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.
Lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
God damn it people need to learn if you say unlimited on the ad it means fucking unlimited. If you don't want people using it you need to say so.
It's time people got together and sued these fuckers that do this crap.
An improvement (Score:5, Insightful)
This is actually an improvement over their current model of "We have a cap, but we won't tell you what it is".
Like a previous poster said, though, if they promise unlimited, they have to deliver unlimited. They should indeed be sued for not doing so.
Bad news (Score:4, Insightful)
A high cap, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
But is this just the FIRST cap? Will the cap be lowered to 200gb six month from now? Will it be jimmied down to 150gb a year from now, with the option to pay extra for a $200gb cap? Is this, in short, the opening shot to tiered pricing?
I can't decide whether to terminate service out of principle over this move or not. It isn't like I have many options - for me its Comcast or DSL for the same price but half the speed. Verizon won't sell me FIOS no matter how much I want to hand them my money - they haven't even applied for a franchise in Philadelphia last I checked.
Heavy usage? (Score:4, Insightful)
Now i wouldn't have an issue if that's how the service was sold (800kb service, burstable to 10mb or whatever)... But ISP marketing tries to make the service out to be something it's not. And then have the nerve to complain when people try to actually use what they thought they were buying.
Right now, I can't say I have a problem with this (Score:3, Insightful)
This will limit new uses of the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Eliminate unprofitable users. These are users who do more than just check their e-mail and surf the web. These are the ones who actually *use* their connections Rather than investing in infrastructure, Comcast simply wants to get rid of anyone that it doesn't make money on.
2) Eliminate competition with its own cable offerings. If you can watch the latest news from CNN or TV shows from NBC streamed *from* CNN or NBC, then you don't need to pay $60 / month for cable TV. This is a major threat to Comcast, and they are trying to make it infeasible.
3) Gain consumer acceptance of limits, then lower them later. The cable companies have a history of raising prices 5-10% per year (much greater than inflation). They can do to this because they have monopoly power in many markets. You can expect Comcast to behave in a similar manner with data. Want to fight back? Do you have many alternative providers? If not, you are stuck.
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:5, Insightful)
But in this case (which is not official, BTW), it sounds like they are going to change $15 for an extra 10GB! That is far too high. I mean, assuming you pay $50/month, the first 250GB are only $0.20 each... and it goes up to $1.50??? That's pretty peculiar. It also doesn't seem to reflect the cost of bandwidth. Giganews charges $14 for 25GB, for instance.
I fear that we will quickly approach the dreaded cell-phone bill in complexity here.
Re:Comcast has a monopoly in many markets (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, having a published cap would mean that customers would know the information they need to make a decision on their ISP in advance, rather than discovering some secret shadowy cap after they've hit it and called tech support 10 times about their problems before finding someone willing (or knowledgeable enough) to admit that such a cap exists, and maybe the approximate value of said cap.
As for existing customers, they'll just send out a notice saying they are changing your contract and you have 30 days to cancel otherwise you agree to the new cap.
I'm outraged (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Comcast has a monopoly in many markets (Score:2, Insightful)
I would agree that DSL is probably available in most places where cable is available. Indeed, there are plenty of rural areas where DSL is available but cable is not.
Still, it is a very common situation even in cities to have your only options for high speed internet be Comcast cable or Verizon DSL. You are basically between a rock and a hard place in that situation.
Re:250? (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly, don't think that 250 Gig per month is where they want to be. Meaning, they do not have even close the amount of bandwidth available to provide this level to their customers. What I am sure they are wanting to do, however, is to get buy in a 250G limit, and reduce that amount over time to something closer to 20G per month.
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:5, Insightful)
They forgot something in their calculations (Score:4, Insightful)
With 6 people sharing cable, that impossible-to-reach 250GB turns into a paltry 42GB. Or about 1.4 gigs a day. It would be very easy to accidentally hit that if you watch videos online.
