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Comcast To Cap Data Transfers At 250 GB In October
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Aug 28, 2008 07:10 PM
from the crimp-in-your-style dept.
from the crimp-in-your-style dept.
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."
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So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Funny)
The swine ! (Score:5, Funny)
How can I possibly make it through a month at 250 G? I, um, have a condition, yeah, that's it, that requires I download unlimited amounts of data from the internet. This is cause an undue hardship. As if comcast has the RIGHT to take this from me. If my connection weren't actually my neighbors, I'd SUE THEIR ASSES pronto!
So what shall I do Slashdot? How can I get my umlimited back? Get a bigger Wifi antenna? I heard about that but what about bandwidth?
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Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Insightful)
yea, that's why my kitchen and bathroom faucets stop working if i use more than 250 gallons of water a month...
it's not hard to calculate how much bandwidth the average user requires each month and then take that amount * the number of subscribers you have, and make sure that your capabilities can match that level of traffic. of course, this doesn't work if you oversell and _advertise your service as "unlimited"_.
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Which is absolutely fine (Score:5, Insightful)
Provided they tell you that up front. Not telling you and still capping your service is most charitably considered sleazy and is hopefully something they could get sued/prosecuted for.
And what about the screwing around with P2P traffic? Are they still going to do that and pretend that they aren't?
Re:Which is absolutely fine (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree... about time they finally told us what their REAL bandwidth limit is.
Now the next step is throttling connections when they reach 80% of that limit, so that they won't exceed it (Reach 80% of that 20%, and they'll throttle it even more, and so on). Then you can pay an extra amount of money for a larger bandwidth cap, like 500GB or 1TB per month.
Ta-da! Everybody happy.
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250 GB (Score:5, Funny)
Re:250 GB (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:250 GB (Score:5, Insightful)
It sucks already. If you watch one HD movie a day, you'll exceed the quota.
Of course, Comcast wants you to watch HD movies through their expensive pay-per-view service instead of downloading them...
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Okay folks (Score:5, Insightful)
I want my FIOS.
I want congress to SMACK THE TELCOS HARD. They have been collecting Billions of dollars in fees to provide Broadband and have delivered nothing.
I want the money paid back with interest NOW!
Re:Okay folks (Score:5, Interesting)
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Here come the "In Australia..." posts (Score:5, Insightful)
you are complaining about 250Gb?!? jeez, In Aus I have to pay $120/month (~$100US) for 25gb onpeak, 40gb offpeak ( that's 65gb/month for those of you who suck at math). I WISH I was in a position to bitch about 250gb/month.
Here we go... here come the Australians who inevitably pop into internet usage cap threads with their "In Australia we pay $500 a day for 10 mb up and down transfer... you should be happy with the restrictions your ISP is placing on you."
Dammit Australia, just because you have crap internet, the rest of the world shouldn't have to accept it!
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Re:Okay folks (Score:5, Informative)
You forget....
They also collected billions in TAX DOLLARS to fund the build out of their infrastructure.
I say the Feds audit every one of them hard.
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Just get a business acct... (Score:5, Informative)
And hell, if you're a little devious...those connections will run fine split into a MythTV box with an analog card, to get all of extended basic, and if you split that off into a HDHomerun...you can scan and get all the unencrypted QAM Digital and HD channels out there.
At least..so I hear. Anyway, that should more than compensate for a slightly higher monthly fee for internet service....
$150 a month isn't so bad, really (Score:5, Informative)
Much as I hate it, I'd rather spend the money on a Comcast Business connection than worry about whether or not I'm getting close to some artificial cap.
I FTP things in and out of my apartment all the damned time, including backup image files and the like, let alone dealing with torrents or streaming video. I'm sure I transfer more than 10GB a day.
Disgusting as it is, I don't have any other high speed alternative.
Boiling a Lobster (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe the plan is, this is fine now so nobody gripes. Same as it ever was, I don't notice the cap so there's effectively no cap, right?
In 5 years, 250GB will be used up in a week. Now they're saving money, and charging you if you want any more. The thing is, that 250GB cap has been there forever. Same as it ever was, right?
About Time (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm actually oddly happy about this. I was contacted in the past about going over the mysterious limit (I did about 400GB that month,) and since then I've been living in fear that I may go too high again and get my service cut for a year. Now that an actual known limit exists, I can easily monitor my usage accordingly via my WRT54GL flashed with Tomato.
A 250GB limit is more than fair, and as long as it is fully disclosed in advanced, I have no problem with it. Having secret, constantly changing limits with undefined penalties for violations is not acceptable for any contractually agreed upon service.
Reasonable. Now, a request... measurement. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is perfectly reasonable if they're up front about it. I have a request... I would like a method to see what my consumption so far is so I can plan appropriately.
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.
"Unlimited" Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
And I'm sure Comcast will make an effort to hide that little bit of information in the fine print so you don't notice it.
Honestly, they can't call it unlimited anymore. Unlimited has a set definition. It's not open to interpretation. If you introduce caps, or limits, well, you're giving a different service.
It would be nice if Comcast actually did something surprising... like, you know, give a good service? That would be tits.
Comcast Bandwidth Cap Hits October 1? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, looks like all my porn for the next 6 months is getting downloaded in September.
And what of VOIP? (Score:5, Insightful)
So say you have Comcast's triple-play or some VOIP service that rides out of your house on your Comcast connection. You get cut off for one reason or another, such as exceeding this cap. Is your phone service dead, too? Better have a mobile phone if 911 needs to be called?
More info (Score:5, Informative)
On the Comcast Network Management page [comcast.net], they note that:
Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 - 3 GB.
That puts the cap in a little more perspective, not that the 2+ TB/mo users will think it's reasonable.
Re:about time (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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Re:Still practically unlimited for most (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm. Would this include upload as well? I'm thinking that if you happened to have a number of highly desirable files in your P2P folder, other people grabbing a copy of your content might kick you up. Might this actually be the objective of such "reasonable" caps, to make people think twice before hosting such content?
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