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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."
DSL is great... As long as you don't mind paying more for less. Seriously, does any DSL provider offer 3MBps max for $50 a month? And without PPoE or some crap like that?
I run a small ISP, and I can put an end to all this speculation regarding the use of the word "unlimited" -- assuming anybody actually cares.
The reason ISP's use the word "unlimited" in their advertisements is because it sells more accounts than if they don't.
The fact that they are lying is really not a relevant point. Consumers will flock to the guy that says "unlimited" in his advertisements regardless if it's the truth or not. Consumers don't think that hard about the issue.
It should be obvious that you can't provide a dedicated "unlimited" 56K connection profitably at the $10-$15/mo market rate, but you will sell a lot more accounts if you say "unlimited".
This is also true in the web hosting business. I see advertisements for "Unlimited Bandwitdh" web hosting all the time. But we all know that this is neither physically possible nor economically possible. Still people sign up for these lies.
Guys like me that run businesses that want to be honest about things are punished for our truthfullness. Consumers demand to be lied to. So ISP's are forced to choose between significantly lower sales and being dishonest.
Now, I'm not saying that there aren't ISPs that try to be honest in their offerings. I could give you a list of honest ones that don't use the word unlimited unless they mean it. All I'm saying is that dialup consumers do not typicaly choose these honest guys when they see an "unlimited" offer for the same price.
We have talked about this numerous times on Slashdot before (at least twice). I have posted that what really sucks about it is:
a) they took over from AT&T, raised prices, forced you to get CATV or pay even higher rates (42.95/45.95 with CATV or 60.95 or 63.95 without)
b) have little to no competition in the broadband market, especially at the speeds they offer (now 3mbs in most, if not all, areas)
c) now are able to control their userbase with "invisible" DOWNLOAD caps (not speed caps as some people are confused with) based on a "local average" whatever that is...
So, they get a bunch of customers becomming one of the largest ISPs and probably *the* largest broadband ISP. They don't like the fact that some users are actually USING their bandwith so they decide to make up near-random numbers so that they can cut you off when they want... Best of all, they can cut you off at any time because you don't have a "contract" with them that you can retaliate against. They can disconnect your service at any time for any reason leaving you with little options for broadband (nevermind reasonably priced connections).
Nothing to do with obscure ISP bandwidth usage, but HOW is Joe Bloggs winders user know what their bandwidth usage is? In all honesty, 90% of people haven't a clue what that means - that's why they still execute attachments in outlook without a second thought. Nick
It's good so you can download all those legal DVDs?
end of line
you may want to replace that while with an if.
otherwise, you'll be switching providers a lot...
...they're policing their bandwidth by harassing legitmate customers with arbitrary, secret limits-- but they're doing practically nothing to stem the flow of spam from the machines of their moron customers who can't secure their Windows boxes.
In Comcast's view, people downloading more than 30 gigs/month are most likely downloading warez/illegal movies, etc.
Maybe this is their indirect way of dealing with this?
The article says that some of the abusers who are getting these warnings/disconnections are moving upwards of 1 terrabyte of data/month. Thats more than "downloading a lot" and it seems to me that if someone is moving that much data they should probably look into something other than basic broadband service. 1 terrabyte/mo is about 414 kilobyte/sec which is a pretty insane rate to be downloading stuff. Clearly these guys are running servers and whatnot which is not what the residential accounts are for - I have zero sympathy for someone who uses more than 400k/sec of data and then gets disconected from a residential account.
they are based on a local average... So if you live in a college-kid infested town you are likely to be in an area w/a higher average. If you live in an area of middle-aged to older-aged individuals who use the service for fast checks to yahoo and comcast.net then the average will be much lower.
The fact that they can't a) tell you how much you have downloaded, b) refuse to tell you what their # is, and c) don't think that they need to tell you is what makes it unfair.
If you are going to shut people off you need to give them a tool that tracks it, allow them to call up and ask a CSR for the current bandwith usage, and also know what the cap is.
Regulation already exists. It's called "Truth in Advertising." It simply needs to be effectively applied.
KFG
C'mon, 60 bucks for an internet-only subscription?! You're out of your mind.
Snip! Emphasis mine. Sounds like Comcasts legal team broke into the nitrous oxide again.
