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Comcast Cuts Off Users Who Exceed Secret Limit
ConsumerAffairs.com has an article up spotlighting Comcast's tendency to cuts off heavy Internet users without defining in their AUP exactly what the bandwidth limit is. Frank Carreiro of West Jordan, Utah, got cut off by the mystery limit and started a 'Comcast Broadband dispute' blog.
I have top secret information about the limit. They cap you if ... *internet goes dead*
Police are handing out speeding tickets to drivers who exceed secret limit.
I've got to be honest here... I'd take an invisible high bandwidth cap over something as low as 100 GB. I can rarely download less than 150 GB per month. Yeah, it's pretty lame of Comcast to be cutting off customers using a large amount of bandwidth, but from the sounds of it they're randomly cutting off users who consume more than 200 GB of bandwidth per month. Invisible caps are also better than set caps because set caps tend to be pretty low in general. However, when an ISP has an invisible cap, it often takes more bandwidth usage than it would be if it was a visible cap to grab their attention.
This sounds like a good case for breach of contract. Why has nobody sued?
Everyone loves small print, but everyone loves it even more when there's the extra small print that you can't see till you screw up ;)
When it was advertised as unlimited, I can see where a user could complain that it would be a FTC violation if they limited your service, but these days i've only noted in the adverts always on. What's the advertising stance presently on comcast service?
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I have both Comcast cable and AT&T DSL. I'm really hesitant to use the Comcast cable for much of anything, because of this cap. It is great for games and Web browsing, because it is indeed very fast and responsive. However, for bulk downloads, I would steer clear of it, and BitTorrent is right out.
DSL is slower, but I've never heard of a monthly bandwidth limit. I believe that the slower throughput speed of DSL is self-policing. DSL is also individually wired to each customer, unlike cable, as cable's bandwidth is shared throughout entire neighborhoods. So, the only one you hurt by maxing out the bandwidth of DSL is yourself, and with a packet shaper, this becomes less of a problem.
It varies from area to area, but it appears the "secret" Comcast limit has been determined to be roughly 100 gigabytes per month. I believe this is a cumulative total of both upload and download.
This has been going on for some time, and the good people at broadbandreports.com have much to say about it....
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
Hire a lawyer and sue the fuckers for breach of contract. Both parties in a contract must be privy to the terms of the contract. So sue the fuckers, because if they haven't revealed the limitation on the TOS, the limitation isn't valid.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
The problem with this right now is that there's no way for the market to work. We don't have a comparison of the different speeds of different ISPs as they really are so the quality of connection doesn't really influence buying decisions. All of the ISP comparisons I have found are based around the ISP's own speed definitions. How about someone running benchmarks:
Preparation: download of 10 GB of data of various kinds; at that point measure:
a) how fast is a bittorrent download
b) what's the quality of skype (packet loss/delay at normal quality speech)
c) what the https throughput for many random independent sites
d) how does youtube do?
e) how fast is tor & freenet
f) how good is SIP based VOIP / Video (packet loss/delay at high quality speech)
And do something like multiply them up to provide an overall quality measurement for each ISP and provide it on a web page. At that point people could actually begin to choose their ISP based on real performance rather than some stupid and useless megs per second measured between the home modem and nearest router. Probably this needs a community of people with connections (and a willingness to sacrifice???).
any better ideas?
anybody already started on this?
if your internet is cut off?
What?
Taken from another website regarding this same matter. Credit to Generation_D.
"From what I know, the unspoken limits about 300 GB a month, which is more than almost any of us will touch even once in a lifetime, it takes multiple torrents running full on 24.7 . We know this cause we caught some Comcast rejects moving to our company. Sudden spikes in monthly bandwidth on our end can doom our business, to the level these guys were pulling.
The reason Comcast doesnt tell you is if they did, asshat downloaders would lawyer the total and if lets say it was 100, they'd use 99.9999 then whine if they were denied that much. The approach would backfire. Plus its a competitive disadvantage for Comcast if their competitors know what a soft limit on dl's is. You'd generate a race to the bottom over max downloads, again, the tactic would backfire.
There's always one claimed good citizen, but reading the article he has 6 kids, guaranteed not all of them is telling daddy what he left the computer doing all last night, and the night before, and the night before that. non stop DL porn? in my family's PC? Its more common than you think.
And no its not a content issue, but you'd be amazed how some of these guys have no idea what 300GB of porn or DVD looks like. Some of us with ISP careers do -- purely research purposes. And I can tell you not even our raging gamer tech supporters touch anywhere near 300 GB in a month, I've tried to get them to.
Hitting those caps is very difficult to do unless you're running non stop multiple torrents. Despite what mr. innocent citizen says."
I'm always connecting to the servers and especially my own box at school when i'm at home. I'm swapping huge data files back and forth, backing stuff up, and vnc-ing. Comcast can only see that everything is going through ssh. Add all the non-copyright infringing youtube videos, linux distros and kernels, so on and so forth, to that and I'm already a huge drain without even pirating anything. If they announce their secret limit, they better let their customers see some reports on our own traffic, especially *according to what they're measuring.*
If they include as part of the limit all the packet and port snooping they're apparently doing on their customers, I want to know.
This type of thing isn't really new from any ISP. The problem for anyone to define acceptable is that depending on your location, node, etc. acceptable can be different. Remember this is based on "hindering other uses experience" and if you are on a node that supports 250 people but only 25 people are on their your limitations could be different than if 225 people were on there.
As for the customers experience where he talks about trying to get 50 GB. This *may* be true. However, I know someone that called for bandwidth abuse and the account holders had no idea what it was being used for in the house. Asking the members of the house they found their son had downloaded over 400GB of movies in a week. Another scenario is that someone could have been tapping into an unsecure wireless network, taking an average amount of usage into something considered high.
it were 6 or 7 years ago. I'm sort of surprised nobody's been able to get anything out of them after all this time, maybe some type of suit will happen someday. It's the American way isn't it?
Seriously, this is a dupe. Eventually people are just gonna have to accept that "reasonable" limits do exist on a service.
I think they should specify what those limits are, but lots of limits in life are not strictly specified, basically be reasonable. speed limits might have a specified limit, however everyone goes at a speed of whats reasonable and ignores the hard limit.
this is a dupe because it is now known comcast does this. it isnt news, it isnt shocking, it is well known, it is stupid but it isnt gonna change.
they should just specify somethign in their agreement and be done with it, "250 gig transfer per month"
no one really gives a shit if its called "unlimited" anyways, all they care about is how fast it is.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
comcast has to do this because a heavy internet user can bring down a whole neighborhood, where DSL does not have these problems. They are cutting off bittorrent use because they see that as giving away bandwicth uneccessarily to nerds who pirate music.
With everybody signing up broadband and everybody using bandwidth intensive activities like video, comcast probably sees no alternative in their own eyes.
I think that ultimately the question that came about (and of course no one REALLY knows (which is the problem)) was that some folks began wondering if the data was incorrect - in other words - if the bandwidth numbers were mistakenly attributed to an individual who hadn't actually used anywhere near that much.
