Comcast To Cap Data Transfers At 250 GB In October 939
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."
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?
Re:The swine ! (Score:4, Interesting)
Out of interest, when are you planning on watching all that?
After all, it's hard to avoid the results from the bits you recorded - they were all over the media, etc. etc.
And just how many hours does that 250Gb consist of? I guess you must be taking a week or two off in order to watch it all?
It can be verified. (Score:4, Insightful)
There are ways to validate their claims. For example, my Linksys router is running the Tomato firmware, which provides a full-featured bandwidth monitor. I can get usage reports by hour, day, week, and month, as well as in real-time. It separates my usage into upstream and downstream, and gives me a combined total (which is the number that Comcast is concerned about). Now, a setup like this may be a little beyond your average websurfer, but then not many of them are likely to hit the 250 GB cap, anyway.
So now, if they call me again (and they have already done so once) I can verify their reports of my usage. I may not be able to convince the person on the phone, and they may still decide to cut my service, but at least I'll know I was right and have a record to use against them.
Very insightful point made in article (Score:5, Informative)
That statement actually relates well to a very insightful point made at the end of the article:
You are lucky to have some genuine competition in the form of FIOS. If I could, I would switch to that in a heartbeat, even if I had to pay a relatively large installation fee (probably up to 200 dollars). Unfortunately, just about everywhere I go I'm locked down to one provider. In the tiny town of Jackson, OH, I am restricted to Time Warner Cable (another company working on a cap), and before I was transferred here I lived in Minneapolis, subject to Comcast. I suppose I could potentially get DSL, but that is so much slower than cable it almost doesn't count as competition in the broadband market, and satellite is so latency heavy it doesn't count either. That leaves cable standing alone, unless you are lucky enough to have true broadband competition through FIOS.
In my opinion, cable providers are starting to stifle innovation and competition the same way large cell phone providers do. They see one company screwing the customers with a cap, and figure, "Hey, I can do that too! Now I can keep more money for profits instead of network upgrades." And with no competition to force changes on them, that's the way things will stay. Both cell phone companies and cable companies are able to stay the way they are because of huge barriers to entry... you can't lay another set of cable lines in every town, and it's prohibitively expensive to try to set up another nationwide cellular network. In instances like these, the government does need to step in to regulate the monopolies/oligopolies. My water company doesn't put a cap on how much I use because the government regulates that monopoly (granted, I do pay more the more I use, but if the cable companies went to that model without government intervention, it would probably be priced like the cell phone companies price text messages: 10 cents a kilobyte or something ridiculous. That's why I'm currently opposed to anything other than a flat rate from them).
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:4, Informative)
You can get up to 15mb/sec on DSL these days as long as you are within range. I realize that doesn't apply to everyone but many people can get it and dont even know about it. A lot of people dont realize that FIOS may go to 20mbit but if you get a good ISP like speakeasy you can go to 15mbit without any port blocking or throttling.
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose I could potentially get DSL, but that is so much slower than cable it almost doesn't count as competition in the broadband market
how fast is your cable connection? with adsl every person can have a 24mbps connection, to themselves which doesn't matter how much anyone else is using it nearby.
Cable last I checked is shared on a circuit common to at least a few households, so your mileage may vary depending on neighbours. still, if you can get faster than 24mbit on cable consistently I may consider switching from dsl to cable myself.
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:5, Informative)
I've got the choice between Qwest (turd sandwich) and Comcast (douchenozzle). I tried Qwest for less than a week before calling Comcast and asking for an install, and I dropped Qwest the day after Comcast was installed. Even with the unknowns, the service quality difference was undeniable.
Compare:
Qwest charged over 50 bucks a month, required a 1 year contract (you could only cancel penalty-free within the first 30 days, I got out just in time), and had a "max speed" of 3Mbps. I was lucky to get 2Mbps. The modem was such a POS that if I refreshed servers on Steam, it would drop all connections for about 10 seconds as the buffers overflowed. I only fixed that by putting it into bridge mode and configuring my router to handle all connectivity (DD-WRT on Linksys WRT54Gv2).
Qwest's site was often down or not working, and their tech support/customer service was nonexistant.
Compare that to my service thus far with Comcast:
I called up, and was told that the 6Mbps for 20 bucks a month was only for existing customers, but that they could give it to me for 25/month (plus $3 if I wanted a modem rental). Install was normally $99, but they knocked that down to $50 because I asked. When I got the modem plugged in, it had trouble synchronizing with comcast, and wasn't finishing the setup. I called tech support, and the guy didn't jerk me around at all. I explained what I'd tried, he said "sounds like you know what you're doing, since all you need is the firmware, how about I set that up for you, and I'll give you blast for free (16Mbps down, 1-2Mbps up)?"