Quack, quack.
from NYC to LA for $.37.
People who send first class mail from NYC to LA are not "abusing the system."
The system takes such matters into account when it sets the postage price.
The phone company acts in similar ways when it sets its price for unlimited local calling. Some people talk more, some never seem to stop talking.
One can send certain kinds of mail at lower than first class rates if one wishes. Just as one can obtain limited calling at additional fees per call. You may assess your own usage and determine which might be the better deal for you, thus those whose usage is expected to be high naturally pay a premium for the premium service and such service can be expected to attract such users.
The populace understands this system and when they see "unlimited" assume this is the sort of averaged pricing structure they are dealing with, and they have every right to do so.
The ISPs know full well what the public thinks they are getting when they advertise their service as "unlimited," thus, if that is not actually what they intend to deliver they are, in the technical language that applies to such legal matters, "Lying Bastards" and should be treated as such.
KFG
When I play online games, the bandwidth is just plain insane. I did an estimate once with some network monitoring tool and it came to some 1 to 3 gigs worth of transfer over a 12 hr period.
If comcast said I can't play games, I am better off discontinuing the service. Why else would I need that much bandwidth.
In order to do this, the customer would have to max out a 3Mb/s connection, 24/7, for the entire month. Since the cable companies are only now 'doubling their top download speeds to 3 megabits, how is this possible?
Now my connection is ADSL, 512/256. I run BitTorrent downloads 24/7 on an old headless box. Theoretically, I could pull down 165GB/mo. I know I don't because i haven't started buying shares in Maxtor, Hitachi or Western Digital yet.
I would have modded you insightful if I didn't want to respond so badly.
The problem that ISPs are now dealing with is that their calculations which made the "unlimited" label economically feasible in the late 90's are now way off. P2P has exploded; so has the net's general usefulness and the net-savviness of the average user; so has Internet publishing of every kind. That "unlimited" word started appearing before google became a verb, before blogging became popular, before people needed the term "file sharing".
The middle of the bandwidth bellcurve has moved up dramatically in those few years, and the company has to take into account the new median bandwidth usage, but they haven't. Ethical ways to do this would be:
1) Put pressure on upstream bandwidth infrastructure to lower their prices
2) Raise prices to consumers taking into account the new usage rates
3) Stop advertising unlimited service and charge the same rates
They of course chose (4), continue to do business the way we always have, and bill unsuspecting customers.
They'll get their comeuppance for this.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
comcast is the fifth largest ISP in the country....of course you have a significant amount of spam traffic coming from them.
eBayDig 1s a typo saerch engien
i have comcast cable internet. (previously AT&T broadband). the only thing that changed from at&t was they discontinued unlimited usenet transfers, and outsourced to giganews. on my comcast connection, i transfer all sorts of files, both uploading and downloading. many many gigabytes per month. running web, ftp, email, kdx, and other servers. downloading all sorts of audio and video, linux and other ISOs. maybe 25-50 GB total up and down? they've never complained to me about it...
in the article, it says they wouldnt tell this person how much they had downloadloaded, and how much was acceptable. so, based on that, how can they expect him to comply?
They're not doing false advertising, they're just not correcting misconceptions about it.
Originally, many internet services operated on a business model of overselling their internet service. Frequently, your local cable company advertises 250kps bandwidth for each of its customers. But they never originally expected a large percentage (if anyone at all) to saturate their entire allocation 90% to 100% of the time, which is becoming a growing trend among service users.
Yup they sure did. You paid for it in the speed shown on your downloads... So why in the world would they up their download caps to DOUBLE what they had when they started enforcing the "local average limits"?
This is bullshit on Comcast's part, plain and simple. If they were having such a problem w/bandwith being a "hot commodity" they wouldn't have nearly doubled our speed caps from 1800/256 to 3000/256. I went from 220kB/s to 390kB/s.
The article should point out that not all cable providers are as bad as Comcast.
Cablevision's Optimum Online service, which I use in NJ, is outstanding. They do NOT cap their service (8Mb down, 1Mb up). While I consider myself to be a heavy user, I have NEVER had a problem with my usage (unchanged over the last 4 years).