In other words - digging into the details, it became obvious that one very strong possibility was that (again, no one REALLY knows (which is the problem)) the person who got contacted was not the person who generated the bandwidth. In other words, Comcast keeps asking the poor fellow to cut back, they're looking at 250-300 gigs on their end, while the poor fellow is actually doing about 20-30 gigs and cutting back to even less than that. No matter how much the subscriber cuts back, the next month, erroneous data comes in again - Comcast's info is that he's done another 200+ gigs that month. So this ends up where they cut him off for 12 months (true story). There was no other logical explanation (other than the subscriber lying (which is a possibility, or course)).
This is where the secrecy creates problems, really. Sure, maybe an invisible something or another is better than a low explicit one, but you can't defend yourself if they've got it wrong, because there's no documentation. They don't even always tell the subscriber how much the subscriber has downloaded, and it appears that they may even lie about that. They don't want anyone knowing anything, basically. "Just cut back".
But "Just cut back" doesn't cut it when it's not you, now does it?
It's one thing to have rules, it's another thing to have flexible rules. But no matter how flexible those rules are, if you have this absolute secrecy thing going on, you stand no chance of defending yourself if you actually haven't done it and someone gets something mixed up somewhere.
Having a "counter" on your account - where you log into your account online and see how much you've downloaded, for instance - if you see data on there that isn't you, or if it's going up too fast, you can be proactive and call in and say "something's wrong here". If, for instance, the gigs are accumulating, and you disconnect your modem - pull it out of the wall -- and the gigs are still accumulating, then you can call in and notify. This isn't ME doing it. But if they won't even tell you how much you downloaded to get the call, or if they lie about it, (again, no one REALLY knows what happened (which is the problem)), how are you to trust that data is actually accurate? That it's not a mixup somewhere?
In that one particular situation, it did in fact appear that Comcast got the subscribers data mixed up (they actually turned the subscriber's internet back ON). They cancelled the 12-month cancellation because they reviewed their records and they figured out that it wasn't him doing it - they got it mixed up with someone else. The subscriber was downloading 15-30, and their data was saying 250-350. Month after month after month. Try cutting back on that!
It's creepy, is what it is. It's too secretive - you can't defend yourself. There's no data - no documentation.
They really ought to change the way they do this - it's very, very creepy.
I'm a Comcast subscriber with heavy usage, but I don't pay much attention to exactly how much I'm using or how fast it is. I've been noticing slow speeds every once in a while for a long time now, but I have no idea how to go about carefully measuring it. What's an easy way to do so?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
By introducing, or FUDing a secret limit, Comcast users are now in fear that they could be cut off at any time. While some are likely to switch ISP, most will try to slow down a bit "just in case". Overall less data will be used.
If Comcast sets a public limit, most users will try to get to that limit just to get the money's worth, and this tends to increase overall usage.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
This year, Comcast has issued a revised Subscriber (Residential) Service Agreement. In this agreement, you agree to arbitration only unless you opt out within 30 days of receiving this agreement.
a shx
If you don't opt out of this clause, your chances of receiving any civil compensation are greatly reduced. All of the other posts that talk about turning your team of lawyers loose on Comcast would be wise to review the entire agreement first.
http://www.comcast.com/arbitrationoptout/default.
The reason for this is not because of a secret limit. It is because of accuracy of the measurement.
A radar gun is at best +/- 3mph. If you "admit" to speed, the issue of accuracy is moot.
Fight Spammers!
I'm using at least 200kb/s down 24/7 with bittorrent plus my normal internet usage, games, etc. That's over 500GB a month. I'm a Charter subscriber in Socal and I've never been throttled, cut off, or warned.
Less people clogging up our tubes.
What do you expect from a monopoly? Do you expect them to play by rules or in any way seem competitive? There are a lot of places in the US that do not even have broadband.
God spoke to me.
Then I don't have a whole lot of sympathy. Yes, Comcast should still state what the limit is. I can understand why they don't want to since it would encourage people to use more, and they'd have to develop a tool for you to check on it, but they still should do it.
However I'm not really that sympathetic to the people hitting it. 300GB is a shitload of traffic. I run a couple web servers (business class cable account) and download anything that catches my fancy like large demos, as well as watch any video I want online, and I've never hit that. That's 10GB a day, for the whole damn month. You really have to try to generate traffic like that. I mean I absolutely don't restrict myself in any way, I pay for a business account it really is unlimited (I have an SLA) and the connection is fast 10mb/1mb. Still rare the month I even do half of that, and that's accounting the 50GB or so that the servers do.
I still think Comcast needs to state the limit, but people can't pretend like you can buy cheap access, slam it 24/7, and expect not to have someone get annoyed.
It's the same deal on the campus where I work. We don't want to do something dick like rate limit people's connections. I mean we've got fast access, it's nice to have fast downloads. You need to get a Knoppix DVD? Get on a good torrent and you'll get it at 5mbytes/sec or more. However, that doesn't mean that you are free to do that all the time. If you did, it'd suck up too much campus bandwidth. It works because people will get what they want and then go back to low usage, allowing others to have a share. If everyone tried to max it, well everything would go slow.
So, rather than rate limit connections so that you can't do it, but always put up with slow downloads, it is a situation of if you don't keep it reasonable, you'll get yelled at, or get your port shut down if you still won't comply. There's not a hard limit, it is basically a "When you are causing problems," situation. During the summer? Go nuts pretty much. When Knoppix 5 came out I got permission to seed it over a weekend and did about 1.5TB of transfers. During the year during the week? Hell no, there are tens of thousands of others using the connection, be respectful of it.
Same deal with Internet at your home. The less you are paying, the more shared it is and the more restrictions you can expect. If you want less restrictions, you can generally pay for it. I bought business cable which allows me to run servers and doesn't really cap bandwidth usage, though I'm still sharing the spectrum with other people on my segment. If I wanted I could further move up to something more dedicated like a T1, for more money. The higher up the chain you go, the less you share it.
Sounds to me like they just want people to keep it reasonable. You don't really need to download 50 movies a month and a thousand MP3 and 10 large game demos and so on (which is the kind of thing it would take to hit 300GB). Morality of infringing on copyrighted material aside, you just need to keep it more reasonable and you'll be fine.
That or pony up the cash for a better class of service. I hesitate to recommend Speakeasy now that Best Buy owns them, and in fact that's why I switched to business class cable (Cox, not Comcast), but they don't do any restrictions at all on their high end accounts. They aren't the only provider out there that does that. However, you do pay a bit more. Expect to pay about $100/month for a 6mb/768k DSL like. That is generally equal or inferior to what you'd get with $30-40 cable service. However, Speakeasy is charging an amount sufficient that they can afford to have you run servers and and use that line fully. The cable company is not (for the consumer account).
Here is the subject material for a new story.
i moved to a area that does not have comcast. its a smaller privet cable provider cable hear is pretty new. wile they lack the sheer speed of comcast at least i dont gotta worry abought getting cutoff. becides witbh stuff like fios and iptv coming i think cable companys better start worrying net will be alot faster then they provide and thers some direct competion to the tv market as well. greedy companys like comcast better get there act together.
