Comcast's 105MBit Service Comes With Data Cap 372
itwbennett writes "Comcast just announced the ultrafast, ultra-broadband 'Extreme 105' 105 Mbit/sec Internet service for an introductory price of $105, when bundled with other services. That's the good news. The bad news: Comcast 'put a data cap on the service of 250 GB per month — about five hours worth of full-bandwidth use,' writes blogger Kevin Fogarty."
But thats not true (Score:2, Insightful)
Downloads are around 10Megs per second on a good day, you can download all day for 5 days at this rate and still not max out the 250GB per month. You would would have to deliberately max your speed out all day every day for about a week before you max out the 250GB. Honestly I doubt many people would be able to do it if they were challenged to.
Is this really a surprise... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Welcome to no Net Neutrality (Score:2, Insightful)
For a nation made up of 'We The People', Corporations have the one and only voice.
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from starting your own broadband company, and then charging a flat rate with absolutely no limits on usage. There may be some trouble with you keeping that going, though, because you'll have to charge higher than the ongoing rates to keep it alive, or will go out of business. This isn't about who has a "voice," it's about businesses providing services, and people who want higher speeds deciding whether or not that higher speed - with a usage cap - is a good fit for how they use bandwidth every month.
Constitution should read 'We The Patrons Of The Companies'
You'd prefer, "We the people who get to force each other to do whatever we tell them to do, but not me, because if I run a company myself, I don't want anyone telling me what prices to charge, only other people should be told that." ... right? Do you even understand the purpose of the Constitution? It essentially defines the things that government may not do to interfere with your life. It also outlines the manner in which the government is structured and managed. It doesn't say anything about getting involved in telling one person what to charge another person for a basket of vegetables (or what color those vegetables should be), the use of a piece of fiber attached to their network, or what it should cost to have your car waxed.
... what? The Bureau Of What All Things Should Cost? Do you understand that you, yourself, would be one of those things that has a price set on it?
... I get it now. You don't actually work for a living. You don't actually charge anyone for your time, and you don't have any patrons of your own. This explains a few things.
Just say what you mean. You want a centrally managed economy that prevents Eeeevil companies from competing with each other and trying to price things to win your business while managing to also stay in business. You consider that all to be too messy and unfair to you. So you'd rather that The People get to dictate prices by way of
Wait a minute
Re:I'm using the 105Mbit service. The datacap is r (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are you judging? Maybe he has more than one kid? One child is watching the new pixar movie, while another is upstairs working on a online college course that has them running through some online lectures.
Then, you have the Mom, who is a work at home mom and has to constantly keep up-to-date with their training materials.
Now, this mom that works from home, always has to have some type of white noise in the background so jumps onto a hulu channel herself.
250GB is easy to burn through if you are single, and EVEN EASIER to burn though if you are married and have kids.
Re:That's normal (Score:5, Insightful)
Speed is not just about downloading more. It is also about downloading stuff quicker, believe it or not. Even if I wouldn't go anywhere near the cap, I would love that speed if I needed to download a movie or two onto my iPad to take on a long journey, because I might not think about it until it's rather late. If I can do that in 10 minutes, then grand.
And ISP have a clue, believe it or not. They know that only about 0.5% or less of their customers regularly go over the cap, and very few actually find the caps to be a problem. If they could just not take that bothersome 0.5% as customers, they would probably be better off. Here in the UK, I just signed up for a broadband deal that has a 60GB cap, but allows me unlimited downloads that don't count towards my cap between midnight and 8am. That seems a reasonable compromise to me. Downloads as much as you want but don't affect other customers who have lower needs, but who still want to watch Youtube videos in HD.
Re:Caps of traffic management? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll take the French ISP Free. No traffic shaping, no bandwidth cap, no traffic management, oh, and 100MBit down and 50Mbit up fiber connection delivered to your home – not shared by the street as it is with Virgin in the UK.
Re:That's normal (Score:0, Insightful)
250 gigs of data is their normal cap across the board.
And that limit is very easy to approach, even on their slowest line, with moderate netflix + gaming. Their penalties for going over 250 are pretty severe.
Really? That's strange because I watch Netflix pretty much every night, game allot, both on xbox and on PC, and I have a hard time even getting close to 200gb. Oh and my son also plays games, watches youtube, etc. Then there's my wife who is online as well. All 3 of us using the net here and there, many times all concurrently and we still can't get to 250gb a month or even come close to it.
I normally sit around 150gb or so per month. So while this may be anecdotal evidence I have to call bullshit on your claims that it is east to get to. BTW I'm on the 12mb service, so not even the lowest speed either.
Re:I'm using the 105Mbit service and the cap is re (Score:5, Insightful)
All it takes is two Netflix streaming users in one household. Right before the cap started Comcast opened a reporting page to show us our average usage for the previous three months. I had hit the cap on all three months, even if for month three I cut down my torrent usage down to zero. That means we hit our cap just watching streamed video. I ditched Comcast (22/8, not that it ever performed at that level) for FIOS (25/25 for $5 per month, always performs beautifully) and never looked back.