as possible
Why would they "be kicking off" those customers?

and keeping perhaps unprofitable customers in high load areas (due them "hogging" bandwidth and chasing other customers off due to a poor experience).

It seems to me that you're somehow arguing that if people use all the way up to a fictitious hard limit, they're unprofitable, but can't be kicked off. If they're unprofitable... change the limit.

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

[Ucklak]

I'm sure location also plays a factor as to why that limit isn't published.

Cox's network has 12M in some areas (mine) and 3M to 7M in others with regards to speed.

If they publish 90Gig as a limit, it may tax a 3M network if 40% of users were utilizing 90% of it versus 90Gig not being as much of a burden on a pipe 4 times larger.

Re:Well think about it....

[Propaganda13]

I disagree. If the government set vague speed limits like this, the police could give you tickets when ever they felt like it. Google and Hotmail give you a ton of storage for emails. I'm under 1% of their set limits.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

If the PR department at an ISP doesn't know what a gigabyte is, the ISP needs a new PR department.

Re:lets do the math!

[nmb3000]

30000*songs = 250000*pictures = 13000000*emails 1 song = 3MB => 1 picure = 360KB => 1 email = 6.92KB Seems right

True, but by not giving hard numbers they leave the door open for people to make wild assumptions.

For example, I store all my music as uncompressed PCM WAVs with an average weight of 50MB. My images are all high-resolution JPEGs with sizes around 6MB (this is actually very realistic). My email is all formatted as HTML composed using Microsoft Word with average message size being 118KB (ha - also very realistic).

This gives you a total of about 1.4 TB and the ratios all equal out the same as when using a 3MB song as your base unit.

In the end it doesn't matter because Comcast just likes to be able to pick whoever they want and cut them off at the knees. It might even be different for somebody living in a very saturated area for someone who is more rural.

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

[ucblockhead]

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:I suspect there is also another determinant

[rolfwind]

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.

The limit should be....

[Jawshie]

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.

Re:So so so wrong.

[mr_matticus]

.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.

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

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"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

[erroneus]

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 scare the abusers.

[ScrewMaster]

and locking out the (admittedly) small number of users using 95% of their network.

Is that really true, though? If current statistics which claim that Bit Torrent alone accounts for a third or more of Internet traffic are to be believed, I suspect the number of customers that are "abusing" the network is probably a lot more than Comcast wants to admit. They're paying the price for their own success: they're huge, they have a lot of customers ... and those people are expecting more than Comcast wants to deliver. Well, I'm not singling Comcast out in that regard: all the ISPs would just love it if people would keep paying fifty bucks a month for email and some light browsing, with maybe a few dozen iTunes thrown in.

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

[watchingeyes]

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:Well think about it....

[mr_matticus]

Equivalent of 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures or 13 million emails in a month" is not a defined limit. It's like saying the speed limit is 55 wargs per hour.

By "the same approach" I was referring to the enforcement, not the limit. Enforcement is arbitrary. The users who would be approached about violating the limits are not unsuspecting grandmothers, which is all Comcast needed to clarify. No typical family is anywhere near this volume of usage. It's the same effect as the wife saying you can only golf 25 days a month--unless you're seriously committed to golf and have no job, you're not going to get in much trouble. The people who feel that 25 days a month is a restriction at all already know who they are.

So? Each franchise is able to set their limits

This discussion is about a corporate line, which they are declining to create. To my knowledge, the franchises all use the corporate terms, which can't state a limit because of that local variability. If you're suggesting that there should be an addendum, that's an option, but I think an unnecessary one.

The limit isn't only geographic, but time-based. Not setting a limit is the most generous to customers, since personal "overuse" in a relatively low-demand period is much more tolerable than consistently high usage at peak hours. It's a judgment call and requires a certain amount of trust in Comcast (ha! I know) but I doubt anyone being shut down wouldn't reasonably know that they're using a tremendous amount of bandwidth.

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

[watchingeyes]

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:Dude, your electric company is ripping u off

[mr_matticus]

It's called "High Usage Saver". You might call and ask.

Absolutely. You can move around in classifications to achieve the best deal for you personally, but in each category you have a usage baseline, and within any single rate schedule, the rates will ratchet upwards incrementally based on your baseline usage. For example, your use of midday power will be a certain number. If you dramatically spike upward one month (and you don't have a YOY/balancing plan), you'll pay the same rate as always for the baseline usage, and pay a higher rate for your "excess" usage in that same schedule.

