Comcast To Cap Data Transfers At 250 GB In October 939
JagsLive writes with this story from PC Magazine: "Comcast has confirmed that all residential customers will be subject to a 250 gigabyte per month data limit starting October 1. 'This is the same system we have in place today,' Comcast wrote in an amendment to its acceptable use policy. 'The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted.' The cable provider insisted that 250 GB is "an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. ... As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage,' Comcast said Thursday. 'If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,' according to the AUP."
Data limit? (Score:5, Interesting)
Notice that it doesn't say anything about if the 'data limit' is uploaded data or downloaded. My guess is they'll make it combined.
Also, since there IS now a limit that can be tied with the monthly price, can we sue spammers/advertisers/etc for $.0000002 per kilobyte? I think its a very generous rate to give them, since cell phone companies like to charge $.10 per kilobyte.
What about ads? How about SPAM?? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Still practically unlimited for most (Score:5, Interesting)
If I flood your IP address, 250 GB can disappear pretty fast, and there's really nothing you can do about it. Whether your router drops the packets or not, they'll still be counted against your quota.
Similar if you fire up a p2p program, and download a video or game level or whatever. Once you end it, thousands of other people are still going to be sending packets to your IP address, checking whether you're back online and can share the file.
And it gets worse -- it doesn't even have to be you. Someone else might have done heavy file sharing, and then in the periodic reassignment of IP addresses that Comcast does (to prevent people from running servers), you get that IP. And all the request traffic, which can continue at high volume for days or weeks.
These are all weaknesses with the IP protocol, but it hardly seems fair not to have a system that takes this into consideration.
Is this a problem? Well, according to my router, I have had 18 GB in traffic (in + out) for the month of July for one of my WAN lines. According to the provider, it's been 27 GB. That's a rather big discrepancy. At the same ratio, if your router tells you you have used 180 GB out of the 250, you won't have 70 GB to go, you will already have exceeded the quota and are subject to whatever disciplinary actions Comcast might have in place.
Perspective (Score:3, Interesting)
250GB/month =
0.77Mb/s (megabits) * 24/7
(a bit less than half a T1 running an full capacity)
3.31 days At 7.0Mb/s and you're out.
Not bad for cheap McInternet service, I guess...
seems good to me (Score:4, Interesting)
The should have done this long ago, put it in the contract, and saved themselves a lot of bad press.
Re:250 GB (Score:1, Interesting)
While I have, in the past, gone over 250 Gb (on a service limited to 60 Gb!), it was with some pretty extreme use.
Who watches an HD movie every day, anyway? I'm extremely nerdy and still I can't possibly watch movies that long in a month.
Re:Okay folks (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:250 GB (Score:2, Interesting)
And a meter would be nice (Score:4, Interesting)
Cox tells you what the limit is (40GB/mo on my plan), but doesn't give you a meter. I don't want to be "contacted about excessive use", I want a meter like the gas gauge on my car. Fortunately, I use a linux router with vnstat so I can keep tabs, but how many home users are able to provide their own meter?
My dad uses Wild Blue, and they provide a nice web page with a meter to check your usage. Their cap is a continuous time average over 30 days, so you don't have to wait until the end of the month for it to reset - the average bandwidth starts going down again after he finishes his Ubuntu download, and is ready for another in a few days with worrying about hitting the limit.
Alternative to caps (Score:5, Interesting)
It's still beyond me why they can't manage to offer a sliding scale...
First 100 GB... You get at the full bandwidth.
For each additional 50 GB, it drops by 25% of whatever it was last.
First 100GB = 100%
100-150GB = 75%
150-200GB = 56%
200-250GB = 42%
250-300GB = 32%
300-350GB = 24%
350-400GB = 18%
400-450GB = 13%
450-500GB = 10%
Now you've got a system where no one ever finds their connection suddenly shut off on them for the remainder of the month.
