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."

Comments

Ditch cable - get Speakeasy

[jhoger]

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.

Re:Comca$t MyCrow$oft Connection

[poot_rootbeer]

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?

Actually, it's not that hard to get the info...

[double-oh three]

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.

Hijacked Proxies

[Akai]

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.

They did tell me what the limit was, ostensibly.

[drinkypoo]

I am a comcast customer. I got an abuse letter. After I called around for a while, I got someone at Comcast to tell me that the limit (for me) was 90GB/mo. He said that if I use less than 90GB/mo then I would not be terminated. So, I installed MRTG and I watch my average downstream, if it gets too high then I slim back. According to my calculations if I peaked out at all times I should be able to do 550GB/mo, so I just run around 20% or lower, and I figure that's good enough.

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.