With a secret limit, especially if it has a slightly random element to it (say, 10% off by either way), one wouldn't need to worry about every putz throttling themselves to 98% of the limit all the time and hogging the bandwidth. "Be reasonable" is fuzzy advice from a math standpoint, but generally a better way to organise things than the alternative.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Dude if you're pushing 200 gig to 300 gig a month band useage it's time to look into T1 lines or dump the torrent. I don't have the time to download that much let alone tie up equipment doing it and I have five machines running. I'm going to move in the Spring and I've considered a T1 line. I do transfer a lot of data at times but almost the bigger consideration is reliability. They've been working on the local cable service and my internet keeps going down which results in hours lost trying to explain to the moron on the other end of the phone that it's not my equipment it theirs. I'm running a graphics business out of my home and I don't want to worry about consumer service limits or the "what do you want me to do about it" attitudes from the service people. T1 service may beyond the average consumer but for heavy users it's pretty afordable compared to the old days. Since it's wired through traditional lines it has the added benifit of being available in areas that lack high speed service. Installation is still pricey but if you own your own home and plan to be there for a few decades look at it as an investment.
And that's the problem. Companies found that with all kinds of lines. For example back in the earlier net days providers wanted to offer metered high bandwidth connections for companies. Something like you get a DS3, maybe even full DS3, but only only get so many GB/month on it. They figured it was a win/win. People want fast downloads, but don't need to use them all the time. They can handle that without expensive backbone upgrades. So they sell you a line that has limits. You get tons of speed, but only so much you can use it. Just buy the amount you need.
Great right? Wrong. They were massively unpopular. Everyone wanted unmetered lines. Didn't matter that you had to have slower bandwidth, didn't matter that it cost more, they didn't want to have to pay overages. So instead of getting something like a full DS3 with a 700GB/month limit, they'd get 2 DS1s for a bunch more money and then only use 200GB/month.
Dialup providers found the same thing. Phone lines are expensive, especially when you are talking digital lines that you need to provide 56k access. Now if people are reasonable and only stay connected when they are actually using the net, you find you can pack a good number of people per line and still never have busy signals. For a reasonable pool of subscribers it is at least 5 people per line usually, and can be as much as 10. So you have 500 subscribers, but only have 50-100 phone lines. Saves money. Problem is some people will leave their connection on all the time.
So the solution is to just add a reasonable limit, like 5 hours per day right? Wrong. Even customers who used waaaay under that bitched. They wanted "unlimited". Didn't matter that the limit was something that wouldn't affect them, and in fact would make their service better, they worried it might and thus didn't want it.
So same deal with broadband. Customers don't want to pay the prices for truly unlimited service, and most don't need to as they don't use it. However they don't want to buy a non-unlimited connection and as such that's how the companies advertise. It would be nice if someone could advertise that they do have limits but those limits make it better service, but nobody would buy it, they'd go for the "unlimited" competitor instead.
...is anyone surprised that they treat their customers poorly?
Unlimited service is economically inefficient and should be abandoned for metered service. Why do power companies charge based on metered usage? Because people like this guy would crank the air conditioning to 60 F and then complain about rolling blackouts (I'm sure it maximizes profits as well). This customer would likely not be very happy with the price Comcast would charge for 300GB/month usage.
Only 100GB?? That's a _lot_ of traffic. How are you guys doing to use that much ??
If I take your 150GB per month figure, that's 5GB a day, or a constant 24/7 traffic of 60KB/s. That's insane.
Look, I'm not a high downloader myself. In fact, most of my bandwidth usage is from playing MMOs, because the rest of time is, well, spent like now: my connection idles while I type a huge message on a board or another. I'd even be a fan of returning to a pay-per-MB scheme, since I don't see why I'd have to subsidize those downloading terrabytes of porn and ripped HD movies. Plus, let's face it, shiny-happy communal resource schemes just result in the poor subsidizing the rich, and "tragedy of the commons" situations.
That says, I'd draw the line at calling people "asshats" just because they use the bandwidth they were sold. They got sold a service on the explicit claim that it's unmetered and unlimited, and they're actually using it as such.
I'm not surprised that the text you quote comes from another ISP, because it's a widespread disease: sell based on outright lies, then try to demonize the users who actually use what they bought. And I find that lame.
It's like advertising an all-you-can-eat breakfast hour at your restaurant, then starting calling people names when they take more than a cup of tea, two slices of bread and a slice of cheese. Or like advertising that a hotel includes a free swimming pool, and then starting treating people like thieves if they're in there for more than half an hour a day. I'm betting not many people would go to that restaurant or hotel again.
Talks about what "normal people" should use or about downloading porn are just a stupid strawman there, plus some appeal to shame when invoking the downloading porn all night argument. It's just freakin' irrelevant. Those people never signed a contract that said "thou shalt not download more than thy neighbour" or "thou shalt never use it for porn", and that's certainly not the service that the ISP advertised. If they're against downloading porn, just advertise as "the family-friendly network where porn is forbidden and a termination offense" and see if that flies in the market.
Those people were advertised unmetered, unlimited access, and there was no talk about what they can't use it for, either. Period. Now deliver what you sold.
Because all the talk about "asshats" and "bad network citizens" and such is just weasel wording to justify a _fraud_. The ISP sold something he can't deliver, and now is calling the customer names when he actually wants what he's bought.
It's no different than, say, me selling you a PS3 on ebay and then starting calling you names when you actually want it. "Auugh, he's an asshat! If all people actually received their PS3s we'd go bankrupt! I bet he just wants to watch Blue Ray porn on it all night! Someone shame him and drive him away already!" It's just not right.
So basically my message to those ISPs is: fuck you, if you can't afford to really offer that kind of service, then fucking stop selling it. Because presenting people as some kind of supreme-evil arch-villains for just using the service they bought, is just lame. Go back to pay-by-hour or pay-by-MB if you can't afford to live up to the unlimited service you promised. But have the fucking _decency_ to not demonize people who just use the service they were advertised and sold.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Get NetMeter http://www.metal-machine.de/readerror/
OK, it's a rant and it's OT. There are lots of people on /. that know better, so you all can move along. For the rest--"Bandwidth" relates to the usable amount of spectrum available to a communications channel, measured in Hertz. "Capacity" is the maximum number of bits per second that can be reliably sent over a noisy channel; a channel's capacity depends on the bandwidth and the signal to noise ratio, as famously set out by Claude Shannon in or around 1948. This confusion of "bandwidth" with "capacity" is the usual confusion by people who like to sound like they know what they're talking about (e.g., press). But this piece's head, confusing "bandwidth" with "bits" or "bytes" is simply beyond the pale. Come on kids, pay attention. This is Slashdot.
my last ISP all of the sudden could not deliver services to me anymore although I am only 150 meters from heir PoP. The excuse was that I was "too close". So now I got a new one, for now. That said I don't think I had been over 60GB pr month at that time.
I do use a lot of bandwith(having always bought the fastest line) a lot of TV and movie streaming over the net, internet radios too.
But the xbox is the biggest consumer of bandwidth, since the bigger hard drive is not available here yet. With only 14 gigs available I download many demos / tailers etc multiple times. And when they start delivering any real content like in the US, I will be using that too.
Glad I'm not living in the states ! =)
I'm currently sitting on a shitty 6Mbit ADSL hovering at around 300-500 Gb a month down (I refuse to seed/upload anything ever) but I hope to upgrade to a 25Mbit ADSL2 or similar connection in the future, I'll never hit my glory days of 1TB a month on my old 100Mbit though but I used to serve around 500+ Gb a month easily aswell on that, maybe I should move again to get a new 100Mbit. I'm glad most to all norwegian ISP's keep away from BW limits these days.
