Comcast Floats a 250GB Monthly Bandwidth Limit 578
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.
Bill Gatesism... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Obviously you've not seen the amount of HD pr0n out there.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I did some research to find out what Comcast's limit was and the only thing I could com
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
False. As always, if you want to run a server you should install a business class line. SOHO and residential services are for home use, not servers. Read your EULA.
Lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Lawsuit (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Lawsuit (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not the users fault at all if the ISPs are going over capacity by selling what they do not have. In fact, if they hit their networks capacity and continue to sell the same terms to new customers, in the end they are comitting fraud (like selling someone a Ferrari at reasonable prices for a Ferrari and then delivering a Civic, to use the ever popular car analogies).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Feel lucky. Almost ISPs now have clauses in their contract that allows them to terminate service on a whim, and there is no law that requires them to provide you with service.
This isn't true, at least in the US.
It's complicated, but cable and phone companies are required to provide "nondiscriminatory" access to their services. You can sue them for cutting you off for ANY reason other than lack of payment. A number of spammers have done this successfully.
How do you do it? Ignore any messages they send you about cutting off the service and keep sending in checks. They won't (immediately) send them back. Then file in small claims court claiming they're stealing from you (by taking
Re:Lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
Before anyone bleats about "they still can't just change the terms, there has to be agreement - there /was/ agreement that they could - that'd be your signature. There was even "consideration" given, the right to have fee
Re:Lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
Good luck with your lawsuit.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Get a grip dude. I read the article. Actually I read about it in several places. My argument is not really about bandwidth caps, but truth in advertising. They are thinking of sneaking in bandwidth caps after people have signed up. This is not right. If you sign up for one thing then they say they are changing the rules, that is bullshit. Pure and simple.
Another thing is comcast if fucking huge. If they get away with it what is to stop other providers from doing the same thing? They are basicall
Re:Lawsuit (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Not bad (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a Ripoff (Score:3, Informative)
I have local backup, but I keep a offsite backup of my data in case of a natural disaster.
Comcast has a monopoly in many markets (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Comcast has a monopoly in many markets (Score:4, Interesting)
Comcast does have a monopoly on broadband in many areas.
Re:Comcast has a monopoly in many markets (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
AND WiMax is not available, AND satellite isn't possible, AND dial-up isn't available. I think if you lived in an area that remote, Comcast cable being in the ground is kind of a laughable impossibility.
None of the three options you listed provide anywhere close to the bandwidth of cable. Satellite would be the closest, but of course with that you are still using dialup for uploads and you have to deal with high latency.
I would agree that DSL is probably available in most places where cable is available. Indeed, there are plenty of rural areas where DSL is available but cable is not.
Still, it is a very common situation even in cities to have your only options for high speed internet be Comcast cab
Re: (Score:2)
Though I agree the OP was poorly worded: Should have been "broadband" internet, since dialup is pretty ubiquitous. Otherwise there are huge swaths of this country that Comcast currently has a monopoly on.
=Smidge=
Re: (Score:2)
> I think if you lived in an area that remote, Comcast cable being in the ground is kind of a laughable impossibility.
Name one city in North America where WiMax exists today as a commercial service.
Satellite has hellish latencies that are intolerable to begin with, and made even worse by the way the satellite routers actually package the packets for uplink.
Dialup? You can't be serious. You might as well argue that
Re: (Score:2)
It's also not really fair to pretend that dialup is the same class of service as a cable connection. It's a little like saying "Don't like Ford? Well then you can drive a moped with your 2 kids in the saddle bags." --
Could be worse (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Could be worse (Score:4, Interesting)
Virgin are one of the worst offenders, because like comcast they also have a cap but won't tell you what it is until you go over it and get billed or disconnected.
At least if you know up front, you can avoid such ISPs...
If leased lines were cheaper, i would consider one (true uncapped service)... In the US you can get a T1 line for around $350/month which isn't too bad for guaranteed up/down rates and business class service.