Instead, it just keeps getting slower and slower to the point where much over 250 GB is going to have slowed so much they'd really have a hard time going much further anyway... and those 5GB movie downloads they used to get within an hour now need to run all night, if not all day and all night, and so are no longer appealing anyway.
Though, to be fair... Funny how it's only those companies that make money by charging for the delivery of TV and movies that seem to have issues with users using the kind of bandwidth needed to get TV and movies without them.
Re:More info (Score:2, Interesting)
The only difference is with my 30mbps connection i can download around 316GB a day. Now, i don't do that but the faster the connection the bigger the risk of exceeding some quotas..
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose I could potentially get DSL, but that is so much slower than cable it almost doesn't count as competition in the broadband market
how fast is your cable connection? with adsl every person can have a 24mbps connection, to themselves which doesn't matter how much anyone else is using it nearby.
Cable last I checked is shared on a circuit common to at least a few households, so your mileage may vary depending on neighbours. still, if you can get faster than 24mbit on cable consistently I may consider switching from dsl to cable myself.
Re:Which is absolutely fine (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Just get a business acct... (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh man..it isn't too late...go for it!!
You can drop the cable box...just do a myth project...
Seriously, the HDHomerun [silicondust.com] is a GREAT item, and works great. It works and is easy with the guides out there. I used Gentoo to set up my mythbox...and it was easy following the Silicon dust and Gentoo Wiki pages.
It works with OTA, and QAM...you can use the two tuners in it either split OTA and QAM, or both QAM or both OTA...great product. Give it a try, and bypass the cable box.
That and a fun thing I've found is...it picks up the channels used for OnDemand...fun to see what other people are watching at night....
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:250GB/month (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:250 GB (Score:2, Interesting)
You're thinking like what you are - a slashdot reader. Meaning, a single greasy male living in someone's basement.
Try a household with two parents and four teenage daughters like my sister's. A single HD movie worth of data in a day would mean that at least two people are at sleepovers.
Have any of these people your referring to ever downloaded a movie?
--
IP Address Finding [ipfinding.com]
Re:Which is absolutely fine (Score:4, Interesting)
Can I have rollover Gig?
So long as it's PER MONTH (Score:4, Interesting)
A couple years ago, I decided to start watching TV on my computer instead of the TV, for no real reason besides liking my chair in the PC room better. So I started really hammering my connection with some torrents (piracy haters, note that I was still paying my full cable TV bill, so in essence I was downloading what they'd already been sending me). My Internet and television provider was Cox Communications in the San Diego area.
I made sure to keep my torrents only running at night out of respect for neighbors on the same cable network. One morning, though, I woke up to see all my torrents dead. I went to see if google was up and was redirected to a page instructing me to call the Cox security division. I did and, after a good while on hold, was told that I'd exceeded my data cap.
Which, being as we were in the middle of a month, was news to me. Confused, I hung up and continued more or less like I was, trying to keep the overall load down a bit with transfer caps in Azureus. A week later it happened again, exactly as before. This time, though, I demanded more of an explanation from the CSR. What I was told amazed me.
Now, I'm not a network engineer, but I'd always assumed that the ISP could keep a pretty good watch on every connection at once. Maybe that's more infeasible than I'd thought on a cable network, but still, the rep claimed that wasn't the case. They COULD get a general idea of who was producing "too much traffic," though, and order a "watch" for that account be forwarded to the security division. Who would then, in turn, watch and record the exact amount of data coming out of that account for a period of time.
Where it gets even stranger - and more frustrating - is that this "period of time" is totally up to them. One of my infractions was a 24 hour watch, the other around 48, and supposedly they could be up to a week or less than a day depending on how many watches they had going. They would then divide the monthly cap (a very difficult-to-find number buried in legal boilerplate deep in an old PDF on their website and actually quoted differently in two other different places) by the time they recorded and shut it down if it went over. So, say, if you got 30Gb in a 30-day month and they did a 24-hour watch, they would shut down your account if it went over 1Gb! Which to my mind makes their advertised bandwidth a complete fabrication: if you downloaded at full speed all month, you'd be several orders of magnitude over the limit. And if they're allowed to shrink the "watch" size as small as they want (nothing they said indicated that a 24-hour watch was the smallest) then you can't be confident EVER using the full speed.
