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Comcast Targets Internet "Abusers"
An anonymous reader writes "Here's a great Associated Press story on Comcast's invisible caps. The company has been threatening and then cutting off customers who 'abuse' their so-called 'unlimited' service by downloading too much. But Comcast won't reveal what the limits are. DSL Reports has been tracking this for a while, and it's good to see the mainstream press catch on."
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. - Rene Descartes (1637)
I already ditched cable... late last year. With all the viruses Adelphia began dropping ping packets. That was the last straw. They also had a policy against VPNs and hosting services of any kind, and enforced the service block by not allowing inbound port 80 packets.
I pay more for DSL but I can do whatever I want with it. Speakeasy just rocks.
In the dslreports forums this has been a hot topic for a couple of months. If you want and interesting read, along with a lot of rants, check out this thread. I don't think I've seen such a long one before and it's the second one on the subject.
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That makes perfect sense. They are one of the largest (if not largest) broadband provider in the US. Therefore, a lot of spam is likely to come from them.
Not sure how widely known this is, but Comcast is a Microsoft company.
Um, no.
Microsoft also invested $150 million in Apple a few years ago... does that mean when you buy a G5 or iPod you're buying a Microsoft product?
I did manage to get the info about what constitutes a breakage of the caps policy when I called their tech support line...
After a quick call to their tech support line, the guy said that the following would flag you as excessive for a residential downloader. 8 gbytes downloads over 20 hours and/or downloading enough to cause problems for other people in the service area. He also said that it shouldn't raise a flag if it's something like 3 gbytes/day for a month. Also, they mostly instituted these policies as a way to make sure that no one person was hogging enough of the pipe to make other cable users connections slow.
"For years, I struggled with reality... but I'm happy to say I finally won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd
Keep in mind what you're seeing is most likely hijacked PCs or open proxies.
Computer hijackers have learned that 24/8, 12/8, and other cable-modem IP ranges are primed for abuse, so they forward spam through them like there's no tomorrow.
Whem a spam is send through an open proxy, the proxy, not the originator's IP is shown. This is different than using an open relay to send spam, which does leave a trail.
This is why providers to the unwashed masses of consumers who just want their pr0n and cheese should enforce some kind of interception of outgoing traffic destined for 25/tcp, at least to track stats, since there are very easy thresholds to set to raise flags (messages per minute for example) and have staffers check them out.
Please send all UCE to scally@devolution.com so I can f
Only if they charge you extra while the contract is still in effect. If they terminate it and offer you a new one based on your download usage, that's not fraud.
Comcast is, however, full of shit. They claim that they only send people abuse letters when someone in their neighborhood complains. First of all, each DOCSIS cable modem gets its own set of frequencies to download on. Your downstream bandwidth is not shared. Let me say that again; downstream bandwidth is not shared. So downloading cannot degrade anyone's performance unless they are oversubscribing. Upstream bandwidth is shared, there is only a total of 11Mbps upstream for everyone on your segment. However, I know from experience (working in a DOCSIS Cable Modem QA/Dev lab for Cisco in Santa Cruz) that there are line cards which increase the number of upstream channels. For example, Cisco's MC16 line card has one downstream interface (which goes into an up converter to be converted into the proper frequencies) and six upstream; the frequencies for upstream can be split off in six groups and fed into those six interfaces.
I have never had a time when I could not pull down a solid 1.8Mbps (my current cap) over my link. If somehow my downloading was degrading service for others, then my performance would suffer as well. This is not happening, and has never happened. Therefore, I conclude that someone called in with a problem that Comcast either couldn't figure out how to resolve, or doesn't want to pay to resolve (bad coax between the user and the little green box on the corner, say) and Comcast just used it as more ammunition for their witch hunt against those who use the most bandwidth. The truth, I suspect, is that they simply don't want to pay for that bandwidth. I respect that, but I don't like being lied to, which is clearly what's going on here.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
1TB/month would be about 3Mbps for the entire month (in other words fully saturated). That seems unlikely, but I suppose if someone was sufficiently determined it could happen.