I thanked him, the modem came up, and the performance has been consistently good. I get about 10Mbps down, and 5 (!) up. My pings are between 10-50 (versus 60-200 on Qwest). Now that there's a hard cap, I'm even happier, because I have an official limit to monitor.
Sure, it's not FiOS, but cable, in this area, is a hell of a lot better than DSL.
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:4, Informative)
And with ADSL your connection speed is COMPLETELY dependent upon your distance from the CO, making it near-impossible for most users to get connections as fast as cable's.
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude, that is the weakest (and some of the oldest) telco FUD in the broadband universe. It ought to be on Snopes if it's not already.
If your cable company connection slows down like you say, it's over usage or inadequate bandwidth being provided just like any other network. aka bad network management practice on behalf of the network operator.
It works the same way with DSL and your neighborhood (aka everyone within ~16,000ft/~3mi radius) DSLAM. No different at all. If the administering company doesn't maintain adequate upstream bandwidth for all concurrent users, you go slow when everyone gets online.
If you're suggesting that cable companies run craptastic networks (even more craptastic than the monopoly telco's I mean) that's one thing....but it's not related to the technology.
For what it's worth, I climbed on the cable internet bandwagon back in 1997 and have had cable internet service in multiple cities - usually in multiple areas of the city - and I've (knock on wood) never seen a slowdown ever. Not saying nobody has experienced this, just making the point that it's far from everyone who experiences the slowdowns you have. Sorry for your luck.
-Matt
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:5, Insightful)
200ms = "relatively"?!?! No offense, but WTF are you playing, WoW or something?
I'll admit I mostly play FPSes (TF2, CS:S), but as near as I can tell, anything over 80 is noticeable, 100 is pushing it, and anything above 120 noticeably affects gameplay. 200ms is almost unplayable and literally halfway to dialup pings. Once you factor in display (5+ms) mouse (5ms) and whatever internal delay on your system, it adds up quickly.
When was your ping issue resolved? Mostly I call it a myth because when the Cable vs. DSL war first emerged in 2000-2001 they had to come up with some sort of downside to cable. Even 8 years ago it was "in some cases cable may..." Eight years have passed and people still spout that shit off the same way they spout off how the Corvair was "unsafe at any speed" even though GM had resolved the issue with roll bars before Nader's film made it to theaters. I suspect cable companies solved the problem with capacity long before broadband made its way to the general population.
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:5, Interesting)
My state is trying out regional broadband served by the power district. I think fiber options from all the major vendors will be coming shortly. After all, if they lose these customers they're probably gone forever.
It's not like bandwidth costs a lot of money. If I moved closer to work I could have 100Mbps for $50/mo. Get this - my wife won't move because the area where I can get that from the power district is "too rural". So much for that density argument, eh?
Anyway, kudos to the power districts that are willing to step up and say: "People need broadband. If you won't serve 'em, we will."
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Insightful)
And what about that user that wants to see 3-5 movies a day? You see, they sold the service as "unlimited" then introduced limits. So maybe they should remove the bold red 150 point "UNLIMITED" from their advertisements. It's all about truth in advertising. If you have a limit, it isn't unlimited.
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Informative)
2 full length movies per day basically...
Or about 0.5 HD movies per day, or around 0.2 if you torrent.
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:4, Informative)
Assuming $50/month and a 250GB cap, that's a minumum usage rate of $0.20/GB if you use all 250GB every month. The $/GB goes up higher the less you use the network.
Think of it as metered usage with a $50 cap on the bill and a data limit that you didn't agree to.
To me that's worth some additional Comcast bashing.
I suspect this boils down to the cable co's chaffing at paying the monopoly telco's for their network access and they're trying to find ways [google.com] to pass more of those costs down to you, the customer. (Without you, the customer, taking your business elsewhere as a result.)
When you consider how much dark fiber [wikipedia.org] (particularly, see Butters' Law) is in the ground as well as Comcast's claims [publicknowledge.org] (p. 24, citation 83) that last-mile bandwidth cost is not the issue, the whole bandwidth situation for consumers here in the US is absurd.
