Comcast Floats a 250GB Monthly Bandwidth Limit 578
techmuse writes "Comcast is considering the imposition of bandwidth caps and reductions in network bandwidth to customers who, while paying for the use of a certain amount of bandwidth, dare to actually use it! Gizmodo has more on the subject." Reader Acererak points out that it would take some pretty heavy usage (by current standards) to hit the cap described. Bear in mind, too, that these reports are based on the word of an unnamed "insider," rather than an officially announced policy.
Comcast has a monopoly in many markets (Score:5, Informative)
Could be worse (Score:5, Informative)
Although most do have limits higher than that, they're rarely more than about 30Gb a month, if even that.
The few that have no caps (like Virgin) tend to throttle the fuck out of your bandwidth at peak times.
It's all a joke, really. Luckily I live near an exchange with some decent ISP's that don't have monthly caps, but it's only a matter of time I suppose.
Re:250 GBs? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:5, Informative)
250GB ~= 800Kbit every second of every day for 31 days.
Some people need to step away from the computer and drop this knee jerking insanity.
Thats 8 GB a DAY people, or 800 kbps 24/7! (Score:3, Informative)
8 GB a day is a crapload of data.
In fact, thats 800 kbps SUSTAINED USAGE, 24/7!
Anyone shifting that much data is probably violating a huge number of TOS clauses anyway.
Outliers & Liars (Score:5, Informative)
It kind of confuses me though. We're already capped on our upload/download rates and since we pay them like a service we should pay them based on the rate of that service. Garbage, Cable TV and Water are rates I pay monthly that never change. Power is different but Cable TV is pretty much equivalent to cable internet
Comcast lies anyway. I don't trust them any further than I can throw their entire infrastructure. We paid a premium on bandwidth for 3 months and were supposed to be getting 15 Mbps download speed (as opposed to the standard which is 5 Mbps). After several problems with lag between me and my three other roommates, we started doing periodic tests. Averaged around 1.2 Mbps download daily. So we called them and they told us our signal strength sucked. So fix it. Oh, they couldn't. Not only could they not fix it, they couldn't refund us the premium we paid. But they could offer us the 5 Mbps download rate
Liars that don't give a damn about the end consumer. You'll be lucky if the 250 GB doesn't include your digital TV as download or even if they agree to their contractual terms.
Re:Comcast has a monopoly in many markets (Score:4, Informative)
1/2 a terabyte a month (Score:4, Informative)
Jonah HEX
Official statements (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:5, Informative)
They've already admitted to bumping people off the service entirely for downloading ~90GB/mo.
There's no way they'll let those guys back in and not even charge them overages.
This is Comcast we're talking about. I'm going to be skeptical of anything they say that even appears reasonable -- and I'm not going to waste any time entertaining such a notion so long as it's merely rumor.
I dont know why people are complaining. (Score:2, Informative)
The 2 main ISPs telus and Shaw have different things.
Telus goes with a 20GB cap on there normal Internet plan. and a 60GB on there HIGH SPEED EXTREME blah blah.
I lived with that 60GB cap quiet happily. This includes a few months were I downloaded enough to have 3 months of straight music to listen to. Really if you stay at home all day downloading movies to watch you MIGHT be in trouble.
Shaw service as i have seen ranges from 10GB on there light internet which is for people who just want cheap internet for email. 20-30KB/s tops when iv tried it.
Then 60 for the normal plan. Hitting 100GB for the high speed extreme 10Mbit down 1 Mbit up.
Im on the 100 GB plan and its nice knowing its there, but really i dare any 95% if not 99% of slashdot users to show me more than 1 month a year they get withing 10GB's of that 100GB cap.
In the future say 4 years from now this might be a little low if you wanna do all your media via internet. But for now this fits fine for 99.9999% of people and it prevents people from using up a 25% share of the tubes, while allowing practically "Unlimited freedom".
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:3, Informative)
I have a 7Mb Comcast connection and I expect to get to be able to use it.
I have my connection shared out between myself, my room mate, and a collection of devices. We both work from home a decent amount during any given month (I am on call and he works on projects after hours if there is a crunch), plus we both game on our PC's, I have a Linux box I use for ventrilo, and sharing photos with friends, etc. I also have my Xbox, Wii and Tivo running off my network.
For a game beta I'm in I know I've pulled at least 10-20GB alone in the last month. With streaming video and music downloads, etc I could probably hit that cap fairly easily.
All of this is exactly why I pay through the ass to comcast in the first place for the 7Mb connection. And now they tell me I can't do what I pay to do? F-that. I've been waiting for FiOS for month, since it won't be at my place any time soon it looks like it might be time to go back to DSL.
Then again all this would be contingent on actually getting even 800Kb transfer rates when I pay for 7Mb. I'm lucky sometimes if I can pull 200Mb over their service. Though my overnight rates to tend to be higher than 1 Mb. Guessing its tied to shared lines on their network.
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:5, Informative)
If you have a commercial connection that offers 6mbps, SLA'd, that's different, but you don't, because you wouldn't be a target of this if you were.
Re:Lawsuit (Score:3, Informative)
Before anyone bleats about "they still can't just change the terms, there has to be agreement - there /was/ agreement that they could - that'd be your signature. There was even "consideration" given, the right to have fees waived if you left the service due to a change in said terms.