I predict that in the end we'll have a postal system: we will pay by the bit. The sender of a bit will pay, say, 125 picodollars in postage on top of the $15 flat monthly service charge. There will also be guaranteed express delivery for lower latency (QoS), say for a nanodollar per bit.
The ISP will charge these rates to the consumer, but the carriers will in turn charge each other for data delivery by the bit.
Yes, A bit offtopic but I just did a "Search" and not one word of "Windows" in the entire replies yet! I'm going out to look at the sky, perhaps the pigs are flying! :O
Autumn humor...
In terms of latency DSL is about 10% faster. I did tests with both Comcast cable and AT&T DSL. The response times had a much higher standard deviation and overall higher average (about 90ms vs 100ms) for Comcast vs DSL. If you want the extreme of high bandwidth with high latency just use snail mail. Yes of course Comcast offers 8Mb vs DSL's 6MB but it wasn't often that I was able to actually to achieve speeds over 6Mb (especially with bittorrent). Downloading large files from the local university did show the advantage of cable. However, I quickly got disconnected for "overusage". I'm switching back to AT&T (with 3 months free for switching) and Comcast is refunding me for the month where they shut me off. I complained to the BBB and it was fairly effective. Someone from Comcast called me back to respond to my issue and refund my money.
not kidding i was asking comcast abought there hosting abiltys one day. i wanted to open a site i knew would genrate alot of traffic. so i was asking abought there limits. this was long befor these storys of them cutting people off so i guess they didnt fear telling me. well the logic behind it is indeed flawed but it goes like this. comcast does indeed have no written limit its based on the top 3 percent. the avrage usage at that time was around 100gb but im pretty shure that has gone up sence stuff like youtube and iptv has come out. so there limit is not a static one but one based on what everyone else is doing but that top 3 percent things means someone is always getting screwed. thank god i dont have comcast anymore.
Wasn't that exact same clause ruled unconscionable for AT&T already? I'm pretty sure there was a story about that on Slashdot's front page a couple of weeks ago. So the precedent already exists.
And frankly, while IANAL, it should have been obviously so all along, even in corporation-owned USA. A clause saying "if you have any grievance with me, I'm the sole judge, jury and executioner on that" just isn't how the rule of the law was supposed to work. It's not just a blatant conflict of interest all the way, it's essentially proclaiming someone exempt from the laws and rules that bind everyone else.
The contract is _not_ sacrosanct and doesn't override laws in any civilized country. E.g., you can't sell yourself into slavery even if you wanted to, because there's a law against that. Otherwise everyone would sneak "you are now my property" in the fine print or some would go beat someone up until they sign such a contract.
Heck, AFAIK even in the USA there is this provision that contract clauses that are unexpected and unreasonable to a normal person, are essentially worthless. If you rent a car from my hypothetical car loan shop, I can't come afterwards and say "ha ha, in the small print says I now own your home and I just adopted your firstborn too", because that's clauses which don't belong there and aren't expected. I certainly can't see how an "I'm above the law" clause would be any more allowed.
So it's just one of those crap EULA-type clauses that's there just to hopefully scare you into believing it, not because it's actually legal or enforceable. Some corporations figured out that instead of just lobbying for more power, they'll just claw away at your rights by just telling you that you're bound to give them some powers, and hoping that you'll actually believe it.
Disturbingly enough, it seems to actually work.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"But no matter how flexible those rules are, if you have this absolute secrecy thing going on, you stand no chance of defending yourself if you actually haven't done it and someone gets something mixed up somewhere."
We're talking about Comcast, right? Because for a minute I thought you were talking about the No Fly list.
if an isp says that it is going to provide a certain bandwith with NO transfer limit or doesnt specify a transfer limit, it has to provide whatever it is thrown at it. its DECENT BUSINESS for gods sake.
Read radical news here
I do internet tech support and never got a call from a customer who was "capped". I would assume just like any other customer when they can't get online, (wether it's Comcast's fault or not) they will call tech support at 1-800(or 888)-COMCAST. Which will get them to a call center based on region. I work the NE areas PA, NJ, WV, DE, NYC, DC. The only abuse calls I ever see are people who have port 25 blocked cause too much spam is coming from their modem (99.9% are Windows spam zombies).
I do see DMCA takedown notices sometimes, but I've seen people w/ 3 warnings in 30 days who still have service. I never do see the ones who are cutoff for continued violation, nor do I see those who get caught removing their speed caps (I know one person did but it was a friend who did it years ago). The other reasons are they didn't pay their bill (strangely some are cut off after 30 days, some up to 90). Or if their modem is not properly registered with a real account (bought a new one and didn't give us the MAC or some lame Comcast database glitch.
There are also problems with salespeople putting rate codes in wrong when upgrading to CDV and don't adjust the HSI code accordingly; and people who want to cancel sometime in the future but the disconnect order is put in wrong and it forces the HSI off that day.
Anyway, in 8 months averaging 25-40 calls per day, so far, I have never seen a person who was cut off for downloading too much.
Maybe they're out there but they must be extremely rare. Cause even if someone else got the call... in the culture of the call center (I'm sure most of you know what I'm talking about) they'd be talking about how funny/stupid/angry/unique the call was.
Well, I'm aware of that, and it's insightful in its own right, but it still doesn't justify fraud.
If it takes 600+ per month to provide the service they advertised, then they can say so. Arguments boiling down to, "but we'd go bankrupt for actually providing the service we advertised," are still just fancy wording for fraud. If you can't deliver what you sold, it's fraud by any other name. If you can't afford to provide it at that price, then just don't in the first place.
Redefining "unlimited" is bogus. That's just word play. If they wanted to mean exactly that and only that, it's damn easy to just say so. It takes at most one sentence. Heck, it just takes two extra words: "unlimited connect time." There, now it's perfectly clear what's meant.
It's like putting a shield outside a pub that says "free unlimited beer" and then getting into wordplay games like "yes, well, see, we meant free and unlimited as in speech. We're not limiting your rights to do whatever you wish with your beer." It's still false advertising nevertheless.
The truth is, "unlimited" used to mean exactly that: unlimited everything. And bandwidth used to cost a fair bit in the modem days too, because there was a lot less backbone cable laid. The problem was just the same. They just bet that you wouldn't use most of it. At the time, it wasn't that modems made it any different, it was just that there wasn't that horribly much to do on the net. And it was sorta self-throttling for everyone: if too many people try to see a web page at the same time, all of them get it a little slower. If there's anything that made a difference, it's not cable modems, it's that P2P programs came along. And those don't play as nice: they open hundreds of channels to stuff the bandwidth to the max.
They also knew what they're getting into when they kept upgrading the DSL or cable speed without actually increasing the backbone speeds. They kept advertising higher and higher speeds, while fully knowing they can't actually deliver.
Even the word redefinition falls on its face if you look at the examples and justifications they use to demonize their customers. Most are along that line of "but they kept downloading all day!" Ah-ha. So they used the connection and advertised bandwidth for actually an unlimited amount of time.
At any rate, it's still fraud. They sold a service based on an expectation that's just short of explicit.