You might have, as part of your plan to get the best possible rates for your home, a rate schedule which uses an artificially sustained rate to minimize major swings in bills.

But it is ironic about more usage costing less. My dad used to manage a smelting operation, and the electricity costs were a fraction of residential rates simply because they used so much.

Absolutely. Residential rates are substantially higher than commercial rates. Same goes with business costs--their price per byte is rock-bottom. But that's offset by the fact that their bills are several orders of magnitude higher. If you could supply that much business, you too could have those low rates. But that confuses vertical rates (what we're talking about here) and horizontal schedules (different classes of service).

So they seem to be okay with most people using a lot more.

Sure. Their concerns about bandwidth vary from location to location based on a huge number of factors, which is why they resist setting any concrete figure. They'll be more tolerant of "overuse" in places with low demand and when it occurs during off-peak hours than if you were consistently saturating a connection during peak hours on an oversold pipe with a large number of customers. That's why they decline to state when they start to "care" about how much you're using--because it's a complex matter sensitive to time, geography, and local market conditions.

Your 600GB isn't a problem in your area. In my area, my 200GB could be a problem. It's fundamentally unfair and also inevitable, so it's a lose-lose situation for Comcast to say anything about it. Laying new cable is the obvious solution, but also a poor business decision--copper coax isn't very futureproof. The cable companies have the misfortunate of undertaking a massive infrastructure rollout that missed the PC/Internet bandwagon by just a few years. They had no idea how critical bandwidth to the home would be, and they're running into the same wall that the phone companies did--an expensive and limited infrastructure. Cable smashed dialup/ISDN/DSL--and they're about to be smashed by FiOS and others. Until those technologies are widespread and cheap, we have to work around the limits of cable.

They lady said I shouldn't bother unless there is an issue.

An issue like being told you're going to be disconnected :). Seriously, there's a separate calculus for business use that involves a greater bandwidth expectation, so it helps with the load balancing for you to be considered a "small business" in that instance, and it means you won't get a shutdown notice as quickly. The lady on the phone was probably trying to save you money, since, as you say, your usage is not problematic.

Also

[Sycraft-fu]

They don't want to give a specific limit because some people are habitual line steppers. I've discovered this with administering forums. You try and think up a set of hard and fast rules governing what is and isn't ok and write them down. Then you get a group of people who continually try to do as much as they can to be problems within those rules. They dance right up to the line and bitch if you come down on them. It's a situation of "Obedience to the letter (sort of) not the spirit." As such it works much better to have the rules more simple and open ended. Basically "Don't be a dick." Though they may pretend they don't know what you mean, they do and it works.

Same deal here. You put a number on it people will cause problem with it. They'll try to max that out every month, if they get cut off they'll say "But my traffic monitor showed I did only 199.999GB, you said the limit was 200GB that's not fair!" It'll be continuous problem with people who want to stretch the rules as much as they can.

Also, I imagine they care more about the impact the traffic has than the traffic itself. If you are on a segment with only a few subscribers, and you do all your heavy transactions at 3am when nobody else is using it, chances are they don't give a shit, even if you use a lot of bandwidth as it is just sitting unused. However if you are grabbing as much as you can via P2P (which due to the large number of connection hogs more than some other kinds of traffic) during peak hours every single day, they may get annoyed as you make things worse for everyone else.

I don't know anyone here who's been cut off (we have Cox not Comcast) but I do know people who have been throttled and/or yelled at. In EVERY case it was a person who loaded up the torrents or eMule and let them run 24/7 at full blast. Gee, wonder why the ISP might get a little annoyed with that. I have thus far yet to meet someone in person who was cut off or otherwise censured for anything except extreme amounts of P2P.

Re:The limit should be....

[DavidD_CA]

I dont know about your math, but your reality is what is wrong. If I understand you correctly, it sounds like you expect your ISP to reserve 100% of your total capacity just in case you intend to use it. And not just yours, but every customer they have. You're essentially saying, "If they have 500 customers with 1MB connections, they should have a 500 MB connection."