Re: (Score:2, Redundant)
It's not really the limit that is the issue, it is the principal of the thing. If I sign up for rated cable then that is fine. If the package says on it 250 GB a month limit, I can live with that. 250 GB is a shit load of data for a home account.
But if the damn thing say Unlimited on it then I expect it to be unlimited. Unlimited means unlimited. Even if they say that applies to online, well if I'm online I expect to be able to do something.
They may say that applies to no time limit. Well what is
Re: (Score:2)
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.
I knew the UK was quite bad, been reading about BT and all the great things they've done in order to prevent the spread of high-speed internet, but 1 - 30gigs sounds horrible.
Anyways, the issue with comcast isn't really the cap, I mean, the vast majority won't care if the DL cap is 250gigs, the only thing is, they shouldn't advertise it as unlimited if they have a cap.
However, they haven't put the cap in effect yet which means that it is unlimited right now, and if they do put it there they should in
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh and EVERY SINGLE ONE of them, even the truly uncapped ones have a "fair usage" policy in their T&C's, essentially meaning they can kick you off as and when they feel like it.
I think this is true for every ISP on the planet, which is sad.
250? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:250? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:250? Do The Math (Score:4, Interesting)
Right! And a single 30GB BluRay equivalent High Def download/rental takes out 4 days of that per movie. Think of that the next time you hear about Apple trying to kill off Netflix and rentals by mail in favor of their more expensive AppleTV and iTMS replacement.
250 GBs? (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I routinely use ~250gb+ a month without a problem. The only time I got an angry phone call was when I used ~500gb.
You are the exception, not the rule, and you are also the reason that the rest of us have to suffer these 'fair usage policies'.
I welcome the definition of an actual cap, then you have some kind of comeback if they say you are using it excessively, whereas at the moment you don't. Currently, if they say it's too much, it's too much.
This also empowers the consumer by giving them the information they need to make a purchase. If 2 companies advertise 'unlimited with fair usage' how do I know which one wi
An improvement (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:How to fix cable: (Score:5, Interesting)
Local cable franchise boards are pretty powerless to have an effect on Comcast policy.
The best way to hurt Comcast is to go to DSL if available. If not, work at the federal level. The pay-as-you-go model makes telcos and Comcast drool. This is only the tip of the iceberg, as these guys aren't into heavy capital investments to stay competitive. They use the mantra, 'shareholder value', 'shareholder value', 'oh me padme Wall Street'.
You're a customer? Fuck you. Downloading distros that go over your limit? Get the second half of it next month, chump. Or did you see our 'business plans'?
Once a viable broadband alternative, Comcast has turned themselves into crap magnets. They and the other telcos want to be above the law, and their customers be damned. Sitting in a cable franchise meeting, sadly, won't do a thing but provide an opportunity to see how ineffective they are, and how boring those meetings can be.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Tiered bandwidth pricing (Score:2)
Bad news (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Open Wifi (Score:5, Funny)
A high cap, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Heavy usage? (Score:4, Insightful)
Now i wouldn't have an issue if that's how the service was sold (800kb service, burstable to 10mb or whatever)... But ISP marketing tries to make the service out to be something it's not. And then have the nerve to complain when people try to actually use what they thought they were buying.
Thats 8 GB a DAY people, or 800 kbps 24/7! (Score:3, Informative)
8 GB a day is a crapload of data.
In fact, thats 800 kbps SUSTAINED USAGE, 24/7!
Anyone shifting that much data is probably violating a huge number of TOS clauses anyway.
Outliers & Liars (Score:5, Informative)
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
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
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.
Right now, I can't say I have a problem with this (Score:3, Insightful)
This will limit new uses of the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
This will also stifle hardware innovation (Score:3, Interesting)
We'll be stuck at ugly, low resolution video for decades, considering how glacially slow comcast and other ISPs are to offer improvements to service for affordable prices. That cap will probably be the same in 2018. I don't understand why people are so gu
Meaningless? (Score:2)
Ludicrous bandwidth caps and no customer service (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The first step is the important one (Score:2)
Comcast Insiders (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a comcastrophe!!! (Score:2)
I'm outraged (Score:5, Insightful)
Why gripe? (Score:2)
The contract is month-to-month (minus equipment lock-in), either party can leave.