-Matt
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Insightful)
200gb isn't that bad guys, will only piss off like 10 people, not me, screw'em
150gb isn't that bad guys, will only piss off like 50 people, not me, screw'em
100gb isn't that bad guys, will only piss off like 500 people, not me, screw'em
OMG! THEY SET THE CAP TO 50gb, As this directly effects me, since the other providers seen how they could lower the caps right along side them... I would like to ask why people are allowed to slowly wittle away at our freedoms, come everyone, join me in fighting this evil company!
(Just woke up, no coffee, not taking the time to make the post not look like I'm being an ass, sorry man)
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"_.
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...
I don't know how it works where you live, but in my city I pay more if I use more water. In fact, I pay much more per gallon the more I use. If you want Comcast to adopt water billing, it will be $50 for the first 250 GB, then $75 for the next 150, then $125 for the next 100.
calculating (Score:5, Informative)
I've noticed that my Netflix "watch instantly" simply does not work properly from 4 pm to about 10pm every day. Netflix says it appears to be comcast that is throttling things.
a good netflix connection needs about 2.5 to 3Mb/sec. So if I watch 4 hours of netflix a night then I need 43 Gigibits of data, or roughly 5.4 Gigibytes. times 30 days is only 162 Gigabytes.
So a 250GB cap does not seem way out of line for even substantial usage.
What I want is for COmcast to actually deliver untrhottled bandwidth during prime time. The cap I'm fine with.
Re:calculating (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a suspicion that Comcast could solve this problem for you if you ordered PPV movies through your cable box instead of netflix movies over the modem.
That would appear slightly anti-competitive though, so I am certain it isnt true.
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Insightful)
It did mention the cap is for "residential" accounts. For another $10-$20/mo you can flip to Comcast commercial
and voila no bandwidth caps. My guess is Comcast is going to get a flurry of "commercial" subscribers, and
achieve what they wanted all along -- to jack up the costs of a truly unlimited account, and to cap everyone else.
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Funny)
I'm going to pretend that you don't mean that. It would otherwise hurt me inside.
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:4, Insightful)
How do you think broadcast/multicast from a small number of prearranged sources impacts the network differently from unicast to and from arbitrary destinations?
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea of television as a broadcast medium is dead (as is always-running channels). Soon, you'll pick what and when to watch a la Tivo/Hulu/Netflix Watch It Now, etc.
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean like my unlimited long distance plan let's me do?
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference is.. the telcos bill you for each call.
Do you want the ISPs to start billing per-megabyte? It's like any business - you advertise a maximum usage that is financially tenable for the business at a given price, with various usage assumptions factored in (time of day, contention ratio etc.), and offer that to the consumer.
Anyone going substantially above the expectations of what you get for your money would be subject to excess charges - someone has to pay for the above-average usage.
Granted, it's a stupid thing that American ISPs have advertised "unlimited" in the past, but there's no good reason to bitch now that they've come clean about exactly what they can handle, and what the expectations are.
They expect $XX per month, you expect YY gigabytes per month. What's wrong with putting that down on paper rather than "uh, yeah, use as much as we consider viable.. we'll tell you when you hit it"?
We could have unlimited internet plans.. but would everyone be willing to pay extra to expand the infrastructure?
Re:Cable TV != Cable Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Interesting)
Watching QAM traffic
If you go into the diagnostics screens of your digital cable box you can see how much traffic is transferred. Wikipedia has an OK (not great) article on QAM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation [wikipedia.org]
They're not exactly fixed; they use different compression ratios on different channels, as you can see watching some high-def programming the clarity is sometimes no better than standard def programming because of compression artifacts (blocking, banding, etc.) and if you go into the diagnostic screens you can watch how many packets are being transferred in realtime. (They don't forbid you from going into those screens in case you were wondering - I went into them myself to gather info to report to customer support when I had my service updated and wasn't getting programming I should have access to. They just won't tell you how to go into those screens). Incidentally if you're not 100% sure which channels are actually analog and you have a newer box which gives you S/PDIF on both digital an analog channels, use the diagnostic screens to determine what the tuner is actually receiving.
Now, there is a LOT of unique traffic; on demand programming. So, yes, there are a lot of programming streams unique to individual users at any given moment, probably most commonly weekend evenings.
Receiver Setup
Incidentally, when you upgrade to high def, you will definitely want to get into the receiver's diag and config screens, because your box might be recycled and be configured for a previous install for 720i, 720p, or even 480p at a previous install, or the cable tech might leave it at the default 720p setting. Just FYI.