I hope that they plan to tiered service like cell phone companies. Ideally with automatic tiering - so rather than paying ridiculous overage charges per-GB, you just pay for the price of the next tier. (as in, up to 250GB is $X a month, 300GB is $X+$Y/month, etc)
Re:Lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
Good luck with your lawsuit.
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides it's like your sibling comment points out 250GB is ~800Kbit/sec for 31 days.... that's 8+ divx movies^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H "linux iso's" per day every day for a month.
Re:250? (Score:5, Insightful)
This cap is to prevent internet from taking over television delivery (which is a huge cash cow for them). 720P under H264 compression is about 3GB per hour so this would prevent the average household (e.g. - 2 or 3 televisions running for a few hours per day) from dropping their $100/month cable tv subscription.
We need anti-trust countermeasures here.
Internet television delivery is powerful. Right now, only the extremely wealthy can control the horizontal and vertical. If you plug the internet into televisions and 20 million people decide to pay a penny each to watch "Leave Britney Alone!", then someone just made $200,000.
You'll get a lot of clever content under this model. And internet speeds are getting to the point where we can start thinking about HD content to a significant amount of people.
Re:Lawsuit (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, I for one would rather have a clear and well-publicized cap than this mysterious wall people seem to be hitting. I think I would sleep easier at night knowing that I was still 20GB below the cap rather than worrying about the connection suddenly being shut off. You can measure your bandwidth usage and know for sure what your status is.
That being said, it's still Comcast. So there's probably a catch there somewhere.
(I need to work on my spellchecking lol) (Score:5, Insightful)
If they happened to offer maximum speed at all caps and had a variable rate of cap is one thing, but that's not the case here, it creates an artificial discrepancy.
Also, yeah consumers are typically not even close to slashdot-smart so I wouldn't be surprised if plenty are confused by the changes or don't even understand the big deal.
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's just for one site, and only very early in our "digital delivery" revolution we're going through. You can now rent movies off iTunes (even HD ones), or through your Xbox 360. I have an Apple TV that I use for these types of rentals. You can subscribe to TV shows the same way (I subscribe to "Escape to Chimp Eden" and "The Universe", so there's another 2GB or so per month right there).
I also have several video podcasts like Geekbreek.tv and WebbAlert that are each downloaded about 4 times per week that together add up to another GB or 2 of downloads per month.
Add in OS updates (or source downloads for my Gentoo box), music purchases and audio podcasts and the amount of bandwidth used per month inches up pretty fast. That said, I'm virtually positive I'm still well under 250GB per month, but I certainly CAN envision breaking that limit easily within the next few years.
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:3, Insightful)
Raised Expectations (Score:3, Insightful)
What a typical DSL product offers is "download speed bursting to 8mbps shared amongst 20-50 users" depending on the contention ratio. The problem is that the infrastructure can't handle modern internet usage - streaming video, etc, when more than a few people are using it at the same time. In order to provide a fair internet service to the other people who are also using that connection they have to throttle big bandwidth users. This wasn't a problem even a couple of years ago, internet use was mostly bursty, with gaps of inactivity.
Internet service should be sold based upon a minimum guaranteed bit rate, and the burst bit rate. I'd rather go for 256kbps/2mbps than 64kbps/8mbps.
Oddly enough some services never seem to have a problem. Virgin Media Cable in my area is great, even at peak times you can get 250KB/s downloads on their budget 2mbps package. Yet in other areas it apparently sucks Satan's scaly cock.
I really don't mind the idea of reasonable bandwidth caps, as long as they increase by ~25% year on year. 250GB/s is a lot of bandwidth, that's more movies than you can find the time to watch in a month, even in HD. Probably an issue for shared geek hohuseholds though.
Hmm. not bad if they use Cingular idea (Score:3, Insightful)
So I could use 20,20,500,20,20.