Claiming "unlimited internet access" at, say, 1 megabit speed, is already making a claim about how much a cap you're getting. It means, 30 days times 24 hours times 3600 seconds times 1 megabit. Per month. XCalc says that's 2592000 megabits per month. Assuming 10 bits transmitted are roughly 1 content byte (the rest accounting for overhead, handshake, packet headers, etc), that's 259,200 megabytes or roughly 259 gigabytes. If you advertised more speed, that's more. E.g., if you advertised 6 megabit/s, for example, that's a bit over 1.5 terrabytes per month.
That's the underlying assumption.
For most people (myself included) it's more than they'll ever need, but nevertheless, that's the implicit quantity they sold. That's what those people bought. Not being willing and able to actually deliver it, just means fraud. Trying to demonize those who actually use all they bought is lame.
It's no different than if I claimed that for X$ a month you can get 1.5 square miles of land on my hypothetical third country island, on the assumption that almost noone would actually get that much land. Then when you actually buy a tractor and build a fence around exactly that much land, the ISP way would be that I coome and kick you out for being a bad community member and using that much land at the expense of others. You should have known that regardless of what the contract says, you're not actually supposed to get more than 100 acres.
That's another thing that gets my goat in that fraud, btw: trying to present those users as some arch-villains that steal from the community. It's not the IS
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
My connection reads 6mbps down, 768kbps up. Exactly what I'm paying for. Yet I have my connection COMPLETELY saturated 24/7, and have for the last several months. No cutoffs here.
1. They advertise the plan as "unlimited bandwidth". Things in public ads are _more_ binding to a company than the terms of service IMHO.
2. That kind of contract clause is called in BR law "leonine clauses" and are automatically void. They would be obligated to spell what the limit is -- in the contract _and_ in the advertising (even if only in the "small letters nobody can read on TV without 1080p but you can see on paper and magazine ads").
What we _do_ have here is a clause that says "the ISP will provide at least 15% of the nominal bandwidth 24/7 and 100% of the nominal bandwitdh at least 15% of the time." and it's barely legal as is. But, thank $DEITY, no DL cap. Disclaimer: in my town [third largest in the country, 4M inhabitants], there are at least six providers of broadband.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Well I know it must be somewhere under 750GB for a month, because that's what got me cut off.
And, this is where trial attorneys come in and file a class action lawsuit against Comcast. The long-term result is a defined cap, perhaps one month's free service from each subscriber cut off, and millions in attorney's fees. It's the American way.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
511 gig month using the same IP number (24 day period actually) generated a warning call to me
a warning
no answer as to what the limit is. its above 40 and below 400 though I have heard
Effectively, the light users are subsidizing the heavy users. If usage goes up (YouTube?) then overall profitability suffers. Either prices increase for all, or the hogs get slaughtered. Comcast has apparently chosen the later.
Expect squeals of protest from the hogs "contractual obligation". But it's not that simple. I would expect software to drop/delay packets (TCP ACKs) to throttle the hogs. This would avoid network performance degrading under load for the bulk of the users. Nothing illegal or inviolation of contract -- load has gone up and this is how they share it more equally. Buy an upgraded account.
I got rid of Comcast the moment FIOS was available for various reasons, but I used to download a LOT of ISO's and other large files, plus share the connection with my wife and our teenage daughter. We never once had a problem. I am sure I exceeded 100 gigabytes in a month at least a few times. I guess we just got lucky.
All ISPs in Belgium have a monthly data limit. The only cable ISP, Telenet, offers a 10 Gb limit per month. You can consult a webpage which shows how much you downloaded already, and even see last months statistics.
At night, they use "nightsurfing". Basically, you can download twice as much and it just counts as normal traffic. So someone surfing only at night could download 20Gb per month.
You can order extra Gigabytes, at 1 euro per extra Gigabyte, but you can only order a "reasonable" amount extra each month.
And yes, big downloaders each either download 9.99 Gb/month, or start downloading a lot the day before the meter resets (back to 0). They then introduced a "dynamic" meter.. not resetting once a month, but always counting your last 30 days. Each day, the day 30 days ago fell off, and a new blank day was introduced. After much complaints from the customers, they brought back the static meter, resetting back to 0, but each customer had his own reset day (instead of all customers resetting on the end of the month) thus dividing the 'last day'-traffic across the month.
And yeah, this is an annoying system and lots of people complain. But it's been improved over the years, and it is pretty decent now... if you can settle with about 20 gigs a month.
Read your user servie agreement form that you agreed to upon installation. It can be found online at Comcast.net in the help sections. You guys act like this is something new...just because they didn't verbally tell you about doesn't mean its any less enforceable. You guys are slowly turning into the type of people that sue McDonalds because they're coffee burned them. The cup says its FUCKING HOT but you need more.
This is Slashdot! Give me the latest gadget, bug, or OS project! This ain't english class so don't confuse the two!
I thought I had just broken a rule that was stated in the terms of service document. While on the phone with the representative, he informed me that I had used 440gb of bandwidth that month, which is high for me, which made it hard for me to gauge how much is too much since they don't specify a number in the TOS. I asked the guy if he could give me a number so that i wouldn't be blacklisted for a year, and all he said was to be reasonable. Unfortunately, what seems reasonable to me is clearly not reasonable to them and that arbitrary of a term shouldn't be used when the service in question is easily quantifiable... He said that normally such use would bring an instant year suspension of service but since i lied and told him that my router was unsecured and my neighbors must have been using it (not true) he told me to secure it and don't do it again.
When ever I upload a file (which I do on a regular basis, three times a week,) my upload speed starts off average and then, every second I upload, the speed goes down.
By the end of the transfer, I'm usually down to a crawl.
I'm using FTP (different port from P2P) but that doesn't matter, they are throttling the speed regardless.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
have you done the calcs for that? 32ft per second per second. How big a cliff will have to be for a house to reach 150mph?
Somehow I think for something as big and clunky as a house, the terminal velocity will be around 100mph.
We are living in the age of massive internet usage now. Video streaming, audio streaming, distribution of software via downloads (downloading 2GB+ software packages is nothing unusual - just sign up for any of the various online RPGs and you will see...), multimedia-heavy websites... traffic limits of 10GB per month are outdated. Even 100GB+ are very easy to reach, without downloading porn or warez. I guess a lot of management-type people just have not realized this yet, and so completely NORMAL internet usage is seen as being a "bandwidth hog" or "using the internet at the cost of others".
Thank god I live in Germany. 49.95 Euros per month for 16000 DSL without time/volume limits and including unlimited phone calls. And no traffic shaping either. And somehow, even without placing limits on what people do, it still works...
Sprint did the same thing two months ago -- they involuntarily terminated customers who were calling customer service too much...to complain about the customer service.
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Don't most routers/modems come with a data counter? I know my AVM Fritz!Box provides a daily/weekly/monthly overview. IF the data measurement is the problem, shouldn't Comcast be interested in working with their (former) customers to resolve such issues?
I think it may be a bandwidth thief that may have hijacked their router , using it for his own p0rn collection....but in the end, I agree, if they had better info on who downloaded what, especially using mac addresses to see if there is more then one computer on the HOME network...which would show if there was someone else using it......then they could signal the user HEY you have 2 computers....downloading...."no i dont"...then in comes a tech that would secure their home router...
Happened to my dad, and I set up his router's encryption and voila, he now isnt being charged 100$ month more because of the enourmous downloads...