Sorry, I have no sympathy for hogs and lots for those on shared circuits whose traffic gets squeezed.
They forgot something in their calculations (Score:4, Insightful)
With 6 people sharing cable, that impossible-to-reach 250GB turns into a paltry 42GB. Or about 1.4 gigs a day. It would be very easy to accidentally hit that if you watch videos online.
I hope that they plan to tiered service like cell phone companies. Ideally with automatic tiering - so rather than paying ridiculous overage charges per-GB, you just pay for the price of the next tier. (as in, up to 250GB is $X a month, 300GB is $X+$Y/month, etc)
1/2 a terabyte a month (Score:4, Informative)
Jonah HEX
Official statements (Score:4, Informative)
The Moving Limit (Score:4, Interesting)
An analogy:
Once upon a time all calls to 411 information were free. Well not free really, but included in what you paid for telephone service. Then the telephone companies cried out how much 411 was costing them. (They weren't already making enough profits.) They claimed that this high cost was caused by only a few people who used the service excessively as opposed to using the nicely provided telephone directories. They got the regulators to set a limit that only the first 15 calls to 411 each month would be "free", after which you'd have to pay per call. This would only impact the "excessive users of the service" they successfully argued to quell public opposition.
Well, you guessed it. That 15-free-calls-per-month quickly dropped in broad steps to 3-free-calls-per-month, and then 411 service was spun off into its own profit-making enterprise and now you pay every time you use it. And you phone bills were never reduced from this "savings".
How long before Comcasts 250GB/month cap becomes 220GB/month. 200GB/month. Down so low that you can't watch video online (unless you watch Comcast's video delivery service, which will mysteriously not count against your bandwidth cap) without paying extra. Just watch it happen.
Two interesting things about this Comcast proposal:
First: For the heavy user, simply buying two accounts at the ~$50/month rate and having two modems is a far cheaper way to get to 500GB/month than paying the cap-breaking charge.
Secondly: Although Comcast decrys how a few heavy users are overloading their system to the detriment of all the other users on the cable loop, simply by paying more money WITH NO IMPROVEMENTS TO THE CABLE LOOP AT ALL this heavy usage problem magically goes away and you can use all you want to pay for.
Obvious conclusion: Comcast Lies like a Rug to try and squeeze out increased profits in every manner possible. Something that should not be allowed in a regulated monopoly.
This doesn't address the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
My suggestion to Comcast would be to use a time-based rate limit. From 8am - 2am local track the bandwidth, from 2am - 8am give untracked time.
All us geeks can schedule our torrents and other downloads to run during that time.
My stuff is all legal, but I can easily consume that much bandwidth in a busy month. I download a handful of DVD ISOs (Fedora betas, previews, releases, CentOS releases, MythDora betas and releases, Live CDs) and all that can wait until off-hours.
My day usage for work (I work from home 2-3 days a week, sometimes the entire week) is often pretty constant as well. I've typcially got Cisco MeetingPlace sessions going (seen the new Cisco commercials with the little girl selling cookies? I sell the stuff that makes all the work), with multiple VPNs going on back to the office and customers all day long, downloading Cisco patches (CallManager 5/6 "patches" are 1.5gb each), etc.
Plus, we're going to see more and more streaming TV/movies going on. We've a MythDora box, and if ever they removed all the DRM junk and just let us download movies to watch how we want, we'd be watching them on there.
Comcast needs to get over the fact that we may have our own "set top" boxes that don't come from them (like my MythDora) and may get our content from another provider, using our unlimited bandwidth.
Again, my 2am-8am solution would work here - I don't care about seeing most shows the same day/time it is on. There are some things my Wife wants that way (American Idle, Dancing with the Stars) as people are talking about it the next day, but all the rest can wait a day (and we probably won't watch it for many days, perhaps a week or so). If I want to download this from my own content provider, I could schedule this for 2am-8am.
