Comcast Floats a 250GB Monthly Bandwidth Limit

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

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.

Re:Lawsuit

Lawsuit could work maybe once, but then they would just change their contract. Story for you: Several years ago, I lived in a small town. So small that when my house of 5 power users got the only broadband service available in the town run by a small "mom and pop" type company... after the first month we got a letter stating that we went over some bandwidth limit that they had apparently imposed out of thin air. I reviewed the contract I had signed, the latest version of their contract... there was absolutely nothing about it in the contract. The letter was nice enough that they asked me to cut back on usage. I immediately set up my internet gateway to monitor and track all bandwidth usage on the WAN NIC. Next month rolls by and we get another letter from the ISP stating that if we continued to use as much bandwidth as we did that they'd be forced to cancel our residential account or have us upgrade to a business account. I went to the gateway and checked the bandwidth usage. It was roughly 30 GB of usage. Not too much in the grand scheme of things. So I called the ISP's manager. I talked to him. I told him that we were paying for unlimited usage and asked why we were receiving the letters. He told us they had a "fuzzy limit" that was "at the descretion of their network admin". After some more heated discussion, he hung up on me. Next month rolls around and we get a letter stating that because we violated the contract they have cancelled our account. So I took the company to court. What was so interesting was that in court the company brought some interesting data in. Apparently, because the company serviced such a small area and that area was something you could consider "not very tech savy"... their grounds on the cancellation of our contract was based on one piece of data. Apparently, of the total bandwidth usage by their customers, my house was responsible for 80% of that usage. Luckily, the judge was tech savy enough to understand what was happening. He read through the contract I had signed and the latest version that the company is having customers sign. No where in either of them did he see that there was any "limit" or notion of a "fuzzy limit". The only thing that could come close was the clause stating "activities that disrupt or degrade service are prohibitted". Looking at the rest of the data that the company brought in showed that the total bandwidth consumption by their customers was rouhly 65% of the total available bandwidth across the course of the month, and since my house was 80% of that 65%, we weren't coming anywhere close to saturating the network. Furthermore with the caps in place, there was no way that my house could possibly disrupt or degrade service to anyone but ourselves. So that ISP shot themselves in the foot. My service resumed the next day and I didn't hear a peep out of the company until I moved. The little guy wins over the not-so-big company.

Re:Lawsuit

Well, something like this would mean they're not saying "unlimited" anymore.

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.

Re:Lawsuit

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.

If you RTFA they are considering bandwidth caps, right now it is still unlimited. I'd assume if they do add caps they'd stop marketing it as "unlimited", or maybe they won't, who knows? There's no reason to throw a tantrum about it right now though.

Good luck with your lawsuit.

Re:Lawsuit

Oh come on already!
Here Comcast is (possibly) going to announce a change in their service plan so it does not say unlimited -exactly what you seem to want. And in the next sentence you are calling for a class action lawsuit. SUch a lawsuit would have the following effects:

1> really big fricken payoff for one waste of skin (lawyer)
2> maybe fifty bucks worth of discount coupons on PPV movies (you will have to spend 100 bucks to get the full value)
3> Comcast will raise their rates to show their customers who is really in charge.

For myself I would welcome the idea of a fair charge per gigabyte - My ideal would be a tiered system based on consumption similar to how my electric bill is structured. (1st 250 KWH is pretty cheap, next 750 not too bad, and beyond 1000 is highest. (Now how can I monitor my actual consumption bearin in mind that I have 5 PCs in my home network - can my router tell me how much internet bandwidth I am consuming?)

But, that is not what Comcast is doing. They are proposing a very high cap that would only affect the very highest consumers of bandwidth. Folks who have had any exposure to real American History may recall that when the Federal Income tax was introduced it was only going to affect the wealthiest 2% of the population. If Comcast goes through with this, they will just fold regular reductions in the cap into their frequent service changes and overall price hikes. (Yep we have added the Comcastic Mandarin Home SHopping Channel to your regular lineup - and this new service requires us to raise your basic cable charges by ....mumble... and (in mouseprint) your digital television service is now included in your internet bandwidth cap...

Re:Lawsuit

I don't know how shit works in Canada so I have no clue. But if they advertise 7MB/s and don't say anything about a lower speed cap then you should have some legal recourse. Really I think what is advertises should come over what it says on some contract they have you sign.

Bait and switch you know. This used to really fucking illegal, now its just a wink and a nod. Yeah, the tv said unlimited but the contract you signed says different. WTF is up with that?

Not bad

I'm fine with that as a limit if they also agree to stop tampering with the connections of anyone not in violation of it.

Comcast has a monopoly in many markets

Note that Comcast has a monopoly on Internet access in many markets (for example, where they are the sole cable provider, and DSL is not offered.) For users in these markets, there will be no alternative provider to switch to.

Could be worse

250Gb isn't that bad at all. There are some ISP's in the UK that have limits of as little as 1Gb a month.
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.