I was one of the lucky winners of Comcast's cutoff last month. I wasn't cut off but I was given a fairly stern warning. They were also unbelievably rude to my wife. The call was made from Comcast's Internet Security group.
On that call it was explained to me that I was receiving this warning because I was in the top 1/10 of 1% of downloaders nationwide. I don't know if that's really nationwide, since Comcast's NOCs are run semi-regionally. I asked how much that means I downloaded, I wasn't given an exact number; I was told it was between 300 and 400 GB.
(Wish I could say it was for something good and I was downloading warez and pr0n -- it was all for work)
At any rate, I was told that this was my only warning, to knock it off or my service would be terminated for a period of twelve months. The whole call was about five minutes during which I found the Comcast employee to be fairly menacing. It was not a pleasant experience.
I was also told that business users are NOT subject to these caps. My only real option is to get a business-tier account if I expect this to happen again -- Comcast is the only game in town, and they know it. Can't get DSL where I am. It absolutely sickens me that all I can really do is give Comcast more money to have this not happen again.
Another possible explanation is that someone has spoofed his IP address. It's not too difficult to change the IP address under any OS. If Comcast's accounting system is based on the amount of traffic received or sent to this address from their end, this could be what is happening.
A simple test would be to note the assigned IP address of the computer in question, disconnect it from the network and then attempt to 'ping' the same address from another system.
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The comments on the blog suggest that the guy was actually using file sharing software; that is explicitly prohibited by Comcast's AUP, so I think they are within their rights to discontinue his service immediately. Also, volume limits are an economic necessity.
Still, I think Comcast would do themselves a favor if they revised their policy:
(1) state an explicit per-month volume limit for each of their plans
(2) charge excess volume, with different rates for peak/off-peak (or make off-peak free)
(3) drop restrictions on service type
In fact, I'd be in favor of legislation basically requiring ISPs to charge in this way.
I live in Central Indiana and we have Insight Broadband, here, and we went through all of these shinanigans all this past year.
First, everything was fine on our 4mbit/128kbit cable service. The upload sucked, but it worked alright. Then, they decided to upgrade everyone's service to 10mbit/1mbit for free (which gives us some of the best cable that I know). That's where the problems started.
When it was 4mbit/128kbit, people could max their measly 128kbit line and it probably didn't hurt Insight all that much. But when they started upgrading for the "InsightBB 10.0" switch, people continued to max their lines, but all of the sudden they were maxing their 1mbit lines instead of their 128kbit lines.
So Insight started calling people telling them to reduce their bandwidth usage. The broadbandreports.com forums were booming, and for awhile they had a similar stance to Comcast, i.e., "there is no set limit, we can't tell you that limit, just decrease your usage."
People were really pissed for a while, but eventually, after enough calls, some people were getting answers. The answers were varied. Some people were told not to upload more than 5gb per day, some were told not to exceed 50gb per month, and some were told to cap their upload speeds to 40kb/sec or 50kb/sec. My personal phone experience with one of their managers was that there wasn't really a set cap, but he recommended that I cap my upload speed to 20kb/sec (which is what I capped it at back when I had the 128kbit upload connection, and is roughly equal to 50gb per month, if uploading 24/7).
About a month after that, Insight got Sandvine. Torrent performance crashed and burned. Suddenly it was very hard to seed things (though sometimes you could and sometimes you couldn't), and I couldn't download at more than 80kb/sec on any torrent, no matter how many seeds. This, again, made people angry, and broadbandreports.com was booming, again. Insight continually denied capping or tampering with torrents, though no one believed them. Eventually, the problem sorted itself out. I'm guessing that Insight wasn't intentionally tampering with torrents; I bet Sandvine was set up to screw with torrents, and it took them a little bit to tweak it so that it was no longer doing so on such a magnitude.
It took several months of poor service, but now things are stable and running fine. I get a full 10mbit/1mbit connection, now, and torrents run smoothly, again. I've kept my torrents capped at 20kb/sec upload and haven't received a call, since.
Thankfully, Insight's CEO regularly reads broadbandreports.com and posts there, occasionally, so all throughout the problems, our concerns and complaints were heard. I highly doubt that Comcast would do something that nice, but Comcast has a much larger userbase, so it evens things out, a bit.
Also, it's worth noting that, as far as I know, we don't have a download limit. Though I'm sure if we downloaded 300gb per month (which is over 121kb/sec 24/7), we might get an angry call, too (though how could you download that much per month? How many DVD+Rs would you be going through??).
Why don't you do a little research before you post next time?
Florida Statutes Look at Section 3(b). I didn't say they couldn't pull you over, I said they couldn't fine you. Read your own link, specifically, items 318.18(3)(c) and (e) -- just below where you stopped reading. (c) Notwithstanding paragraph (b), a person cited for exceeding the speed limit by up to 5 m.p.h. in a legally posted school zone will be fined $50. A person exceeding the speed limit in a school zone shall pay a fine double the amount listed in paragraph (b). (e) A person cited for exceeding the speed limit in an enhanced penalty zone shall pay a fine amount of $50 plus the amount listed in paragraph (b). Notwithstanding paragraph (b), a person cited for exceeding the speed limit by up to 5 m.p.h. in a legally posted enhanced penalty zone shall pay a fine amount of $50. Won't you read the whole section before you "BZZT, Wrong!" someone next time?
I hooked a hose to my local grocer's restroom faucet for my car washing business. They told me to stop. I was like WTF!?! Your restroom policy doesn't forbid it. What's the hidden limit? Can I pay to hook up my hose? What if I use buckets? My business plan roxxers because I can exploit your bathroom policy. The manager suggested I buy water from the water company and I was all F-THAT.
Don't believe their "unlimited usage for power users" lie. They not only terminated me, but tried to get me to pay the $300 early termination fee when *THEY* terminated *ME*. In their case, they specifically told me (after a few months of what I consider to be harasssment) "download more than 100G, and we'll cut you off". This was $90/month "fancy" internet that I bought, when I could have gotten Verizon FIOS (fiber) for $40. I even had a pre-sales chat, where they lied to me and told me I could download 100% of my bandwidth 100% of the time without ever getting terminated. I took screenshots, because I had a feeling Speakwasy was lying to me. And indeed, SpeakEasy WAS lying to me.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
In the UK, Virgin Media has started throttling customers who download more than 350MB within an 8 hour period. Pretty miserly I think, especially when they are trying to push 20MB speed deals onto customers. What's the point of having all that speed if you quickly get throttled anyway? Also people have been reporting throttling even when they haven't downloaded the limit.
I was trying to investigate this issue last week, but it was a problem because there was a fault affecting the whole town and it took them over a week to repair it. Since they took over Blueyonder, service has really gone down!
I don't see a problem paying for bandwidth at a fair rate. As more and more services like downloadable HD movies, HD streaming etc come online, more bandwidth will be used.
If a fair rate is charged, there should be no problem. More bandwidth used, more profit for ISP's and then they will be able to build the supporting infrastructure/pay for the bandwidth.
Unlimited access doesn't seem to be something that can survive in the long term.
They don't tell us that the animal house frat is actually on a double secret probational bandwidth limit from comcast.
A couple of questions/ideas. Comcast is cable--don't several people use the same pipeline? If so, then how do they know which customer is doing all the downloading?