The problem is that your proposed service would be so exceedingly expensive that you, nor anyone else, would want to buy it. Actually, that service does exist. Some businesses buy QoS lines with throughput guarantees and no bandwidth limitations. They also exist in fractions, too. For example, you might buy a 1.54 MB line for $300/mo with a 25% throughput guarantee. Meaning the line can go as fast as 1.54, it will never drop below 384k, and you're allowed to peg it at 384k for 24/7 without penalty.

Since Slashdot loves analogies, here's one based on your logic: A restaurant that offers "free refills" should stock enough soda to quench the thirst of all its customers, even if the customers decide to stay there from opening until closing, drink non-stop, with their mouth directly under the spout. And sell it for $0.99.

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

[ASkGNet]

I agree wholeheartedly. As a non-US person who is always hearing about the litigiousness of US citizens, how has this not happened yet?!?!?

The ISPs claim that the term "Unlimited" is described as meaning "Unlimited right of access", "always-on", "available 24/7"; as opposed to offers which limit the amount of hours you can be online.

4% of what you pay for - not counting upload

[pQueue]

At 8 megabits per second you could download over 2.5 terabytes per month. 100Gb is only 4% of the bandwidth your actually paying for with Comcast.

When they cut me off they also claimed it was a summation of upload and download, so in reality you get even less of what your paying for. AT&T never gave me problems so I switched back. DSL has about 10% lower latency in my area also.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you never heard of the modern age of video downloads that use a whole lot more bandwidth than an mp3 that an average user can literally just point their web browser to and end up zapping a whole lot more bandwidth than that and hit the said limit after watching a bunch of those videos from *normal* usage.

Also-experience.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well apparently it's Mr Matticus and you who get it. Amazing what experience does to a subject under discussion. The majority here are basically arguing, My rights!, My rights! were there are none, and ignoring the other side of the issue. Two posts for the bookmark file.

"They don't want to give a specific limit because some people are habitual line steppers. I've discovered this with administering forums. You try and think up a set of hard and fast rules governing what is and isn't ok and write them down. Then you get a group of people who continually try to do as much as they can to be problems within those rules. They dance right up to the line and bitch if you come down on them. It's a situation of "Obedience to the letter (sort of) not the spirit." As such it works much better to have the rules more simple and open ended. Basically "Don't be a dick." Though they may pretend they don't know what you mean, they do and it works."

Read this [amazon.com] book, and marvel at how flexible people are when it comes to "what they want".

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

[Shakrai]

The reason they don't publish the actual limit is that they are smart and they understand game theory. If they publish a limit, abusive users will carefully monitor bandwidth and go right up to the limit, and then switch accounts. It's standard practice not to publish exact limits when you don't want to be "gamed". You can hate Comcast, that's fine, but give credit where credit is due. They are smart a-holes.

So, following your theory, T-Mobile and Verizon can stop telling people exactly how many peak minutes they are getting with their plan, because "abusive users" will carefully monitor their usage and go right up to the limit and then stop using it for the month, thus denying them the overage? They should just sell it as "unlimited" and cut people off who in their minds talk on the phone too much, right?

You say "abusive users", I say "maximizing the value of the service that I'm paying for".

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

[a_nonamiss]

The reason they don't publish a number, is that it would develop into an expensive arms race between competitors. Let's say you have two fictional companies. We'll call them Comm Warner and Timecast. Right now, neither publish a number, so either can start cutting people off at "around" 100GB/mo. They have a gentlemen's agreement not to publish any numbers, so both companies benefit from the ambiguity, and the only customers that they piss off are the top 0.01% of users. Keep in mind that only 0.01% (just a made up number, but let's agree that it's a very small number.) of customers even see this monthly limit. Now, for marketing reasons, let's say that Comm Warner decides to break the informal agreement and publish that their d/l limit is 100GB a month. Until now, both companies have just tacitly kicked people when they neared this limit, but now one of them is actually publishing a number. Users of Comm Warner are now entitled to 100GB a month. Timecast sees this as an opportunity to pick up new customers, so they start advertising a 150GB/mo service. By and large, American consumers are stupid. (Not trying to knock Americans, because I am one, but US consumers will swallow 99% of the BS that marketing departments shove down their throats.) They see 100 and 150, and obviously 150 is better than 100, so they switch. So Comm Warner starts offering a 200GB/mo. service. Never mind that most users never hit this ceiling. Now repeat this process until both companies are publishing that their service is unlimited. Now, they are obligated under truth in advertising laws to have a truly unlimited service. Neither company has gained any significant number of users, but both have lost the ability to kick "annoying" users that download a lot of stuff.