One way that cable providers can make customers happy, and reduce their costs, is to make newsgroups available (and educate their customers about them). This is an alternative, safer way for customers to get the media files they would otherwise go to P2P applications for. Since the news server is "on net" the ISP does not have to pay anyone else for the bandwidth.
Comcast's actions aren't just customer hostile, they show a lack of business acumen and technical skill. If I were in their area, I'd opt for any other provider (even multiple dialip lines if it came to that).
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Guys like me that run businesses that want to be honest about things are punished for our truthfullness. Consumers demand to be lied to. So ISP's are forced to choose between significantly lower sales and being dishonest.
Actually, I think the problem here really is that you are not BRUTUALLY honest. If you are serious about wanting to run an honest business, why don't you go all out? In your advertisements you should point out the blatant lies of your competitors. Point out that there is no such thing as 'unlimited' internet access right in your ads! Then go further and suggest that if your competitors don't respect the intelligence of the average joe before they get the money, how could you possibly trust them to respect the customer AFTER they already have the money?
You're in an uncomfortable position right now: you're in the half-way point. In tennis it is called "no man's land" -- the area between the baseline and the net. You haven't committed to one course of action or another and end up getting stranded in a position worse than either option. You need to decide whether you are going to be brutally honest or a deceiver like everyone else. Don't try to play a happy medium. You're not going to be very happy if you do that for very long.
Just make damn sure that everything you say in your ads is the truth otherwise their lawyers are going to come down on you like a ton of bricks. Be truthful and what are they going to do: sue you for telling the truth? If they take you to court you can countersue and make some dough.
GMD
watch this
These machines have long since been compromised, and turned into spammer 'zombies.'
Is there an easy way for an ISP to prove if a PC has been compromised in one of the more common ways, and it working as a zombie relay?
If so there is a great opportunity here to help solve the govenment budget crisis. Amend the various "attractive nuisance" laws to allow the city or state to cite people for running a compromised system (similar to a traffic ticket). ISP's might be glad to turn in these customers to reduce the load on thier networks. Smart customers (the kind who fasten their seatbelt for a short trip to the corner landromat) will have firewalls and/or virus scanners installed, so this will mostly be a tax on stupidity. Anyone councilman/representative who trys to fight the passing of a law like this can be labeled as a spam supporter.
Depends on what you mean by more for less. For $26.95 I can get 1.5Mbps down / 256Kpbs up from SBC DSL. And with 3Mbps cable going for $45-$50 while only offering 256-384Kbps UP, the $20-$25 saving is nice if you don't need a constand 3Mbps most people won't see in normal usage.
This article is describing a bandwidth hog pure and simple. My heart does not bleed for him. Excessive bandwidth is not a "right", it really does amount to "abuse".
I would agree, and I would also agree that it's the ISP's right to throttle bandwidth. However, it's absolutely imperative that the ISP be very upfront about this. They need to stop going around advertising "unlimited usage" when in fact that's not what they're offering. They need to advertise that there are caps, and what those caps are. They also should provide their users with a means to see what their usage for the month is.
ISPs have the right to regulate the use of their own equipment, but advertising unlimited usage when it's not is fraudulent.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
The reason for this is that, as the party drawing the contract, they can word it in the best possible way for themselves. That they did not, when they had the chance, is, as we used to say as kids, "tough nookies".
This is why you have your lawyer draw contracts that you propose.
You could've hired me.
is make the the alterations to the TOS to be clear on what the limits are, send the tos out to all customers, and give them a grace period of 60 days to terminate their contracts without penalty. That would be the right thing to do, not that they'll do it.
If they want to offer tiered level of services, they should introduce a second data class on their line, requiring different hardware and operating at a symmetrical speed, like 1.5Mb up / 1.5Mb down, or even 3u/3d, and unlimited xfers. They should be wary of overpricing such an offering, but who am I kidding, they overprice everything.
The only reason I'm with comcast is because they were offering $20/mo for 6 months, and they only reason I stay is the new 3Mb down. If they send me a letter and disconnect me, I'll just get DSL and wait for the class action suit that will inevitably follow all this.
I wonder if the problem is more with having enough nodes in a given area, and the cost of adding nodes, or if the real problem is with the amount of upstream bandwidth that they have to buy.