;-)
Also in occurred to me that if Carreiro, who was cut off, had an insecure wireless network (or if one of his kids passed along the password) he could have set up a free neighborhood server and not known it. Comcast could have alerted him, "Hey you're using 300 GB a month." He says, "There's no way we're downloading that much." "Hmm...let's put a track on things." Then you find out you got some neighbors are hooking their water hose up to your well. Instead, Comcast just shuts them down. The reason he's only getting less than 50 GB a month now may be because whoever was tapping in can't get in now.
I agree that Comcast should be sued for breach of contract. You cannot make up policy as you go along and then cut people off for not following the rules that you never stated in writing (unless, of course, you're the government.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Every time I initiate an ubuntu update, my (comcast) connection goes dead and I have to restart my cable modem. Is this somehow related?
I have the same problem with my ISP, however they don't cut you off, yet. They just send you nasty notes that you violated the AUP.
When asked what the new limits are so i can conform to them ( since they aren't in the published agreement ), ' we don't have any, but you exceeded the limits'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Take airline reservations. Or hotel reservations.
Both overbook but I have never heard it called fraud.
Of course unlike the DSL provider, these industries do not cut you off - they give some kind of recompensation to those willing to yield consumption of service, but what if no one yielded?
Comcast High-Speed Internet Acceptable Use Policy;
Prohibited Uses and Activities
Prohibited uses include, but are not limited to, using the Service, Customer Equipment, or the Comcast Equipment to:,
ii. post, store, send, transmit, or disseminate any information or material which a reasonable person could deem to be objectionable, offensive, indecent, pornographic, harassing, threatening, embarrassing, distressing, vulgar, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive, or otherwise inappropriate, regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful;
------
So what are most people with Comcast real doing, if not looking at pornographic material...
I can't help but think that one reason they are doing this is to curb the use of competitor services like Skype and Vonage. They probably don't want people to download movies from iTunes, Amazon and others because it directly competes with their own On-Demand service. I would bet money that if they see these people using their own services they look the other way. Didn't many providers in the media and telecom industry try to set up ways to legally stifle competitor services a couple of years ago and got shot down by the courts? I can't remember but this seems like they are trying to do it in a more roundabout way now. Gotta love deregulation and those exclusive cable franchises...
"The media (CD-Rs/DVD-Rs/HDDs/etc) costs alone are mind-boggling, not to mention the nuisance of having to burn 3 dvds every single day,"
DVD-R's are about 25 cents apiece when purchased in bulk. If you watch for sales, they're closer to 10-15 cents apiece. CD-R's are a about 1/2 that price.
Burning a DVD? That takes what.... 8 minutes? A CD can be burned in about 3-4 minutes.
I don't think costs and time are significant barriers here.
The real question remains... as more and more business will deal with downloadable video, how can these relatively small caps remain? Or how will comcast stay in business once people are downloading 8-12 movies a month from providers? That could easily push the "average" user to 50-100GB per month.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
"but lots of limits in life are not strictly specified,"
Like...what? Name 2, if there are many limits on us that are never specified. I don't mean fuzzy limits like "don't lie, don't steal", but limits on things that can be quantified, but aren't.
I can't think of one.
nt
That's still massively different.
If nothing else, and this is the crux of my grievance: the airline won't call you names, accuse you of wrongdoing the other passengers, and generally treat you like a thieving scumbag for just showing up at the airport for the flight you booked. At the very least, they'll acknowledge that it's the problem they created and try to give you some compensation, as you were saying.
That's already a _massive_ difference. In and by itself. I'm willing to even forget and forgive mistakes, even motivated greed, flukes, whatever, as long as they have the decency to, you know, apologise for it and try to do better next time. Such bullshit as the ISP's demonizing the very customers they oversold to, calling them names, etc, is just unforgivable in my book. It's just bullshit.
Imagine going to the airport and finding out that the air company you booked with can and will:
A. treat you like some kind of criminal because you didn't miss at least half the flights you booked, and
B. occasionally call you various unflattering names for it, and
C. try to guilt-trip you and present you as some great malefactor that preys on the other passengers who might need that seat, and
D. might just kick you out for nothing more than not missing enough flights.
I mean, heck, I'm sure they too could make more money if they restricted their business to only people who miss 3 flights out of 4. Then they could oversell the plane by a factor of 4, instead of a measly couple of extra tickets. Should it be allowed then?
And that's just what these ISPs are doing. Trying to kick out everyone who doesn't stay below 1/5 of the capacity they thought they bought or lower.
And when I hear such other BS as secret quotas, lying tech support, etc... I can't see how that's defensible at all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
300GB? I'd hit that.
and wheter it could be considered as such.
The piss poor customer service aspect of this situation is another matter alltogether.
All of the issues you raise are unconscionable customer service actions, and generally a symptom of a near monopoly.
If an airline called you a fool for actually beleiveing that you where guaranteed a flight at the reserved/booked time and day, you would never fly with them and use another airline.
At my address I only have COX cable as a broadband connection choice (wired that is, not sure about satellite - but that would be too expenseive). However so far my customer experience with them has been pleasant. Not sure what I would do if I moved and ended up in an area that only had Comcast service.
In North NJ, optimum online does a similar thing. When you upload for too long (theres no specific time or amount as per information from optimum) you get capped at 17k/s upload and around 450 k/s download. (Advertised at 12mbps/2mbps) There is no warning of this capping and its a real bitch to get it reversed. I got suspended from them because this happend to me 3 times, so i cancelled the service and got FIOS. Im not surprised that Comcast is doing something similar like cutting off service.
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Skype uses so little bandwith (50kbps?) that it would never reach a cap that is in the 10s of GB.
I wouldn't be surprised if the time of day, the length of time ports are open and transferring, and what servers are being accessed are part of the equation. update.microsoft.com and anything on akami for instance probably don't count as much against the limit as much as transferrs to end users. And they can tell end uses because the dhcp ranges for the big networks (cable, dsl) are known for the most part.
I did mention other types of services besides Skype...
It's okay to have a secret rule I'll only hear about if I'm violating it, because if I knew what the rule was, I'd try to follow the rules and get what I paid for? What the hell?
I mean, do you think people are going to just download random data to max out their connections for the hell of it or something? "Oh, I've only downloaded 95 GB this month, so I might as well download 5 GB worth of pi to finish it off..."
You can say "But you're not paying for it!" I guess, but the only reason I'm not is because they won't let me. I'd be more than happy to get cable if this cutoff wasn't a worry. Instead, I'm stuck on IDSL, which is utter crap. But it's still better than the local cable company. Of course, the local cable company actually publishes their limit--20 GB/month--and still doesn't offer any way to buy more.
Screw this crap. It only makes me want to move to Japan, where 10 MB and 100 MB connections are common and you can actually use them.
Thats super slow for most Broadband. Just goes to show Broadband is not what the sales man said it was. I remember the first Cable ad's showing 500.MByte down load speeds.
I knew then it was a joke. Perhaps when You are the only subscriber. but cable is only one wire. So now we have seen how the Cable Co. plans to keep the cost low and maintain a high revenue.
Same crap, different issue. They blocked my SMTP port because they thought it was spamming. It wasn't. I couldn't talk to anyone, nothing helped. I was SOL. So I had to bipass their silly port 25 restriction and send/receive my mail anyway. I wish they would get someone with a clue over there. BTW, they blocked the port 25 on my cable modem. They don't own it. Didn't seem to matter.