Bandwidth Cap
250GB? That seems fair at first, until you consider online programming. Do you do a lot of netflix? How much bandwidth does each
I download quite a bit, in spurts. When a new kubuntu, OpenSuSE, or CentOS release comes out, I download DVD and CD ISO images, and I seed them for a bit. That could easily be 10GB in a single day. Now, 250GB / 30 days = 8.3GB / day, just under a dual layer DVD per day. Is that fair when for the last 10 years they have been fraudulently advertising unlimited internet and surreptitiously enforcing unpublished caps?
The Real Reason for Caps?
I think part of the reason for the bandwidth cap rather than throttling (not blocking) the heaviest users is that they do not want you to use netflix, hulu, blockbuster, or other third-party online programming services; they want you to use theirs. I think that what they're saying publicly is just a cover to ward off any potential anti-competitive complaints. Now, let me just restate that this is my opinion (I am not stating this as fact) based on the evidence I see.
The Solution
Contact your local selectmen, town manager, mayor, etc. and let them know that sanctioned monopolies are a bad thing. Want to bring Comcast into check? Get your town to invite competitors so that residents have a choice between two or more cable providers. Forget Verizion and FIOS, since their TV service stinks. Get real competition.
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.
Re:Which is absolutely fine (Score:5, Insightful)
Ta-da! Everybody happy.
You must be new here!
I'm pretty sure that there is a significant minority (majority?) on this site which absolutely will not be happy in any capacity until their internet connection is faster than their LAN, has no cap whatsoever, and is free.
And a meter would be nice (Score:4, Interesting)
Cox tells you what the limit is (40GB/mo on my plan), but doesn't give you a meter. I don't want to be "contacted about excessive use", I want a meter like the gas gauge on my car. Fortunately, I use a linux router with vnstat so I can keep tabs, but how many home users are able to provide their own meter?
My dad uses Wild Blue, and they provide a nice web page with a meter to check your usage. Their cap is a continuous time average over 30 days, so you don't have to wait until the end of the month for it to reset - the average bandwidth starts going down again after he finishes his Ubuntu download, and is ready for another in a few days with worrying about hitting the limit.
Re:And a meter would be nice (Score:5, Insightful)
How does Comcast help its customers track their usage so they can avoid exceeding the limit?
There are many online tools customers can download and use to measure their consumption. Customers can find such tools by simply doing a Web search - for example, a search for "bandwidth meter" will provide some options. Customers using multiple PCs should just be aware that they will need to measure and combine their total monthly usage in order to identify the data usage for their entire account.
Does not help!
In order to enforce their 250GB limit they first have to measure it. It would seem very simple for Comcast to display the current measurement on my account page.
I can't think of any reason they would want to hide it -- except to hide the fact that most customers are using only a few percent of what they are paying for.
No, it's not absolutely fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
250GB in a 30 day month is 8.3GB a day, 355MB/hour, ~6MB a minute, 101KB/sec.
Or, 809kbps. On a connection which is advertised as being at least 6mbit/sec.
It's also the beginning of the end- they'll use this to justify limits per week next. Then per day. They already have a hidden cap on uploads; they advertise a 768kbit upload limit, but if you upload at more than 384kbit/sec (the old limit) for more than about 4-5 minutes, your connection gets massively crippled, not just until you slow back down to 384kbit/sec, but until your upload drops *dramatically*. They call this "powerboost", but it's really "ripoff technique" to let them advertise one speed, but actually have another.
You know what still gets my goat? That comcast has for more than a decade had an incredibly hostile AUP that banned any form of mailing list or discussion group hosting, yet you people only started screaming about your "rights" and network neutrality when they brought the hammer down on your precious porn and TV episodes.
Re:No, it's not absolutely fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
What doesn't make sense is how a company that pays by bandwidth hopes to alleviate its problem by controlling traffic. I may only download 1 movie a month, but if I do it during the same hour as every other house in my neighborhood, Comcast still doesn't have the bandwidth. Comcast is using the excuse of low-bandwidth to restrict traffic, purely for profit. They won't upgrade their network to provide more bandwidth, but they'll try to charge people more to use it (I am making the obvious assumption that they will soon offer 250+ GB plans for a premium price).
Comcasts approach to controlling bandwidth issues would be like a local government saying too many people drive too fast on the roads during rush-hour, so they decided to raise the tax on gasoline. That won't slow people down, it just means they can afford less gas, and run out 75% of the way to their destination. Those who can continue to pay the price of gas will continue to drive their Corvettes, while the rest of us take the city bus to the local library to check our email after our children downloaded too many freakin movies off our netflix account.
