Slashdot Mirror
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."
When they come to you and say "you have been abusing your 'unlimited' download quota"? Do you ask them to define what 'unlimited' means? Or do you simply pack up and get another ISP?
I have that issue with my (dialup) isp, that the isp itself has an unlimited policy, but they forwarded me a nastygram that *they* recieved from their upstream provider during a month where I was downloading iso's heavily.
So, having other things higher on my to-do list, I let it go; but I'd like slashdots' opinion on how you handle it when "unlimited" means "unlimited up to a certain point"?
They should do something about all those spammers using their service. Seems like about 20% of the spams I run through SpamCop resolve back to Comcast as the email source.
We accept there is no service-level agreement, we accept that we're lower on the food-chain than companies who pay a lot more for their bandwidth, but when a company makes a secret, arbitrary decision to cap you, it gets a bit hard to accept.
If it were advertised that you get 512/128, xx GB/month, with a charge of $Y for every 10GB over that, everyone would know where they were. This unfortunately will not happen while there is no regulation of how companies advertise their service. If company A says the above, and company B *does* the same, but doesn't say they do, then B will get more customers - all of whom will be pissed off when B caps them...
Regulation is the way to go.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Just becuase they invested in them doesn't mean they are a MS company. Lots of tech companies invest in each other. MS has invested in Xerox in the past, are they now a MS company? You can point the tinfoil hat away now, thanks.
They used to be AT&T until mid 2003. I've never had any issues with them, and I've been downloading lots of files, all of the time.
I work from home, and download large (several gigs apiece) drawings and presentations on a daily basis. One of my jobs is to proof them, and then send them on to the appropriate folks. So I would upload the same amount of data, just about.
I'm not sure how I would know that Comcast has issues with me, other than getting a letter. My service is extremely reliable, and I've never had a download or upload fail...
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
is it really possible to abuse a 56k connection? as i recall, it was barely possible to actually surf the web(yes, im spoiled by my cable at home and lan at work, rarely am i limited by my end), let alone download massive amounts of software, etc.
is it just a matter of $10-15 is not enough to pay for very much at all?
use your turn signal! you people act like it's divulging information to the enemy
Wouldn't this be considered false advertising though? I mean if you say unlimited you can't just go back on it because it isn't economically feasible. If a company told me I had unlimited bandwidth and then sent me a letter that I exceeded my bandwidth limitation I would be pretty irate. I would be especially pissed because not only are they employing false advertising, but even their own AUP that they refer to makes no mention of a bandwidth limitation.
I got Comcast cable and specifically asked the cable guy hooking it up what the bandwidth limit for each month was (being educated from a previous slashdot article :) He kinda blew it off with some answer to a question I didn't ask. I asked him a little later after he hooked it up and he told me that the only people that have ever given him a straight answer on that were the people at Avaya.
Sooooo, I'm not sure if that applies nation-wide or if that's just local -- but either way -- find out who ACTUALLY provides the bandwidth to Comcast and then ask THEM what the limit is...
Hope this helps.
>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".
Nah. Bulk ports are available in quantity for sub $5 per month. Netzero's paid account at $9.95 monthly really is unlimited - nail it up, go nuts, they make up for it on the millions of customers. I wouldn't be unsurprised if other big dialup providers were the same nowdays...
if you figure it costs the ISP about $20/month/incoming line it is difficult to make money off someone who is online every night thoughout peak usage.
When Dialup ISPs first started the rule of thumb was 20-25 customers per line. Not long after you needed 1 line per 8 customers. I would bet it got worse later.
The "abuse" is not the upstream bandwidth it is tying up the line.
AnonyCow sez: "Consumers demand to be lied to."
WRONG.
SOME consumers ALLOW themselves to be lied to. The rest of us should not have to expect it just because of them. I demand honesty from those I deal with. If someone's lying to me, they're lying, and the fact that they gtet away with it with some idiots is no reason to excuse it.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
A lot of dialup providers have always sold 'unlimited' dialup with the footnote that unlimited equates to a maximum of 12 hours a day and maximum connection time of 2-4 hours in a session.
I suggest charging a minimum fee for the connection itself and start charging more for the service used.
The phone companies (as much as we love/hate them) have a pretty good system worked out for $20/mo you get a local phone line that includes emergency access and whatnot.
ISP's could probably swing a connection for $20/mo with (oh I don't know) 50-75 gb of transfer. Best to make it symetrical traffic too. Then, when someones goes over it, charge them per gb of traffic.
This addresses a few problems:
* People complaining highspeed is too expensive
* ISP's taking a hit because not many people sign up
* People/ISP's happy with a balance of traffic vs billing
- Dan
Comcast has a HUGE problem right now with hundreds (if not more) of virus-compromised systems, run by the clue-deprived who have not the slightest inkling about the most basic Internet security.
These machines have long since been compromised, and turned into spammer 'zombies.' The problem has gotten bad enough that I've blocked access to our mail systems from ANY system with a domain name ending in 'client.comcast.net,' not to mention huge swaths of Comcast-controlled IP space.
If this 'crackdown' that Comcast is doing helps to get rid of a bunch of these spammer 'zombies,' great! It'll be that much less to worry about.
Granted, if Comcast's so-called "Abuse Desk" even gave a crap about the massive amounts of bit pollution their network is pouring out, they wouldn't have any problems with "abusers" to begin with.