That, and 250gb/month is going to seem very small very soon. I recently turned up a 1gb/s internet connection to CSU CENIC at my children's district office, which in turn has 1gb/s internal connections to all the district schools. They don't even know how to use that much bandwidth (yet) having come from sharing something like 40mb/s before.
I'm betting my local junior college will be getting a similar connection soon as well and could offer high-bandwidth classes, and for that matter many schools are offering that.
I've got 4 kids, ages 7-10, and right now there internet usage is rather light (lego.com, disney.com, etc.), but there all a bit on the geekish side like me, and I'm sure we'll always be a top-0.01% "normal" usage household (not downloading anything not legally available) - at least for another 11-15 years or so (depending if they stay at home to go to the local JC and CSU).
If Comcast wants to pull this sort of stunt locally, they may also find themselves losing their franchises.
Raised Expectations (Score:3, Insightful)
What a typical DSL product offers is "download speed bursting to 8mbps shared amongst 20-50 users" depending on the contention ratio. The problem is that the infrastructure can't handle modern internet usage - streaming video, etc, when more than a few people are using it at the same time. In order to provide a fair internet service to the other people who are also using that connection they have to throttle big bandwidth users. This wasn't a problem even a couple of years ago, internet use was mostly bursty, with gaps of inactivity.
Internet service should be sold based upon a minimum guaranteed bit rate, and the burst bit rate. I'd rather go for 256kbps/2mbps than 64kbps/8mbps.
Oddly enough some services never seem to have a problem. Virgin Media Cable in my area is great, even at peak times you can get 250KB/s downloads on their budget 2mbps package. Yet in other areas it apparently sucks Satan's scaly cock.
I really don't mind the idea of reasonable bandwidth caps, as long as they increase by ~25% year on year. 250GB/s is a lot of bandwidth, that's more movies than you can find the time to watch in a month, even in HD. Probably an issue for shared geek hohuseholds though.
Hmm. not bad if they use Cingular idea (Score:3, Insightful)
So I could use 20,20,500,20,20.
I think this is going to be an issue as folks use the internet as cable. I don't think 250gb will affect normal P2P much. It took me about 15 months to download one terrabyte of data so that is about 80 gig a month.
The problem is... 250 now... then 200... then 150...
The other problem is...
200mb shows now... 700mb shows three years from now (as we all go HD).
People wouldn't pirate if prices were reasonable. If anime were $22 instead of $80, I would buy it. Sometimes, it's easier to wait for prices to come down than to download (X-Files, La Femme Nikita, Get Smart).
I currently have a 1,000 hour backlog of things to watch on purchased DVD's. That's enough that some things, i will probably never ever see.
Just wait for weekend Gigabytes (Score:3, Insightful)
The thing that should worry anyone is that cell phone companies make much of their money from overage fees.
I predict that if this goes into place, rather than improving the service, their effort will go into ever more complicated and confusing fee schedules.
When you do the math, consider this. (Score:3, Insightful)
They mostly have 10MB interfaces? Then 10mb/s =600mb/m =36000mb/hr =4500MBytes/hr?
=108000MBytes/day?
Ok, this is Ethernet. Derate x.6 for CSMA/CD (I know it's switched. Don't believe you can get 100% utilization on a switched line). And do we get 64.8GBytes/day?
Wow. Let me do this again:
10mb/sec x.0 =6mb/sec =360mb/min =21600mb/hr = 2.16GByte/hr? (Byte = 8 bits?) For those of you scoring at home, this about half the speed of a streaming DDS-3 tape drive, probably LVD, with compression.
Crap, I can't add any more. Maybe if we approach this differently?
250GB/mo = 8.33GB/day. Somwhere I read that a Blu-Ray single-layer disc is 25GB. If we assume that a typical BR movei will take half the disc (not supported by evidence) then we need 12GB to dump a movie. We can dump about 20 movies a month and still have some cap room left to play Halo.