Re:Which is absolutely fine (Score:4, Interesting)
Can I have rollover Gig?
250 GB (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
...should be enough for anybody.
You're clueless. Don't be so gullible. This is nothing more than an attempt to get around "net neutrality" using bandwidth issues as a red herring. Comcast doesn't want Directv, Vudu, iTunes, NetFlix and the YouTubes of the world competing with their own offerings. That's what this is all about. How long will it take for a Directv customer using Directv's "On Demand" service (which uses the Internet) to reach the cap? How about a Vudu or Roku customer? What about when YouTube has high definition videos, an
Re:250 GB (Score:5, Funny)
Re:250 GB (Score:4, Funny)
Re:250 GB (Score:4, Informative)
Famous *apocryphal* Gatesism.
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...
Re:250 GB (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, I suspect that's why they're doing this now. Call me cynical, but my gut says this isn't about bandwidth at all.
Services like Amazon Unbox and the iTunes Store are reducing their non-Internet (cable TV) offerings to mere commodities. By making TV shows available for immediate purchase instead of having to wait a year for them to come out on DVD, many people are realizing they really don't need cable TV. Worse for Comcast, many find that they would pay less per month to buy a season pass for the shows and own the recordings instead of only being allowed to time shift them for a limited period of time.
Add to that the impact that online movie download services (Unbox, iTS, NetFlix, etc.) have on pay per view movies, and you'll quickly understand that this has virtually nothing to do with their bandwidth costs or preserving quality of service for other users and everything to do with anticompetitive price fixing and consumer lock-in....
Make no mistake, if bandwidth were the culprit, the would be charging based on how much traffic came in from off-network sites, not for all traffic across the board. They would be in favor of P2P and would be encouraging services like Unbox and iTS to use P2P designs to maximize the efficiency of customer delivery. Instead, they're deliberately creating barriers to scare people away from obtaining TV and movie content from anyone but them.
Here's hoping the next administration lets the antitrust lawsuits fly against Comcast and their ilk.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
I'll give myself a *woosh*... I'm not quite sure where you are going with that... (the 2nd family bit)
Re:250 GB (Score:4, Insightful)
Downloading a movie need not be a obscure, shady business contingent upon tweaking mysterious internet ports and poking holes in your firewall. It can be as simple as turning on a box, navigating a menu, and selecting something that piques your interest.
Re:250 GB (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not HD quality, any more than a DivX-compressed movie on CD is DVD quality. It's comparable to what the cable companies send you as "HD", which is a far cry from what's on a Blu-Ray disk, much like their regular 480i content is a far cry from DVD quality, or the "digital movies" which the movie companies now show not being anywhere near physical movies in display quality.
Let the users choose their own quality, not the internet provider.
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:4, Informative)
Great sentiment... (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with you, in general.
However, this move looks like a positive thing. Comcast always limited you, but it was always an arbitrary amount, which you wouldn't know till they banned you for a year. More recently, they pinned it down in terms of "songs", "videos", "pictures", "emails", etc.
This means you could conceivably sue Comcast if they raised a fuss and you were under your 250 gig limit.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Does that mean "given notice of termination"? I wouldn't put it past Comcast to just terminate those accounts, notice or otherwise.
Re:Great sentiment... (Score:4, Informative)
Likely they'll cut your speed down until the end of the month. That's what most (if not all now) ISPs do in Australia. So you can still email and surf most stuff, just no youtubing or radio streaming.
Re:Great sentiment... (Score:5, Informative)
Comcast hasn't used the word "unlimited" in ages. They don't have to, almost no one thinks in terms of "how much can I download," they just look at the speed numbers.
Instead they just refer to their service as something vague like "always-on, high speed Internet access."
Which is still a complete lie, based on how often my connection goes down. Sure, my modem is always-on, but whatever's at the other end sure doesn't seem to be.
Re:Okay folks (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Re:Here come the "In Australia..." posts (Score:5, Insightful)
"Dammit Australia, just because you have crap internet, the rest of the world shouldn't have to accept it!"
There's a little thing called 'living within your means' which used to be considered a virtue. That's why we laugh at people who have ten times as much stuff as us and yet feel more hard done by. Grow some restraint. It'll be good for you.