If the problem is not enough nodes, it's their problem. They are responsible for maintaining the network and providing adequate room for growth, and for current users.
If the problem lies in purchasing upstream bandwidth, it's still their problem, but they just exposed themselves to potentially %100 more swing in their needs by doubling their speed limits.
I think they failed to plan for this 3Mb change and are ill prepared to deal with it. If they have to scale back to deal with it then I guess that's what they have to do.
Doesn't saying "unlimited" when it's actually not smack of false advertising?
I could see the company's argument if, like, General Electric signed up and decided to use a single account for all their global operations (shut up, geeks--of which I am one--I know this doesn't make any sense), but it seems that there's a significant proportion (I consider it significant if the business had to develop a process for discouraging the accounts that exceed the "unlimit") of people hitting this arbitrary and secretly-determined-and-monitored cap.
I see advertisements all the time that say You too can be a millionaire using this program* (footnote: provided you started with $1M plus $1 more than the fees associated with this purchasing this program), Lose 10 pounds per day!* (footnote: with diet, exercise, liposuction, surgical removal of excess skin, and successful completion of Boston Marathon), and Learn to read 100 pages per minute!* (footnote: really big print, really tiny pages).
So I don't buy this marketing argument that they'd take a huge hit in subscriptions. I propose they say the following:
or how about:Saying it's unlimited when it simply isn't, and they have a business process they apply to customers on a regular basis proving this is so, is simply unnecessary and at the very least arguably wrong (and I think illegal, no?), so why do it?
sevAs usual, I had to step in and give the right answer on this topic, for once and for all.
--me
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Reminds me of what some senator said not so long ago with respect to the state of health care in the U.S. -- everyone (including the poorest of the poor) has access to health care in the same way that everyone has access to the new Cadillac sitting in a showroom.
If it's all about access, then I'm sure when I go out for the evening tommorrow I'll be accessing hundreds of available women.
This isn't the second time this has been covered, its about the tenth in the last two years.
.16 = $160/mo divide that by half - $80/mo cost for my outflow bandwidth
... the silence is deafening ...
I'm not going to repeat my explanation of IP bandwidth costs *AGAIN* - just go read my journal - it is one of the first posts.
The attitude on here just amazes me - I pay $85/mo for two public IPs, 256k of upstream that I can use like a wholesale pipe (ie 24x7 101% utilized) and I have 3 meg of downstream. If I were younger and more flexible I'd be turning backflips in celebration of this.
When you buy a T1 worth of IP in a the form of a T1 you spend $200+ just for the local loop and the bandwidth itself costs $800 from a quality carrier all the way down to $400 from a third tier. Lets break down my 'expensive' broadband connection.
Half the cost is inflow, half is outflow.
256k/1.544 = 1.6 - $1000 *
3meg/1.5meg = 2 - $1000 * 2 = $2,000/mo divide that by half - $1,000 mo cost for my inflow bandwidth.
Now, can anyone tell me how Cox Cable makes money selling me $1,160 worth of service for $85? Its simple - they have a whole lot of business class customers like me who use the network in a bursty fashion. The technical term here is aggregation.
The typical slashdot responder who coyly dodges specifying that he has a god given right to steal music and video owned (right or wrong) by someone else, and jumps into arguments about false advertising, facist ISPs, and the like.
I think given the horrible way all of you are being treated that the solution should be obvious - pool your funds, pick the most vocal opponent of these policies, and let him spend your hard earned money on building a 'proper' broadband ISP.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
I know from personal experience that a shared internet connection can be a real pain in the butt. I live in a privately managed, off-campus college apartment complex with a few hundred other college students. A large percentage of the residents here use KaZaA on their computers. The network connection is quite fast (multiple T-1, according to the management company) but during most peak times, you're lucky if you can get enough bandwidth to do DNS lookups. The point is, you really do affect the people around you with what you do.
I can't fault the tech department for the management company - as far as I know, KaZaA is almost impossible to block at the router. If anyone knows differently, I'd love to know about it.
One more suggestion: if you find yourself in a similar situation (a clogged residential network), I've found that having a DNS server on my computer work as my primary DNS speeds up your web surfing.