But the math escapes me. If my cable modem is indeed 10MB, now much fracking data can I pump through it 24x7?
I thought this would be easy. Needless to say, I am not a rocket scientist.
Of course, if DOCSIS 2.0 is the system, it's limited to 30MB/s. Go look up the specs yersef. So I can't get more than 30mb no matter, and that's the limit. megaBIT. Math. Crap.
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
It's should be listed as "800Kb/s, burstable 7Mb/s" or simply "250GB/month"
Don't be short sighted.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
thats over 350 tv episodes bittorrented (assuming you share at least 1:1)
or
thats over $9,000,000 in fines to the MAFIAA (at their current discount rate of $30k per item)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
thats over 350 tv episodes bittorrented (assuming you share at least 1:1)
or
thats over $9,000,000 in fines to the MAFIAA (at their current discount rate of $30k per item)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
$ vnstat -m
eth0 / monthly
month rx | tx | total
Jan '08 26.70 GB | 34.97 GB | 61.67 GB
Feb '08 65.46 GB | 111.99 GB | 177.45 GB
Mar '08 52.28 GB | 139.67 GB | 191.95 GB
Apr '08 53.86 GB | 155.96 GB | 209.82 GB
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:4, Informative)
-- Said a crack addict once.
Seriously, if you are using MORE than 1GB a day, you are a heavy user. And you, are definitely a heavy user considering you have some sort of servers running (bittorrent?). After all, there is no way you can rack up tx>rx unless you are running something like that.
Secondly, you are using 7GB a day. If that usage is over 7 hours a day, then your are using 300kB/s of bandwidth at every single second of those 7 hours!!
Finally, if you are truly not a heavy user, then your box is riddled with spam bots or similar malware.
30GB/month is moderate usage (including watch 2 hours of youtube a day). 0-2GB/mo is low usage.
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:4, Interesting)
Well which is it? Do you have a cutting edge ultra fast network, or do you have a bogged down shitty neighborhood shared backbone?
Pay us 120 bucks a month for your cable and we'll give you ultra compressed, grainy "HD" channels, spotty unlimited cable internet, and unlimited complaints about how you're breaking our network with your massive downloads!
This company is a sham, this bandwidth limit is a sham, and I hope they both sink like stones; rest assured that when I move next, I will move somewhere that has FIOS available.
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I have a 7Mb Comcast connection and I expect to get to be able to use it.
I have my connection shared out between myself, my room mate, and a collection of devices. We both work from home a decent amount during any given month (I am on call and he works on projects after hours if there is a crunch), plus we both game on our PC's, I have a Linux box I use for ventrilo, and sharing photos with friends, etc. I also have my Xbox, Wii and Tivo runn
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes I get good burst speeds and low latency, which are fine, but when someone pays $100+ a month for cable/internet I expect them to let me use it as much as I want. If that means downloading 15GB files every night so be it.
The point was more that I'm fairly certain I could use 250GB, but the limiting factor is how slow my actual connection is regardless of what I pay for. If they realistically know that I will see the same performance in a 3Mb, 5Mb, 7Mb line, then they shouldn't charge differently for them. If I pay for a separate level of connection I expect there to be some gain for it, even if that means my share of the overall pipe is 200k on average instead of 150k.
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:5, Informative)
If you have a commercial connection that offers 6mbps, SLA'd, that's different, but you don't, because you wouldn't be a target of this if you were.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The The difference is that the alternative is that they can just progressively throttle back the speed (allowed by the "up to" part) as you use more. You still have "the internet", and thus "unlimited internet" (I've never seen an ad that says "Unlimited data throughput"), until it's a mathematical impossibility for you to exceed the quota.
Personally that's the approach that I think they should be pursuing, not hard caps. I don't do a lot on my up-to-10Mbps connection, but when I do I
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:5, Informative)
A real 6Mb connection is a fraction DS3 with a SLA. Ballpark, you're talking about $3k a month for that kind of service, and that's assuming you live in a major metro area where the loop won't be exorbitant.