I think this is going to be an issue as folks use the internet as cable. I don't think 250gb will affect normal P2P much. It took me about 15 months to download one terrabyte of data so that is about 80 gig a month.
The problem is... 250 now... then 200... then 150...
The other problem is...
200mb shows now... 700mb shows three years from now (as we all go HD).
People wouldn't pirate if prices were reasonable. If anime were $22 instead of $80, I would buy it. Sometimes, it's easier to wait for prices to come down than to download (X-Files, La Femme Nikita, Get Smart).
I currently have a 1,000 hour backlog of things to watch on purchased DVD's. That's enough that some things, i will probably never ever see.
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't think these rates are reasonable, go with whatever the competing ISP in your area is. That's capitalism at work. All that matters here is whether or not the customers are getting what they knowingly pay for.
non-issue (Score:1, Insightful)
Like someone else's reply, if you're using that much bandwidth perhaps it is time to step away from the computer and go get some fresh air with the other humans.
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:2, Insightful)
Just wait for weekend Gigabytes (Score:3, Insightful)
The thing that should worry anyone is that cell phone companies make much of their money from overage fees.
I predict that if this goes into place, rather than improving the service, their effort will go into ever more complicated and confusing fee schedules.
Re:Lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not the users fault at all if the ISPs are going over capacity by selling what they do not have. In fact, if they hit their networks capacity and continue to sell the same terms to new customers, in the end they are comitting fraud (like selling someone a Ferrari at reasonable prices for a Ferrari and then delivering a Civic, to use the ever popular car analogies).
When you do the math, consider this. (Score:3, Insightful)
They mostly have 10MB interfaces? Then 10mb/s =600mb/m =36000mb/hr =4500MBytes/hr?
=108000MBytes/day?
Ok, this is Ethernet. Derate x.6 for CSMA/CD (I know it's switched. Don't believe you can get 100% utilization on a switched line). And do we get 64.8GBytes/day?
Wow. Let me do this again:
10mb/sec x.0 =6mb/sec =360mb/min =21600mb/hr = 2.16GByte/hr? (Byte = 8 bits?) For those of you scoring at home, this about half the speed of a streaming DDS-3 tape drive, probably LVD, with compression.
Crap, I can't add any more. Maybe if we approach this differently?
250GB/mo = 8.33GB/day. Somwhere I read that a Blu-Ray single-layer disc is 25GB. If we assume that a typical BR movei will take half the disc (not supported by evidence) then we need 12GB to dump a movie. We can dump about 20 movies a month and still have some cap room left to play Halo.
But the math escapes me. If my cable modem is indeed 10MB, now much fracking data can I pump through it 24x7?
I thought this would be easy. Needless to say, I am not a rocket scientist.
Of course, if DOCSIS 2.0 is the system, it's limited to 30MB/s. Go look up the specs yersef. So I can't get more than 30mb no matter, and that's the limit. megaBIT. Math. Crap.
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:5, Insightful)
It's should be listed as "800Kb/s, burstable 7Mb/s" or simply "250GB/month"
Don't be short sighted.
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes I get good burst speeds and low latency, which are fine, but when someone pays $100+ a month for cable/internet I expect them to let me use it as much as I want. If that means downloading 15GB files every night so be it.
The point was more that I'm fairly certain I could use 250GB, but the limiting factor is how slow my actual connection is regardless of what I pay for. If they realistically know that I will see the same performance in a 3Mb, 5Mb, 7Mb line, then they shouldn't charge differently for them. If I pay for a separate level of connection I expect there to be some gain for it, even if that means my share of the overall pipe is 200k on average instead of 150k.
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed. 250GB seems on a high end for them.
Maybe they're talking 'bits' instead of 'bytes'. ie: 250Gigabits seems to be approaching the upper limit of what they'd likely consider reasonable usage.
Likely some manager said ``the upper limit should be 50% more than what a 56kbps modem would do in a month'' or something nebulous like that... which actually comes out to ~250-ish Gigabits.