Also, if you guys have ten times as much bandwidth as us, you'll make websites loaded down with useless Flash and vidcasts which are ten times bigger, you'll write operating systems which are blithely unaware that Internet is not a free commodity for some of us and have no concept of restricting transmissions to the necessary, and we'll get locked out of the Web by all your bloat.
So it's in our interest for broadband speeds charging regimes to be roughly the same all around the world - otherwise we end up the wrong side of the data gap.
And it's not crap, it's metered. You don't get free all-you-can-eat electricity or petrol or food each month - why should Internet capacity be different?
If you really want absolutely unlimited Internet with a charging regime completely uncoupled from usage, that means you want to socialise the cost of communications infrastructure. Fine, that's a valid political position and it's got some merit to it, but in that case you guys should already have free healthcare and be advocating for a Universal Basic Income [wikipedia.org].
Re:Here come the "In Australia..." posts (Score:4, Insightful)
The one thing the ISPs did get right here in Oz is stating the limits up front. 'Course, some of them only did that after getting kicked around by the regulators.
While things are still expensive here, it's definitely improving. I get 40GB peak, 110GB off-peak for $50 a month. And my ISP is giving me unlimited off-peak downloads right now, because they're doing trials for a forthcoming 500GB plan.
Now if they could just do something about ping times... Damn you, speed of light!
you are complaining about 250Gb?!? jeez (Score:3, Informative)
How much did Australian businesses get for building out broad band but didn't? US businesses were given billions of taxpayer dollars to build out broadband but only a few have built any at all. Verison is slowly building out FiOS [wikipedia.org], fiber to a neighborhood splitter, but not many other businesses are building out broadband. They cried they needed public money to build out broadband but did nothing with the money given to them other than pad their profits.
Falcon
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.
Re:Okay folks (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh. What you *should* want is for your local government to stop giving your ISP an unfair advantage [denverpost.com]. Then other ISPs could start providing service if they wanted to. I don't know where you live, but the reason your broadband options suck is almost certainly the fault of your local government, and not some evil plot by the ISPs. Your local government being stupid isn't a problem for Congress. But hey, maybe you're right and there's really nothing the Internet Service Providers want more than to *not* sell you internet access.
What? They're obviously delivering the internet service you agreed to buy, otherwise you wouldn't be posting on Slashdot right now, amirite?
Oh, and by the way, once you give your money to a company in exchange for goods or services, it's not your money anymore. You don't get a say in what that money gets spent on, it belongs to the company you gave it to. Just like your employer doesn't get to tell you what you can spend your money on after they pay you.
How does this bullshit get modded "Insightful"?
Re:Okay folks (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two indecent issues here.
First, you are absolutely correct that a local-government granted monopoly is probably one of the major sources of any individual's current ISP selection woes.
But there's also a second issue, as described here [newnetworks.com]. It's hard to describe the issue in a way that doesn't sound radically biased, but the simple fact of the matter is that the telecom companies committed to deploying massive fiber networks and managed to squirm out of it (mostly thorough regulator-capture).
So this isn't just a local government failure. It's also a massive federal government failure, from which there is perfectly good reason for US residents to feel cheated out of decent speed data infrastructure.
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....
Re:Just get a business acct... (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh man..it isn't too late...go for it!!
You can drop the cable box...just do a myth project...
Seriously, the HDHomerun [silicondust.com] is a GREAT item, and works great. It works and is easy with the guides out there. I used Gentoo to set up my mythbox...and it was easy following the Silicon dust and Gentoo Wiki pages.
It works with OTA, and QAM...you can use the two tuners in it either split OTA and QAM, or both QAM or both OTA...great product. Give it a try, and bypass the cable box.
That and a fun thing I've found is...it picks up the channels used for OnDemand...fun to see what other people are watching at night....
$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?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Er, yeah. A lobster'd be the exact opposite of the point I was trying to make, huh?
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.
Re:About Time (Score:4, Funny)
400gb? What are you downloading, the entire bible word by word in 1280x1024 bmp format?
They DON'T advertise it as unlimited (Score:4, Informative)
I looked all over Comcast's website and no where -- not one place -- is their Internet service advertised as "unlimited".
In fact, there are numerous links on several pages that take you to their terms and conditions [comcast.net] where Comcast has a full section (Section III) entitled "Network Management and Limitations on Bandwidth Consumption". I'll grant you it doesn't say specifically "250GB" anywhere in there, but that's a lot different than the falsehood of claiming "they advertise that it is unlimited!" when they don't.