That is how much always-on, exclusively-yours bandwidth actually costs. So when you only pay $40 a month, it ought to be a sign that what you're going to get is a whole lot less.
In the case of Comcast, they are actually pretty up-front these days about speeds. (Bandwidth caps, not so much, but as TFA alludes to, they seem to be working on it.) That "6 megabits" is a burst speed. I don't like Comcast and as a result keep a pretty close eye on them, and they've never advertised it as anything but. If you---or anyone else---thought that you were actually buying a 6Mb constant (~2TB/mo. transfer) connection for $40/mo, you're laughably mistaken. Bandwidth just ain't that cheap.
Has Comcast engaged in some shady advertising in the past? Sure. Back when they called their service "unlimited" internet, they could rightly be taken to task for cutting people off. But they don't advertise that anymore and haven't in years. It's popular around here to sling mud at Comcast, and while there are lots of valid reasons for criticizing them, it's about time customers started wising up and started reading the fine (or not-so-fine) print about what they're signing up for. I have very little sympathy for anyone who takes asterisk-laden advertising copy on faith without question.
While it certainly sucks that residential broadband providers like Comcast oversubscribe their backbone capacity, most people wouldn't like the alternative: it would quickly price HSI out of reach of virtually all consumers.
Comcast is without a doubt pretty evil, and it's a crying shame that we don't have any real competition in most broadband markets, but people whining that they don't get fractional-DS3 service from their cable modem is tiring. In other news, my Volkswagen doesn't go as fast as a Ferrari.
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
(I need to work on my spellchecking lol) (Score:5, Insightful)
If they happened to offer maximum speed at all caps and had a variable rate of cap is one thing, but that's not the case here, it creates an artificial discrepancy.
Also, yeah consumers are typically not even close to slashdot-smart so I wouldn't be surprised if plenty are confused by the changes or don't even understand the big deal.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's just for one site, and only very early in our "digital delivery" revolution we're going through. You can
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Take a look at your power or water bill sometime. They both charge graduated rates based on over usage.
No, not mine :) I'm in a high rise, and am billed by the landlord. I get your point, though.
:)
I'd like to point out that both water and power are heavily regulated, and as a result those rate schedules are hammered out over public meetings and subject to approval by a public body. Surely Comcast doesn't want to be in that position?
You are right that 250GB is a lot by today's standards, but HD movies are the future, and today's 1.4GB standard-def DiVX movie is tomorrow's 8GB high-def H264 movie.
Or, to stay
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Comcaast usage policy: Pay more, get less (Score:5, Informative)
They've already admitted to bumping people off the service entirely for downloading ~90GB/mo.
There's no way they'll let those guys back in and not even charge them overages.
This is Comcast we're talking about. I'm going to be skeptical of anything they say that even appears reasonable -- and I'm not going to waste any time entertaining such a notion so long as it's merely rumor.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't think these rates are reasonable, go with whatever the competing ISP in your area is. That's capitalism at work. All that matters here is whether or not
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed. 250GB seems on a high end for them.
Maybe they're talking 'bits' instead of 'bytes'. ie: 250Gigabits seems to be approaching the upper limit of what they'd likely consider reasonable usage.
Likely some manager said ``the upper limit should be 50% more than what a 56kbps modem would do in a month'' or something nebulous like that... which actually comes out to ~250-ish Gigabits.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And 250GB is a reasonable limit for the price. That's roughly 100KB/s 24/7.
Exactly. Comcast is starting to see the possibility of having their cable TV service hurt because people are starting to figure out that they can just stream television over IP. At first glance this 250GB limit sounds reasonable because people are thinking of it as 250GB that is downloaded and stored indefinitely on their disk. The limit is being put in place to prevent STREAMING media I.E. stuff that you DON'T keep around after you're finished watching it.
Now, that 250GB sounds fair if you're talking
Re: (Score:2)