Too many of these warnings (either 3 or 5 being the magic number based on the CSR I was talking to) and they'd shut down your cable and blacklist you forever. In an area with no other Internet options outside of dialup, they basically were telling me I might have to MOVE if I did it one more time. And no, there was no way to see how much data I'd used up so far that month, but they were "working on it."
I wish I could tell you that I angrily canceled my account and moved on. But no, I wasn't ready to move, and I wasn't ready to go to dialup. So I just stopped downloading anything over 1Gb, ever, and confining my high-tier, expensive 'net account to web surfing and games. And oh, yeah, I watched TV on the TV on my shitty couch like a good little boy. These fuckers continue to get my monthly checks to this very day. Aren't monopolies grand?
Re:More info (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a lie.
The reality is that a large number of accounts, say 15%, aren't registering any bandwidth at all. Comcast is real screwy when it comes to canceling, moving, or enabling service. Every time I have had to change service I had to contact them multiple times and was overcharged each time. They will charge you for service before it is installed. I know from insiders at the company that this is deliberate.
Another 25% are using the modems in USB mode which throttles their bandwidth to about 1 megabit or they are using very old computers or equipment which slows their connection. It's very difficult to go over the cap at these speeds.
About 3-5% are maxing out their connections, usually through downloading usenet feeds and, to a lesser extent, running bittorent trackers.
So what about the other 65%? I seriously doubt they're only downloading 85 MB per day. That's a handful of flash videos. I suspect it more in the 2-3 GB PER DAY range, or about 90GB per month. And it's rapidly going up.
This is headed for another FCC dust-up because I'm CERTAIN that Comcast is going to exclude their VoIP and their video download service (Comcast is partnered with Hulu) from this cap.
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:3, Interesting)
Lets look at this from the dialup side (I know, I know none of /. readers have dialup, but it's still internet by some definition)...
To have dialup, one needed a *dedicated* connection to their telco of choice. Granted this wasn't always on, but it was always *available* and there weren't (AFAIK) any arbitrary charges based on when one could or could not make a phone call (ie, there was no "peak" or "off-peak" charge/in network calling freebies/whatever other gimmicks). I could make one or 1000 calls a month for any varying length of time, and the telcos never complained about usage.
Couple that dedicated line to a dedicated line into your ISP of choice, and now you've just killed *TWO* circuits in TWO seperate companies.. back in the days of widespread dialup there wasn't any bitching by telcos OR ISPs that there weren't enough phone lines or available bandwidth... even when you'd have to go through 2-5 numbers to finally get a non-busy line to dial into the ISP.
I'll admit the number of internet connected households has exploded since the advent of the internet... but the number of households with electricity and telephones has exploded since the turn of the 20th century (with little to no bitching to the effect of 'oh noes! our can't keep up with demand' that modern ISP's seem to be saying right now...this should have ESPECIALLY been apparent in the telephone industry, before the advent of electronic phone switching and having operators connecting *EVERY* call that someone wanted to make)
With that in mind, I'm forced to agree with everyone here who dislikes the caps involved.
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference is.. the telcos bill you for each call.
Do you want the ISPs to start billing per-megabyte? It's like any business - you advertise a maximum usage that is financially tenable for the business at a given price, with various usage assumptions factored in (time of day, contention ratio etc.), and offer that to the consumer.
Anyone going substantially above the expectations of what you get for your money would be subject to excess charges - someone has to pay for the above-average usage.
Granted, it's a stupid thing that American ISPs have advertised "unlimited" in the past, but there's no good reason to bitch now that they've come clean about exactly what they can handle, and what the expectations are.