Keep the peace(es).
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Well, my speed isn't 3MBs - I'm up against the laws of physics, being within 50 feet of the farthest you can be from the CO and still get DSL... But I pay a lot less than $50.00 per month, and I have a static IP 768/384K with downtime less than 1 hour per year.
On my DSL line, No one gives a hang what I run. I have my own DNS, mail and web (hosting 3 domains) servers, and a bunch of other stuff.
I tried a cable modem recently - Cablevision. (technically Lightpath - I paid extra for "business class service"). Static IP: not available, dynamic only. Inbound Port 80: blocked. The IP address was registered somwehere - damned if I could figure out where - as a dynamic IP, so half the internet was blocking mail from my servers. Reliability: Down around 2 hours a week. Price: 3 times what the DSL line costs.
Oh yeah, sell me another cable modem... when hell freezes over. DSL is the way to do it.
... if it's available in your area. I have two DSL providers, DCAnet and, of course, Speakeasy. I love them both - they're always great to work with and are very responsive to my needs. I have two lines, a Covad and a Verizon, through DCA and one Covad line through Speakeasy. I've never once had a problem with either, and I've had these lines for a combined total of 5 line-years.
I routinely exceed what comcast calls a "reasonable" limit (30GB/month down and 7.5GB/month up, wasn't it?). Not only do I exceed that, I blow it away - never heard a peep out of either of them...
I have a theory about why Comcast is trying to choke off their Internet users. They recently had to double the downrate to compete with DSL, thinking that offering twice the downstream would make the extra expense worth it... However, they're also trying to ramp up their On-Demand movie service, which is far more profitable to them. So, it makes sense to try to reserve as much of their shared bandwidth as possible for movies rather than for Internet users. I would not be surprised in the least if they lowered those caps at some point, as there is a finite amount of information a single shared cable can carry...
Just a thought..
A couple of years ago I got a DSL line from a local company. I felt good about giving my business to a local company rather than the regional telephone company.
A few months go by and I receive an invoice for ~$80. Apparently, they had modified there agreement to redefine unlimited to mean 6GB/month and were charging $10/GB overages.
I didn't say anything to them. I called the BBB and the CRTC (Canadian equivalent of the FTC) and when I had a couple of hours free I filed a lawsuit seeking a declaratory judgment stating that I didn't owe them any money, court costs and treble damages for breach of contract. My damages were the cost of having a replacement service installed and business interruptions.
They ended up paying me $250 plus court costs as a settlement. Although, I still wish I hadn't settled.
Um, 2 dvds from alt.binaries.dvdr per day, x 30 days is about 300 GB/month. Good thing I'm not with Cox!
I've been known to download video files from time to time but 2 DVDs per day is way, way too much. Unless you are also watching 2 of those DVDs each day, you must be building up one hell of a stockpile to films to watch.
30 GB/month is pretty generous for a home account. Anything more than that and you really should be on a business account.
2 DVDs a day is abuse. Did you even stop to think about what downloading like that must do for the other poor saps who have to share a local connection with you? I, for one, am glad that Cox puts limits on how much people download. I don't want my cable connection to turn to shit just because some jackass wants to download 2 DVDs a day!
GMD
watch this
Uhm okay, I don't know who the fuck thinks it's funny to plaigiarize my writing, but I am the original author of this essay. I wrote it on January 8th of this year, the original text can be found here.
;)
Hmm. I don't know whether or not to say "mod parent down!" After all, it got a freakin' +5. In a way, now I almost wish I thought of copy/pasting my rant to Slashdot first. A pity. Could have done wonders for my karma
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
"Comcast and several other cable firms are doubling their top download speeds to 3 megabits per second"
From google: (1 terabyte) / (3 (megabits per second)) = 1.0632985 months
Therefore, before they raised their caps, it would take you over two months to download one terabyte. Afterwards, it would *still* take you more than a month.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I still say they have it way too good in the USA. Sure, things are getting a little more restrictve, but nonetheless.
/MB over the limit, or shape the account down to around 56k (varies from provider to provider).
Let me tell you how it is in Australia! When Telstra, our telecommunication overlord and monopoly release ADSL for all us little punters, you could get it at a tremendous cost, and they gave you a whole 300MB quota. Then they charged you a significant rate per MB after that. It's taken about 2 years to creep up to 1GB for the basic Telstra plan.
After Telstra was forced by various competition enforcement bodies, third parties are allowed to sell internet services over Telstras local loop. However, Telstra charges incredibly high prices for these services and there are terrible delays. These brave smaller ISPs are able to offer reasonably high limits, starting around 3GB and going anywhere up to 16GB (if you want to pay for it). ISP's will either charge
There are a few groups of ISP's with peering agreements, these make the very low limits on Australian broadband tolerable.
Some ISP's do offer unlimited, however there are a couple of provisos.. if you use too much bandwidth, your priority for connections declines and so does your general quality of service.
The primary real reason behind this is that the USA offers, I don't know, something like 1GB of traffic to Australia, and charges like crazy for the rest, generally bringing most countries who wish to communicate with the USA to their knees.
If you want to see how the rest of the world lives, have a look at http://whirlpool.net.au - it might open your eyes up a little.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.