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

[Chrisje]

I'm well aware of the different formats, that's why I mentioned a size and the fact that it got somehow ripped from DVD. :-D Obviously, there will be formats that will demand more space/bandwidth. I don't assume these are the formats that are currently most downloaded.

Go to any torrent tracker or p2p search engine, go to iTunes, e-music right now, and you'll see that 99.9% of content is Mp3 (or equivalent loss-based compression schemes), Xvid, streams or things like it. As you know, any business model takes time to adapt to shifts in technology. Just because Warner decides to make Die Hard 4 a Hi-def 20 GB movie, that don't mean your ISP is going to have triple the fibre infrastructure running along the railroad track the next morning.

If you had told yourself 5 years ago you could get 24 mbit down, 2-5 mbit up (or like I had in Sweden, 100 up/down) for 80 dollars a month with a 100 GB cap, you would have invited half the block for a party out of sheer joy. Now all of a sudden, the ISP's are the bad guys because their infrastructure has limits?

And the funny thing is that we're talking movies, music and such. Back in the day when you had no other options but to actually purchase an LP, the amount of people that had a 50000 song library could be counted on one hand in any given population. Now that it's potentially "free" as in "gratis" or low-cost, all of a sudden everyone wants everything for as little money as possible.

I am a good example. I buy CD's if I like the music. I have a collection of 1100 CD's, most of which are actually purchased. When I went on-line with a P2P client, however, I downloaded 24 different versions of Mr Bojangles just because I could. They are now gathering dust in some corner of a 250 GB HDD I have mounted.

Which in turns makes me say that we're devolving into spoilt children.

Given the amount of time it took for every household to have a VCR, a Dolby Set, a DVD and such things (they still don't), my guess is that it will take quite a while before everyone on the planet (haha.. solve aids and food first) will have a 42" plasma on their wall (or have a wall, even) sitting on top of a Hi-Def DVD player.

In the mean time the early adopters and fans of geekery are asking companies to make billion dollar investments to cater to the need of a niche of the market. In simple terms of dollars and cents, it simply don't make sense. There is a reason why McDonalds and Coke are a bit more ubiquitous than bottles of Bolly seventy-two or Beluga caviar, you know.

TANSTAAFL. Remember that phrase. And shut up about "coulda, woulda, shoulda".

Re:Show Me

[Slashdot Parent]

So, while they may no longer advertise it as unlimited, IMO they still should be required to say that there is a download limit and what it is.

Oh, yes. I definitely agree. And furthermore, it really hacks me off when a restaurant advertises an all you can eat buffet, and they don't write on the ad that you can't bring 10 gallons worth of tupperware to fill up from the buffet line and bring home. It's so embarrassing when I show up and start filling my containers that they have the gall to kick me out. I mean, the ad clearly said "all you can eat", but they never specified a time period in which I had to eat the food.

I guess in life there are very few things that are truly unlimited.

All sarcasm aside, I think that if you look at it from Comcast's perspective, you'll see that they are not trying to be obtuse here, they are trying to be arbitrary. Because cable modem connections are shared loops, they have problems with heavy users, but only on their busy loops.

The way that Comcast wants to operate, is when they get 30 calls from your neighbors about problems with their digital services, they just want to cut your ass off. After all, you're only worth $30/month to them vs. all of your neighbors. On the other hand, if they set a hard limit, they'll have to actually enforce it, even on non-congested loops.

If they specify a number (for the sake of explanation, let's say 200GB/mo), this leads to two undesirable situations:

1. If you use 201GB, they have to cut you off, even if your usage isn't causing any problems. This is bad for revenue and bad publicity.
   
2. If you are causing congestion, and you only use 199GB, there is nothing Comcast can do about it

This is why Comcast doesn't want to commit to a number. While is stinks if you are a Comcast customer to not have any guidance on what constitutes acceptable usage, from Comcast's perspective, they'd rather maintain their ability to enforce their TOS arbitrarily.