They expect $XX per month, you expect YY gigabytes per month. What's wrong with putting that down on paper rather than "uh, yeah, use as much as we consider viable.. we'll tell you when you hit it"?
We could have unlimited internet plans.. but would everyone be willing to pay extra to expand the infrastructure?
Re:250 GB (Score:1, Interesting)
I'll see your four daughters and raise you two boys. All with laptops and access to NetFlix online movies.
Usually we don't push above 100GB, but in the colder winter months it's not hard to blow past 250.
Re:Still practically unlimited for most (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:3, Interesting)
I think my account is 60Gb (30 peak, 30 off peak) monthly. The difference is that we don't yet have anyone offering streaming media like movies as a paid download.
When I first read the 250Gb limit I thought - how the hell can you use that much in a month - our household is lucky to hit 25Gb most months with my husband obsessively checking Impornium for new feeds on an nightly basis. Then I thought about all the proposed new media distribution channels we are supposed to be adopting and realised 250 Gb has the potential to suck greatly in the not so distant future.[1]
[1] This of course assumes that Telstra and or Optus get off their arse and install sufficient level of backbone that the local broadband network would support the level of traffic required to make pay-per-view on demand movie and TV downloads a viable business model.
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:5, Interesting)
My state is trying out regional broadband served by the power district. I think fiber options from all the major vendors will be coming shortly. After all, if they lose these customers they're probably gone forever.
It's not like bandwidth costs a lot of money. If I moved closer to work I could have 100Mbps for $50/mo. Get this - my wife won't move because the area where I can get that from the power district is "too rural". So much for that density argument, eh?
Anyway, kudos to the power districts that are willing to step up and say: "People need broadband. If you won't serve 'em, we will."
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:2, Interesting)
Um....no, no they didn't. My phone package for my landline in the days of dial-up was about $25+taxes. I could call anyone in my local area (which was large, included El Paso, TX to halfway to Albuquerque, NM). If I logged into my ISP, I could spend all day on-line (especially if I were trying to download a large file/group of files) with no additional charge by the Telco.
Same idea with my Fios...and as their advertising says "Unlimited" use, adding an arbitrary limit to my use woudl be a contract violation.
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it's a ploy. If your Internet provider offers media via IP they will almost certainly exclude that media from the cap, effectively penalizing you for using other providers.
In fact, the current model dictates that most of the "bandwidth" that could be used for Internet is used for plain old cable, including pay per view. The only thing missing here is that most US cable internet providers have no usage cap (officially at least).
Re:Goodbye Comcast, Hello FIOS (Score:3, Interesting)
People don't like to pay, period ;) But really, I can understand that. The psychological difference between paying for speed and paying for data transfer is that data transfer is a consumable commodity, but speed is not. Noone likes paying for something that can run out instead of something that does not.
Re:250 GB (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the traffic statistics from my home gateway. The former data transfer amount refers to digital television, the latter to what my household uses for our internet needs. The digital tv is not turned on at all that much and it's mostly not high def.
Yeah, I wouldn't probably use 250GB for my regular internet usage, but I could damn well conceive subscribing to digital television with my ISP only providing the bandwidth and another company providing the service over my internet line. Lawmakers would want to encourage decoupling things like this, because it prevents monopolies.
So yeah, in the digital era you can easily use at least 350GB per every month, just so that someone watches the TV.
no problem if... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:And a meter would be nice (Score:2, Interesting)
That's because Cox doesn't enforce their "limits", which are effectively more recommended guidelines than limits. On the newsgroups there's people using well over 100 GB/mo, month after month, supposedly subject to the same 40 GB/mo limit, that have never heard a peep from Cox. Their actual limit where they'd actually send you a letter is probably more like the 250 GB/mo announced by Comcast than the 40 GB they mention in connection with the "preferred" service tier level.