Again, just be good neighbors and try to hold yourself back from hogging the entire residential pipe that you SHARE with your neighbors.
The actual argument (I am paraphrasing not advocating here... 8-) that was advanced to kill the "false advertising" claims was that the access was "unlimited with respect to where and what the user could access" not with respect to "how fast" because clearly the access could not be made available at an infinite rate. No matter what the equipment there is a limit with respect to speed and there is a natural assumtion that fairness of use could be set and enforced just like speed limits on a road (etc).
It is further argued (ibid) that full disclosure was provided since the claims were made in conjunction with statements related to being on the "real internet" as opposed to limited or local services (like Prodigy or Compuserve or the older AOL "mostly on my site" services).
Accordingly (ibid) the meaning was clear when the standard of understanding was set. Removing the word now is impractical and everybody "should understand" this context for unlimited because it was the only one that was ever used in this market.
Yes, I know, "bull" but business stole my internet and made it cheap TV... I foresee a return to much of the BBS culture in the comming years.
[ASIDE]
I mean consider it, how long until the Warz sites stop offering the "full image" of products and start offering an encrypted image fragment. That fragment would be 99.9% of the actual image but to get the last 0.1% you have to make the private BBS call over the more private and protected direct "voice" POTS. Without that last little chunk the image is just so much digital noise and to get the chunk the "content owners" would have to get off the internet and take tracable real-world actions in a much more well-defined legal scope.
Think of it as a "stolen product activation".
Or as a infrastructurally validatable automated authentication system.
Anyway, IMHO, as "the net" gets clogged with "Cable TV" the phone lines will make a comeback as a unifying agency.
[End ASIDE]
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
According to their AUP yet another reason for getting terminated:
"run programs, equipment, or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN (Local Area Network), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited services and servers include, but are not limited to, e-mail, Web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers;"
http://www.comcast.net/terms/use.jsp
Dang.. there goes my dream of downloading every damn song of the 5.2 million GIG available on Kazaa.
That is simply not possible with a standard cable-connection, of the type Comcast sells as far as I can see from their website. They say they sell "25 times modem connection", and specify that with modem they mean 56K, so, they sell 1400Kbps, upload is capped at 256Kbps.
Thing is, with that speed, even at *full* download around the clock, the entire month, you would end up with around 420 GB in a month. This is very much, but it is not "over a terabyte"
Here we go again, why are we having an argument about ISP's, we should be talking about how the whole current structure of what we pay for internet service is based upon some out-dated teleco pricing of internet access based upon demand models of 10 years ago!!!! We should be paying less and getting more bandwidth and times goes by... moor's law as applied to computer chip/technology growth should also apply to the cost of sending N number of bits down a given data distribution system...the explosion of growth we are experiencing in speed of computers and the ever lowering of cost of storage and the increased bandwith of the modems we use, imagine the speed in say 10 or 15 years, we probabbly will be using cheap fiber optic modems, will we be paying the same overpriced, outdated pricing structure we pay now? We had better be paying 100,000 times less in that future date or something in the universe is very very wrong...(same thing as Microsoft charging wayy too much for their crappy OS's, Go Linux!!!...(what we need is an equivallent of Cntl-Alt-Del for the teleco/cable/sat industry)
I too have sold broadband. When I tell a customer that they get unlimited acess but not bandwidth, they rattle off a list of my competitors that advertise unlimited.. again, i tell them its the access and not the bandwidth that those companies offer.. Basically, the customer will go to one of my competitors and sign up. Wait for it, heres the best part.. as we trade under 2 different names, my colleagues selling a different brand of broadband will get the same customers call in, THEY DONT EVEN ASK FOR CLARIFICATION OF BROADBAND, we pre empt it with "its all you can eat"... ignorance is bliss, for some.. anyway, they basically beg us to tell them what they want to here and ignor everything else.. as long as i keep telling them things they dont want to know, i'll keep pushing them away.. so ive stopped!
serenity now!
Unlimited access (I.E., stay on as long as you care to) is not the same thing as unlimited bandwidth (I.E., use capacity that costs them 10 times as much to provide as they're charging you for the line.)
Information may want to be free, but fiber optic cable wants to be one million US dollars per mile.