On the other hand, at 100GB per month, they're only using 10% of their capacity, but apparently that's the threshold of 'abuse'.
Of course, the real problem is that they give their customers no way to know what they've actually used, and won't tell them what constitutes 'abuse'. I don't think many would guess that a mere 10% utilization would constitute abuse.
All internet accounts are limited:
Dial UP 28K up 53.6K down 295Meg/day up 564meg/day down
DSL 128K up 384K down 1.3Gig/day up 4Gig/day down
Cable 256K up 3M down 2.7Gig/day up 31gig/day down
So using the Cox numbers (Cox is who I have and I want to compliment them on giving out honest numbers), this is:
Upload: 67 hours of max uploads/month or 9% duty cycle
Download: 39 hours of max downloads/month or 5% duty cycle
So they are working against about a 5 to 10% duty cycle. If you are using the service for "interactive" usage and not "automated" usage, then the limits are "way out there". If you want to run bittorent or kazaa, then you are hosed, but these are not "interactive" usage.
For non-server usage this is a lot. Lets say you listen to internet radio at 48K/sec. Even at 24 hours/day, this is only 14Gig or less than 50% of the usage limit.
I've done some work for Comcast, and have seen first hand how the company operates. It's absolutely mind blowing that they manage to make money at all, considering the pack of morons that run the the place, at least at the IT level.
For example, until a ~18 months ago, their entire network was publically exposed. I mean, their ENTIRE CORPORATE NETWORK. Servers, desktops, printers, etc., everything, on the internet, publically accessable. When I suggested that this was bad, I was given a look like just pissed on someone's face.
They brought in Accenture to do their broadband network, after the AtHome collapse (amusing in itself) which may account for it's not being entirely fucked up.
Oh, a little tip to get reductions in the price of your cable bill: call and complain. Just call, bitch at someone, and they'll usually give you a $25 credit to placate you. I personally know someone who does this EVERY MONTH. They can't track who's called, or when, or how many times they've given credits to people (software problems). That and, if you just get cable internet, you get free cable TV to boot - they can't block the TV and still provide the broadband.
I'm a (small) stockholder in this company (had ATT stock before the merger), but I encourage people to take as much money from these schmucks as you can. They deserve it, and maybe it'll prompt the massive firings of staff they need to fix the company.
I will agree that, no, they have not stated that they have maximums. However, they are stating very clearly that you are not guaranteed, well, anything, and your are EXPLICITLY not guaranteed any amount of speed or consistent service.
I don't think you really understand what Comcast is telling these people.
It's not that someone is overusing the service, so Comcast is limiting them, and then they're complaining "But, wait, it's unlimited, waaaaa!" It's that they're overusing the service, and Comcast tells them to stop, so they say "Ok, what does that mean?" and no answer. "How much bandwidth am I using?" No way to find out. "How much bandwidth is acceptable?" No one will say. When Comcast says these users are using about 100 times the average bandwidth, the question is "Ok, so what's the average?" and they won't reveal it. The issue is not that people are demanding a particular level of service that Comcast says is unreasonble, the issue is that Comcast has established a reasonable level of service and won't share that information with the folks that are exceeding it. They are not making it *possible* to deliberately stay within the limits... they only want the customers who will do it by accident, which is disingenuous at best.
Also, the folks who are saying "It's not possible to use that much bandwidth unless you're doing X Y and Z that you're not supposed to" are highly unimaginative. My best friend and her husband are having their first child in April, and his family are in England. If they get a digital video camera, how much data do you think they'll be sending across the Atlantic? When you get into high-quality images and full-motion video, you jump into a different ballpark. Just one 8x10 TIFF image at print-resolution is 16 MB. What if you want to send or receive a whole roll of them? You've burned 400 MB right there. People can send MP3s that are perfectly legal... sharing their own music (that they wrote & performed) with friends and family. You combine a couple or three people with these unusual bandwidth-sucking hobbies or habits into one household, and you *can* exceed the limits while in line with the law. Then on top of that, Comcast won't tell you what the limit is, or how much you've exceeded it by. It makes compliance a bit difficult.
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