At one point Cox DID /try/ to enforce GB caps, at that time 30 GB/mo. A number of folks on the newsgroups reported getting letters. Of course, we don't know if any were finally disconnected, but that wasn't until the 4th time, with just an email the first two times, email and snail-mail the third time, and at least threatened cutoff on the 4th... but since it only seemed to last maybe 6-8 months...
It wasn't long after that, that widely available DSL speeds started increasing beyond the original 1.5 Mbps "DSL lite" standard, and started actually giving Cox (which at that time was either 3 or 4 Mbps, don't remember the timing exactly) some decent competition. Suddenly, nobody seemed to get the nasty warning letters any more!
But in addition to that, at the time, Cox neither had a user trackable meter (which people pointed out they really needed if they were going to enforce, and they still don't have, but they haven't tried enforcing since then either), nor a viable upgrade path. The only possible "upgrade" they offered was switching to business service, at about twice the money for half the speed. We pointed out that wasn't an "upgrade" but rather a serious downgrade, and that at least if they were going to enforce caps, they'd be wise to offer some sort of decent upgrade path, at least.
Low and behold, shortly thereafter, they had a real upgrade plan as well. Now, there's the premeire grade service, ~$15 more /mo, but at least arguably worth it, as the speeds are much higher as well as the (unenforced) bytecaps.
It's unknown if it was our protests or competition; I'd like to think our protests had /something/ to do with it, tho, and Cox /has/ always seemed a bit better than Comcast in such things, but the situation since has been that the bytecap "recommendations" have been just that, recommendations, not enforced caps, and there's /actually/ a decent upgrade path from "preferred" (aka standard) to "premeire" (aka premium", and even a SOHO option between no-server residential, and full privs but much more expensive full biz service. AFAIK, the SOHO option is slightly slower than residential for the money, but comes with no bytecaps or server restrictions, tho you still have a DHCP assigned dynamic IP. (To get the static IP you need the expensive full business class service.)
Calm down, 250 Gig is a lot (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's check the numbers. 250 Gig/month means about 8 Gig/day. Divide that by a generous 86,400 seconds in a day, or round up to 100,000 seconds, and that's a constant download speed of roughly 80 Kbytes/second, every second of every day. That is quite a lot for a residential service, and it requires quite a lot of upstream infrastructure to support. It's unlikely to work well with normal web proxies, because the most likely use is Bittorrent.
So it's completely economically reasonable to want to set a generous cap, and go after the worst residential home users and say to them "this is excessive". I'm certain their contract permits this kind of cap in the small print. Like someone at a smorgasboard who wants to bring home a shopping bag of leftovers, going over that for a residential contract is pretty ridiculous, unless you're running a big download site from your home. And if you're doing that, you should pay commercial rates.
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The swine ! (Score:3, Interesting)
Not exactly the kind of press you want now, is it?
Here's a years worth of my connection data (Score:2, Interesting)
I mainly use the connection to work via VPN and have usual surfing habits.
I don't download movies or participate in online games.
There are several ISO downloads scattered throughout the totals.
These totals are from the machine I work with daily. The other 3 machines combined have Never used more than 2 GiB in a month.
As you can see, this is just under 300GiB for a year.
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Interesting)
Watching QAM traffic
If you go into the diagnostics screens of your digital cable box you can see how much traffic is transferred. Wikipedia has an OK (not great) article on QAM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation [wikipedia.org]
They're not exactly fixed; they use different compression ratios on different channels, as you can see watching some high-def programming the clarity is sometimes no better than standard def programming because of compression artifacts (blocking, banding, etc.) and if you go into the diagnostic screens you can watch how many packets are being transferred in realtime. (They don't forbid you from going into those screens in case you were wondering - I went into them myself to gather info to report to customer support when I had my service updated and wasn't getting programming I should have access to. They just won't tell you how to go into those screens). Incidentally if you're not 100% sure which channels are actually analog and you have a newer box which gives you S/PDIF on both digital an analog channels, use the diagnostic screens to determine what the tuner is actually receiving.