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.
Ignorant title (Score:3, Insightful)
"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.
Perspective (Score:3, Interesting)
250GB/month =
0.77Mb/s (megabits) * 24/7
(a bit less than half a T1 running an full capacity)
3.31 days At 7.0Mb/s and you're out.
Not bad for cheap McInternet service, I guess...
seems good to me (Score:4, Interesting)
The should have done this long ago, put it in the contract, and saved themselves a lot of bad press.
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?
Re:And what of VOIP? (Score:5, Informative)
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?
No, Comcast's VOIP service is out-of-band from regular IP. Skype and others, yep. Funny how that works out to Comcast's benefit, eh?
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:More info (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a lie.
The reality is that a large number of accounts, say 15%, aren't registering any bandwidth at all. Comcast is real screwy when it comes to canceling, moving, or enabling service. Every time I have had to change service I had to contact them multiple times and was overcharged each time. They will charge you for service before it is installed. I know from insiders at the company that this is deliberate.
Another 25% are using the modems in USB mode which throttles their bandwidth to about 1 megabit or they are using very old computers or equipment which slows their connection. It's very difficult to go over the cap at these speeds.
About 3-5% are maxing out their connections, usually through downloading usenet feeds and, to a lesser extent, running bittorent trackers.
So what about the other 65%? I seriously doubt they're only downloading 85 MB per day. That's a handful of flash videos. I suspect it more in the 2-3 GB PER DAY range, or about 90GB per month. And it's rapidly going up.
This is headed for another FCC dust-up because I'm CERTAIN that Comcast is going to exclude their VoIP and their video download service (Comcast is partnered with Hulu) from this cap.
Well, am I grandfathered? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because when I signed a contract with them, it said NOTHING in regards to usage limits. To the contrary, we decided to go with Comcast specifically because it was advertised as "Unlimited".
Are they rewriting my contract without notice? The contract says that they will notify me in writing of any changes, and thus far, have not.
Alternative to caps (Score:5, Interesting)
It's still beyond me why they can't manage to offer a sliding scale...
First 100 GB... You get at the full bandwidth.
For each additional 50 GB, it drops by 25% of whatever it was last.
First 100GB = 100%
100-150GB = 75%
150-200GB = 56%
200-250GB = 42%
250-300GB = 32%
300-350GB = 24%
350-400GB = 18%
400-450GB = 13%
450-500GB = 10%
Now you've got a system where no one ever finds their connection suddenly shut off on them for the remainder of the month.
Instead, it just keeps getting slower and slower to the point where much over 250 GB is going to have slowed so much they'd really have a hard time going much further anyway... and those 5GB movie downloads they used to get within an hour now need to run all night, if not all day and all night, and so are no longer appealing anyway.
Though, to be fair... Funny how it's only those companies that make money by charging for the delivery of TV and movies that seem to have issues with users using the kind of bandwidth needed to get TV and movies without them.
Why not a 2nd service tier? (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me that Comcast is looking at the long tail guys and thinking we have 5% of our users consuming 90% of out bandwidth. (Or some such thing).
This sort of thing always happens when you sell something as "all you can eat for a dollar". Works fine when Aunt Minnie and the Canasta Club got to lunch, but not so good when the Ohio State offensive line shows up.
Also Comcast is being hit with the prospect of having to compete with FIOS. To do so means that either have to invest lots in physical plant to achieve the same service levels as FIOS, (which is what Cablevision seems to be doing) or cut prices.
So they think think cutting prices makes a lot of sense - most people don't need FIOS service levels. Most people will be happier with the lower price. But to cut prices they need to get rid of the long tail customers.
I know! Let's put a use limit in place. This will piss off the long tail guys and they will move to FIOS. BRILLIANT we have just unloaded our unprofitable customers to our competition! What could be sweeter!
PROFIT!!!
So long as it's PER MONTH (Score:4, Interesting)
A couple years ago, I decided to start watching TV on my computer instead of the TV, for no real reason besides liking my chair in the PC room better. So I started really hammering my connection with some torrents (piracy haters, note that I was still paying my full cable TV bill, so in essence I was downloading what they'd already been sending me). My Internet and television provider was Cox Communications in the San Diego area.
I made sure to keep my torrents only running at night out of respect for neighbors on the same cable network. One morning, though, I woke up to see all my torrents dead. I went to see if google was up and was redirected to a page instructing me to call the Cox security division. I did and, after a good while on hold, was told that I'd exceeded my data cap.