250?

Frankly, I'll be glad if they name a cap instead of this nebulous one they may or may not have, and may or may not enforce. And 250GB is pretty good, uTorrent downloads near-constantly for me, and I think I'd have trouble hitting that. That's about 8GB a day.

Re:250?

First, this is what is known in the political world as a "trial balloon". Meaning, they are using a inside source to release the information to see it is builds traction without risk of embarrassment..

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:250?

And 250GB is pretty good, uTorrent downloads near-constantly for me, and I think I'd have trouble hitting that. That's about 8GB a day.

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.

An improvement

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.

How to fix cable:

Here's how to get started on fixing our cable woes: Go to your city's website and find info on the municipal cable board. They likely meet monthly or bimonthly, and their meetings will be open to the public. Get there early and make sure someone on the board knows that you have something to say. Hopefully, there will be a local Comcast (or, in my case, Charter) representative there. During the meeting, the board will open up for public comment. At this point, make generalized claims about how Comcast is purposefully hindering innovation which is bad for the city (anecdotal evidence will likely not work here unless it supports a generalized claim... the cable board is not there to hear your personal story). Assert that maintaining a franchising agreement with Comcast is beneficial only to Comcast and that residents of your city are being unfairly price-gouged.

Now, here's the tricky part: Keep going to the meetings, asserting the same thing. Heck, try to get a group to go. Make sure the board knows that Comcast is pissing off a bunch of really smart people. This works even better if this happens in multiple cities.... the folks at the cable HQs will get these odd reports of citizens showing up at tons of municipalities and complaining.

Open Wifi

My neighbors are going to be pissed when they see their next comcast bill!

A high cap, but...

250gb a month would be over 8gb a day, assuming a 31-day month (the worst-case scenario). I have no problem with that. I've never even come CLOSE to downloading that much.

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.

Outliers & Liars

Reader Acererak points that it would take some pretty heavy usage (by current standards) to hit the cap described.

It's easy to say that if you're not one of the outliers. It's within Comcast's right to introduce this cap. And I'm sure they'll let it sit there as Netflix streams and iPod video become more and more popular. Or they'll even lower it by pure logic of it being only a need of 3% of the populace so who cares if we piss them off? If it helps the other 97% maybe it isn't such a bad idea.

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 ... are they going to limit the total amount of TV I can air in my home?

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 .... after which we change to that it remained at 1.2 Mbps download. What else could we do? There's no competition in cable internet.

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.

This will limit new uses of the Internet

One of the scary things about this is that it will make new, high bandwidth, applications of the Internet infeasible. If you had been asked what was a reasonable amount of data to download 3 or 4 years ago, you would probably give a much lower value than you do today. Why? You would not have been using many of the services that you do now, because they simply did not exist. Modern services are much more video and audio intensive. Ads take much more bandwidth than they used to. We are seeing a transition of services traditionally provided by the cable companies, such as streaming of television programs, moving to the Internet. Calls on Skype now support high quality video. Software distributed over the Internet (for example, the latest version of your favorite Linux distribution) can easily run close to a gigabyte per instance. You can imagine that new applications will follow soon that we haven't imagined yet. Comcast is attempting to do the following:

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.

Ludicrous bandwidth caps and no customer service

They just cut me off 2 weeks ago without notice for bandwidth 'abuse.' It was pretty stupid. Somehow I had roughly 120GB used in the month, on a 3Mbps plan. I didn't even care that there's no way even with PSN stuff going on that I could have used that much, just the fact my unlimited always on internet is not unlimited, and that I don't deserve notice of disconnection even by phone bothers me.

I'm no mathematician, but my math says:
3Mbps / 8 = 375KBps
60s * 60min * 24h * 28d = 2419200s/month
375KBps * 2419200s = 907200000KB/month
Which is roughly 865GB.
At their advertised speed, if one were to actually be able to saturate it for their billing period, would be able to transfer 865GB of data. But they cut people for using 1/8th to 1/4th of that.
And they don't just cut you off, but you get a nifty 12 month ban from their internet service. The least they could have done is call me and tell me something, rather than me having to go into their office 2 days later and be told that they can't tell me anything and that I have to call their corporate office.

I'm outraged

How dare Comcast "consider" things?

Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less

blah blah blah, milk this, milk that.

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.

Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less

blah blah blah, milk this, milk that.

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.

But I pay for 7Mbit, Waaah, waah waaah! I want my 2 TERABytes per month! And I can't afford to pay any more because i have to buy 5 hard drives every month just to store all crap I download!

Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less

I don't mind a cap, so long as you can buy more once you hit it for a reasonable price.

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:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less

Take a look at your power or water bill sometime. They both charge graduated rates based on over usage.

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:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less

Isn't this a step in the right direction though? It would be nice to actually know the limits, so you can decide when and how you want to reach them. And 250GB is a reasonable limit for the price. That's roughly 100KB/s 24/7.