Now, there is a LOT of unique traffic; on demand programming. So, yes, there are a lot of programming streams unique to individual users at any given moment, probably most commonly weekend evenings.
Receiver Setup
Incidentally, when you upgrade to high def, you will definitely want to get into the receiver's diag and config screens, because your box might be recycled and be configured for a previous install for 720i, 720p, or even 480p at a previous install, or the cable tech might leave it at the default 720p setting. Just FYI.
Bandwidth Cap
250GB? That seems fair at first, until you consider online programming. Do you do a lot of netflix? How much bandwidth does each
I download quite a bit, in spurts. When a new kubuntu, OpenSuSE, or CentOS release comes out, I download DVD and CD ISO images, and I seed them for a bit. That could easily be 10GB in a single day. Now, 250GB / 30 days = 8.3GB / day, just under a dual layer DVD per day. Is that fair when for the last 10 years they have been fraudulently advertising unlimited internet and surreptitiously enforcing unpublished caps?
The Real Reason for Caps?
I think part of the reason for the bandwidth cap rather than throttling (not blocking) the heaviest users is that they do not want you to use netflix, hulu, blockbuster, or other third-party online programming services; they want you to use theirs. I think that what they're saying publicly is just a cover to ward off any potential anti-competitive complaints. Now, let me just restate that this is my opinion (I am not stating this as fact) based on the evidence I see.
The Solution
Contact your local selectmen, town manager, mayor, etc. and let them know that sanctioned monopolies are a bad thing. Want to bring Comcast into check? Get your town to invite competitors so that residents have a choice between two or more cable providers. Forget Verizion and FIOS, since their TV service stinks. Get real competition.
Re:The swine ! (Score:4, Interesting)
Out of interest, when are you planning on watching all that?
After all, it's hard to avoid the results from the bits you recorded - they were all over the media, etc. etc.
And just how many hours does that 250Gb consist of? I guess you must be taking a week or two off in order to watch it all?
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:3, Interesting)
This seems to be one of those things that "everybody knows" but which isn't actually true. I hit up comcast.com and can't find any mention that their internet offerings are "unlimited".
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:3, Interesting)
I also live in a Comcast/Qwest market (Boulder, CO), but this market isn't nearly as competitive as the Puget Sound area (where I lived over the summer - working for MS).
In general, I've found Comcast to be surprisingly tolerable if you know how to deal with them. Yeah, their billing system sucks. And, yeah, they gave me S-cards for my TiVo HD instead of an M-card. But they have never given me the "unplug your router" crapola.
If you want Comcast to treat you like someone who knows what the hell they are talking about, you need to demonstrate that you know what the hell you are talking about. Being a software engineer or a competent sysadmin doesn't mean that you know shit about an HFC cable system.
If you call up and say, "my cable modem is broken", they're going to have you go through all of the basic troubleshooting. The thing is, Comcast (and every other cable ISP) gets thousands of these calls, and many probably have nothing to do with the modem or the network.
If, on the other hand, you call them up and say, "My upstream power level is 53dBmV", "My downstream signal to noise ratio is 25dB", or "My downstream power level is -15.5dBmV", you won't have to go through the diagnostics.
When my upstream power level was too high (usually referred to as the modem "shouting"), I went on the support chat and told them exactly that. I was asked if the cables were tight. I said yes. The agent scheduled a technician visit, the technician came, and he put his signal analyzer on the line. Result? It appears that the line is fine, and my 2-year-old SB5100 decided to screw itself. Next step? I'm going to rent a modem from Comcast (total time: approximately 5 minutes to drop by the local office) for $3/mo and see if the problem goes away.
Look, I don't like transfer caps. But this cap isn't really anything new. Now they're being explicit about something that they (and most ISPs) have been doing for a long time. My only concern is that in 5 years, 250GB will look woefully inadequate.
Re:downloaded or uploaded (Score:3, Interesting)