Comcast's Throttling Plan Has 'Disconnect User' Option 299
newtley writes "Comcast's new people, not protocols scheme may mean high speed for some, but by no means all. It's also created a draconian 'disconnect' option for use against anyone who fails to toe the Comcast line. But, says Robb Topolski, the Net protocol expert who originally uncovered Comcast's blatant efforts to control its customers, the plan does offer key take-aways, telling P2P users on Comcast how to do what they do without the risk of corporate interference."
Heh heh heh... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Comcast is just playing by the FCC's rules. (Score:5, Interesting)
The cap sounds pretty reasonable, but the warmings and disconnects are weird to say the least.
If you are over your alloted bandwith for a month, would it not be logical to block you for the rest of the month only, or even give you an option to buy more?
The warning and disconnect seems more like a scare tactic, "do not even dare to come close to this limit"
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
Full disclosure: I'm in the Don't-use-Tor-for-torrenting camp.
I think the issue depends on how much you give back vs. how much you take. If your node is running 24/7 and you aren't limiting how much bandwidth goes through it (since it eats up your own bandwidth) I say torrent away. Whatever you're downloading is your business, BTw. What I take issue with are the people that leech off the Tor network by sending GB of data through it without giving anything back. (leeching http/text doesn't count as being bad, IMO, b/c it 's too small to make much of a difference)
Re:Comcast is just playing by the FCC's rules. (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree. The cap is a perfectly good idea. Giving users no way to see how close they are to their cap, and cutting people off for exceeding it, are terrible ideas.
I see no reason why I, a moderate internet user, should subsidize that guy down the street who downloads 1TB of torrents every month. He uses more, he should pay more.
But the way Comcast is going about it is stupid. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too, essentially. An explicit cap can lead to more traffic, since now people know what the limit is and what they're really paying for, and they may decide that they should use more of what they're paying for. I think they're trying to limit the top people without causing this sort of increase, and doing this by having an explicit cap that still happens to be vague and dire.
If you were to do this right, you should really have a system where many different caps are available. You'd have a default one, probably well under 250GB, that comes with a service that's cheaper than what they offer now. Then you can pay more to increase your cap. You'd be able to monitor your usage, get a warning well before you hit the cap, and increase your account's cap at any time just by requesting it. And if you do hit your cap, then your account gets throttled to dialup speeds until your 30-day sliding window average decreases below the cap level.
Of course this would make far too much sense so Comcast won't do it, but it's what they ought to do.
Re:Easy solution: don't do business with Comcast (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm a Comcast customer and I'm also happy with this cap.
There's no way I'm going to ever come close to it. There's very little way that anyone is going to come close to it with reasonable usage. And if they do, they can always pay more money. I see no reason why I should have to subsidize people who use far more resources than I do. Pay for what you use, that's what I say.
I'll certainly say that the way Comcast is implementing the cap is crappy. Not telling people their current usage and disconnecting users who exceed it are extremely bad policies. But neither of those is going to make me leave them, and the cap is still overall a very good idea.
I'm not aware of any broadband consumer-class connection that has ever been truly unlimited. They're always ready to give you the axe if you exceed some sort of secret limit. Comcast is just making it explicit. No real change.
Re:And (Score:5, Interesting)
How about instead Comcast actually do what they were supposed to do and build capable infrastructure that has enough bandwidth for everyone to do anything?
Personally, I would love for the General Accounting Office to take a nice, close look at Comcast's finances to find out exactly where that taxpayer money went to. Looks more like it went into Comcast's advertising budget so that they could oversell their capacity instead of putting it into the hardware that could have prevented all of this in the first place.
Verizon has millions of miles of dark fibre and have said numerous times that they have plenty of bandwidth as it is. What's Comcast's excuse?
Limits are OK as long as they are public and fair (Score:2, Interesting)
The position that an entity like Comcast enjoys is that of a local monopoly. There *may* be competition, but for most, we have only one viable option for broad band. Like I said, I have *no* problem with a bandwidth limitation on service as long as it is a reasonable business proposition based on the locally awarded monopoly position and market conditions.
The issue I have is the contortions and control. There is no reason why port 80 should be any more favored than any other port. I want "broad band" access, give me access with a documented usage policy. Because you are a locally approved monopoly, that policy must be neutral!
These things are neither hard nor unreasonable. The problem is that business in the U.S. in the last 7 1/2 years have gotten used to dictating unfair terms.
Ok fine (Score:5, Interesting)
But then no bitching if all you can buy is 256kbps. Bandwidth isn't free and the larger the links get, the more pricey they are. You can see this with LAN hardware. It is damn near impossible to get 10mbit switches anymore, 100mbit is the minimum and those are cheap as hell. However gigabit goes up a good deal in cost. A 24-port 100mbite switch might run you $100. A 24-port gigabit switch from the same vendor is over $400. Ok well then 10gbit goes waaaay up. Now you are talking thousands of dollars to get a gigabit switch with even a couple 10gbit ports, and then several hundred per port to get the transceivers.
Now suppose you want to design a network for 500 computers on 5 floors (100 per floor) that gives 100mbit to the desktop. So you get a bunch of 24-port switches and hook them together. Turns out you need about 31 of them. 1 central switch, 5 floor switches and 25 access switches. Those are about $100 each so $3100 total. Ok great.
However you then decide you want everyone to always get their full 100mbit. So now you still connect the computers with 24-port 10/100 switches. However those switches need to have at least 2 gigabit ports (channeled together) on them for uplink, assuming you hook 20 PCs to each. So you now need 25 access switches, but each now costs $180. That's $4500 for for the access switches. Now on each floor, your floor switch has to be able to take 10 1gbit connections in and so a 10gbit connection out. For that you are talking about $2500 per switch for the switch and transceiver. So $12,500 for those. Then for your core switch, you need something with 5 10gbit ports. That is getting extremely high end, and is nearly $10,000 for the switch and transceivers. So for this solution you are talking $27,000.
Well that's a difference of $6/computer and $54/computer. Costs a hell of a lot more to do guaranteed bandwidth. Also this is just a small scale example. Now suppose you have 10 buildings that need connection, then 20 cities with 10 building complexes, and so on. Gets amazingly expensive if you have this "Everyone must have dedicated bandwidth" idea.
What's more, you'd find that for less than that, you could do something that's better overall. If you ran gigabit to the desktop, gig to the floor switches and then gig or maybe 2 gig to the core you'd find that in real usage, everyone would have faster transfers, and you'd pay a less than the dedicated 100mbit solution. Yes, it can get overloaded, however so long as people share it'll actually be faster for everyone.
Re:Chill pill people (Score:3, Interesting)
Looking at the stats on my router, last month I used 230.60 GB.
This month I've used 139.38 GB so far.
Where was the bandwidth used?
None of this has a very high peak, but the fact that it is nearly constant adds up over time.