Re:Lawsuit (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:5, Informative)
A real 6Mb connection is a fraction DS3 with a SLA. Ballpark, you're talking about $3k a month for that kind of service, and that's assuming you live in a major metro area where the loop won't be exorbitant.
That is how much always-on, exclusively-yours bandwidth actually costs. So when you only pay $40 a month, it ought to be a sign that what you're going to get is a whole lot less.
In the case of Comcast, they are actually pretty up-front these days about speeds. (Bandwidth caps, not so much, but as TFA alludes to, they seem to be working on it.) That "6 megabits" is a burst speed. I don't like Comcast and as a result keep a pretty close eye on them, and they've never advertised it as anything but. If you---or anyone else---thought that you were actually buying a 6Mb constant (~2TB/mo. transfer) connection for $40/mo, you're laughably mistaken. Bandwidth just ain't that cheap.
Has Comcast engaged in some shady advertising in the past? Sure. Back when they called their service "unlimited" internet, they could rightly be taken to task for cutting people off. But they don't advertise that anymore and haven't in years. It's popular around here to sling mud at Comcast, and while there are lots of valid reasons for criticizing them, it's about time customers started wising up and started reading the fine (or not-so-fine) print about what they're signing up for. I have very little sympathy for anyone who takes asterisk-laden advertising copy on faith without question.
While it certainly sucks that residential broadband providers like Comcast oversubscribe their backbone capacity, most people wouldn't like the alternative: it would quickly price HSI out of reach of virtually all consumers.
Comcast is without a doubt pretty evil, and it's a crying shame that we don't have any real competition in most broadband markets, but people whining that they don't get fractional-DS3 service from their cable modem is tiring. In other news, my Volkswagen doesn't go as fast as a Ferrari.
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:4, Informative)
-- Said a crack addict once.
Seriously, if you are using MORE than 1GB a day, you are a heavy user. And you, are definitely a heavy user considering you have some sort of servers running (bittorrent?). After all, there is no way you can rack up tx>rx unless you are running something like that.
Secondly, you are using 7GB a day. If that usage is over 7 hours a day, then your are using 300kB/s of bandwidth at every single second of those 7 hours!!
Finally, if you are truly not a heavy user, then your box is riddled with spam bots or similar malware.
30GB/month is moderate usage (including watch 2 hours of youtube a day). 0-2GB/mo is low usage.
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:3, Informative)
Personally that's the approach that I think they should be pursuing, not hard caps. I don't do a lot on my up-to-10Mbps connection, but when I do I want it to be fast. I'd rather not have the economics screwed up because a bunch of freedom fighters are saturating the shared pipe 24 hours a day (and no, the cable companies can't just suck it up. My business is currently paying just under $600 a month for a 5Mbps SLAd synchronous connection, with a monthly cap no less. To think that $40 a month gets you unlimited 10Mbps is just asinine).
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:2, Informative)
You are not paying remotely the cost for a unlimited 7Mbps connection. You are paying to basically share a connection. Don't act all surprised -- we've had this same boring debate on Slashdot about two dozen times over the past 10 years (the 98 in my username is because I signed up in 1998). "I WANT MY UNLIMITED INTERNET!" the petulant cries ring out.
Or maybe the sender can't saturate your pipe. On the real dedicated side of things, 7Mbps is quite expensive, much less enough to saturate lots of simultaneous 7Mbps users.
Re:Bill Gatesism... (Score:3, Informative)
I did some research to find out what Comcast's limit was and the only thing I could come up with was an "unwritten" rule of about 100GB/month. But "unlimited" or not people do get banned/kicked off Comcast for over usage. I was in one customer's house before we found out about their usage issues, they had literally 1000's of burned DVD's in cases in his computer room, not hard to figure what he uses his bandwidth for.
the current cap is... (Score:1, Informative)
The current cap is 400GB for the internet (this number does NOT include TV or phone service).
Management is currently only discussing the possibility of lowering the cap to 250MB.
Time Warner is testing bandwidth caps at the moment, and if successful Comcast will follow suit.
It's a Ripoff (Score:3, Informative)
I have local backup, but I keep a offsite backup of my data in case of a natural disaster.
The economics of metered bandwidth (Score:1, Informative)
Scenario 1
ISP has finite upstream bandwidth (this is a given).
This wholesale bandwidth is resold (marked-up) and oversold (contended) for residential services.
That's how you get '7mb' connections that don't cost 1000's of $$
If this limited resource is sold as 'unlimited', and it is treated as such by customers, the economics start to move against the ISP.
They need to limit and degrade the service in order to turn a profit.
THE INCENTIVE IS FOR THE COMPANY TO PROVIDE A LOWER QUALITY SERVICE
Scenario 2
A basic usage amount is included free inside the package. This could be 10GB, 30GB, 100GB or whatever covers 90%+ of their customer base.
Customers wishing to use more, at full speed, pay for additional usage. Some markup over wholesale rates.
In this scenario, the incentive is to encourage the customer to use more, not less bandwidth.
They get to purchase more network for their users.
Low-usage users are not impacted by bandwdith hogs.
Makes more sense, right?