Which, being as we were in the middle of a month, was news to me. Confused, I hung up and continued more or less like I was, trying to keep the overall load down a bit with transfer caps in Azureus. A week later it happened again, exactly as before. This time, though, I demanded more of an explanation from the CSR. What I was told amazed me.
Now, I'm not a network engineer, but I'd always assumed that the ISP could keep a pretty good watch on every connection at once. Maybe that's more infeasible than I'd thought on a cable network, but still, the rep claimed that wasn't the case. They COULD get a general idea of who was producing "too much traffic," though, and order a "watch" for that account be forwarded to the security division. Who would then, in turn, watch and record the exact amount of data coming out of that account for a period of time.
Where it gets even stranger - and more frustrating - is that this "period of time" is totally up to them. One of my infractions was a 24 hour watch, the other around 48, and supposedly they could be up to a week or less than a day depending on how many watches they had going. They would then divide the monthly cap (a very difficult-to-find number buried in legal boilerplate deep in an old PDF on their website and actually quoted differently in two other different places) by the time they recorded and shut it down if it went over. So, say, if you got 30Gb in a 30-day month and they did a 24-hour watch, they would shut down your account if it went over 1Gb! Which to my mind makes their advertised bandwidth a complete fabrication: if you downloaded at full speed all month, you'd be several orders of magnitude over the limit. And if they're allowed to shrink the "watch" size as small as they want (nothing they said indicated that a 24-hour watch was the smallest) then you can't be confident EVER using the full speed.
Too many of these warnings (either 3 or 5 being the magic number based on the CSR I was talking to) and they'd shut down your cable and blacklist you forever. In an area with no other Internet options outside of dialup, they basically were telling me I might have to MOVE if I did it one more time. And no, there was no way to see how much data I'd used up so far that month, but they were "working on it."
I wish I could tell you that I angrily canceled my account and moved on. But no, I wasn't ready to move, and I wasn't ready to go to dialup. So I just stopped downloading anything over 1Gb, ever, and confining my high-tier, expensive 'net account to web surfing and games. And oh, yeah, I watched TV on the TV on my shitty couch like a good little boy. These fuckers continue to get my monthly checks to this very day. Aren't monopolies grand?
Internet access in Shanghai & Beijing (Score:4, Informative)
In my apartment in Shanghai I have a 5mbit symmetrical connection that is all-you-can-eat (i.e. unlimited traffic up and down per month). This costs me RMB 150 per month or about US$22.
Granted, there is no customer service whatsoever and when it falls over, I have to wait for the ISP (CNC) to realise and remedy.
In Beijing I pay the same but it is only a 2mbit symmetrical service, and also uncapped.
Re:Still practically unlimited for most (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait until you start downloading Blu-Ray from content delivery services.
Re:Still practically unlimited for most (Score:5, Informative)
Wait until you start downloading Blu-Ray from content delivery services.
Blu-Ray is an optical disc format.
It says nothing about the codec used to encode the video.
Many early Blu-Ray discs were nothing more than high bitrate MPEG-2.
Now everyone uses VC-1 (Microsoft) or H.264 (MPEG-4) because they are vastly more efficient.
I think what you meant to say was "Wait until you start downloading high definition video from content delivery services."
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.
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?
Re:Still practically unlimited for most (Score:4, Informative)
Re:about time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
250g might be good enough for a person, but it sure isn't good enough for a house/apartment with more then 1 or 2 people living in it.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Australians and New Zealanders seem to be the only people on the planet who think that the entire world's internet connections should be as bad as theirs. Why is that?
Re:Only 250G? You poor oppressed dears (Score:4, Insightful)
Bandwidth is only a zero-sum game when it's at 100%. If a cable is sitting at 50%, then using more of it has an incremental cost of zero. To put it another way: each byte you use at peak time costs a whole lot, but each byte you use at off-peak time is free. This severely complicates pricing and cost analysis.
I agree that the 250GB cap is exceedingly generous, however. Just so long as they're up-front about it and no longer try to sell this as "unlimited", I have no problem with it whatsoever.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
everytime you connect comcast will automatically send you a 13gb highdef movie explaining the bandwidth cap.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you saying watching HD movies and backing up pictures/home video to Carbonite or something aren't residential activities?
No it
Re:99KBps (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that 100KB/s is nearly a full megabit. Ask your ISP what a full, dedicated, guaranteed 1 megabit line with full, unlimitted, uncapped usage would cost.