I guess "unlimited" isn't what it use to be.
Now if we could get all ISP's to do this for home accounts, it would shutdown many of the damn botnets until they manage to reconfigure for non-priveleged ports.
A question I had to ask myself involved the diff between a home & business account. Turns out that it's a meager $10 per month for the privelege of running servers and faster access to tech support (I get direct access to the level 2 techs). Another advantage is it's deductable as a legitimate business expense (Yes the IRS Says it's deductable) even though I didn't purchase any increase in bandwidth I have a contract that states my guaranteed minimums though it's no SLA along with no-cap except bandwidth provision (effectively unlimited).
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Better than that; ARP spoof the gateway, hand out IPs to your neighbors (or just bridge the broadcast traffic and let comcast hand out IPs as usual), and watch the traffic flow. Then download warez to your hearts content and let someone else get blamed.
I don't know if Comcast has anyting in place to prevent that, but it works on a LAN.
I just reset the modem and that resolves it.
My AUP makes no mention of throughput limits.
This isn't going to fly much longer. With youtube and game demos and steam, we need the bandwidth and the throughput.
This is just like health insurance companies who don't pay benefits.
Comcast sells unlimited usage but doesn't want to actually honor that.
Breach of contract class action?
They're using their grammar skills there.
I'm sorry, but the _only_ reason a "performance" degradation exists there at all, is because they _massively_ oversold the bandwidth and can't actually deliver what they've promised. We're not talking about people using botnets or whatever other malicious acts, we're talking people who just use the bandwidth advertised and sold.
Trying to reword that to sound like it's the users who do evil stuff to Comcast is just stupid and, above all, _dishonest_. It's Comcast that oversold, not the users who somehow steal the neighbour's bandwidth.
If you ping-flooded Comcast DNS server, or if your malformed packet headers caused some router to lock up, _that_ would count as being guilty of disrupting or degrading performance. Just using the bandwidth? Gimme a break. Blaming that on the customers and not on the overselling ISP... that's such a fucked-up definition of responsibility, it's not even funny. By the same definition, you could accuse people of creating a disruption for:
- not missing enough flights they booked at an overselling airline,
- talking too much on the phone when they're on a flat-rate local-calls scheme,
- actually using the parking spot they pay for (directly, or as part of the rent, or any other arrangement) all day, instead of providing some generous oportunity to oversell parking space,
- travelling too much by bus when they have a month card,
I'm sure it'd be so00 much of an improvement to everyone if we apply that model and start throwing accusations at mothers using the bus to go to work _and_ shopping _and_ to take their kid from school _and_ occasionally to visit a friend, instead of using it just twice a day like an average person should. Not.
Nope, sorry, I still stand by what I've said: if you can't actually provide a service, don't advertise it and don't sell it. Or at the very least, have the decency to not try to weasel-word it into sounding like the customers are some kind of criminals.
Nice use of a fallacy there, but:
1. It's a strawman anyway, since it's not the reason Comcast claimed. I wish I could even say "nice strawman", but truth is it's a pretty silly one, because;
2. "Copyrighted" is such a broad term that it's akin to saying you disallow digital downloads. Get this: everything is automatically copyrighted. This message is automatically copyrighted by me, for example. There's an implicit assumption that I grant you a right to read it, and Slashdot to offer it on their site, but it's still copyrighted by me. If you were to put it on music and make a hit single out of it, you _could_ talk to my lawyer at some point in the future. So by your logic, Comcast should disconnect you for downloading it in your browser. Linux distros, since you mention those, are certainly copyrighted too. Read the GPL some day.
So maybe you mean _pirated_ instead? Even that's flawed, because
3. there's plenty of stuff you can do on the network _without_ involving any pirated material. No, it won't be all linux distros. You just need to watch enough Youtube videos -- yes, there are plenty of non-pirated ones too -- for example, to easily go over the limit.
Or here's the ISPs themselves offering a handy-dandy example: in all their calling the customers names, they claim all over t
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Network packets on a cable TV network are encrypted between the gateway (the head end) and each individual networked device. Otherwise it would be far too easy for people to intercept each others data traffic. Normally addresses are assigned using DHCP, with each system being given a "lease" on a particular IP address which lasts between a week and several months. You can look up the Webstar/Scientific Atlanta/DOCSIS manuals to see how this works.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Seriously. On a set day, say Sept. 1st, if you're a comcast hsi customer, call them up, ask them what the limit is. Generate enough calls and you'll cause someone besides the cust. service reps some headache. ask you friends, family, co-workers, etc. to call. if you don't get someone who will give you an answer, ask to speak to someone else, or just call back later in the day.
:-)
and, while we're at it, don't fill up on gas for a day, let the oil companies feel your wrath!
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
While I disagree with some hidden limit, as a sysadmin for an ISP with caps, I will say that these types of limits are being driven by some real economics on the back end.
In much of the country, ISP's are thrilled if they can pay (at the DS3 level) $75 per mb/s delivered to their network. $100/mb/s is not uncommon, as are much higher figures.
Note that this does not include things like the actual facilities used to deliver this to the consumer.
1mb/s is 3.6gb/hour, 86.4gb/day, or 2592gb/month. Note that these are all gigabit/s. Divide by 8 to get gigabytes/month and you find that the ISP only has 324GB/month (assuming perfect transfer efficiencies) for their $75.00. This also incorrectly assumes that the traffic is spread evenly over 24x7. In reality, transfer on a full circuit is more along the lines of 100-150GB/month per meg of circuit capacity when you take into account day and night patterns.
So assuming that someone is transferring 300GB/month, the bandwidth alone may be costing the ISP close to $150/month.
Another point which is often missed is the traffic engineering issues caused by even a couple of customers transferring 300GB/month on a given segment - Especially if this is upload traffic in a system which has very limited upload capacity. One or two customers transferring this quantity of data can bring a system to it's knees and significantly affect the throughput other subscribers have available to them, causing all subscribers on the segment to be unhappy about their service.
The ISP is then faced with upgrading it's systems to support one or two customers which are already potentially costing them more money than they are providing. To put this into perspective, the same amount of capacity to serve one 300GB/month subscriber could easily handle 100 or more "normal" 3GB/s or less a month subscriber.
Jeez folks, the answer is quite clear.
Comcast's AUP bandwidth limit is measured in Gigabytes, while the customer was consuming Gibibytes of bandwidth.
Therefore, the secret "overage amount" is obviously some multiple of 24.
[/sarcasm]
[BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY]: X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVI
...and something about god killing a puppy, I think.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
technically the speeding ticket is thrown out, but they replace it with driving with improper/non functioning equipment. Same fine, no points. Atleast thats what it was in 93 when I was speeding, ugh I mean driving with improper/non fuctioning equip., in that brown two tone 81 Caprice Classic station wagon. My how times have changed.....now I have a two tone minivan.
Moraelin: You are a champion.
I have been bitter about shelling out $40 a month for my Internet connection ever since I was first connected. The only provider available at my location is Comcast, and I'll be damned if I ever get to see a third of the 1.5 Mbit/sec speed that I was sold. I feel cheated each and every time I send my money to those fuckers, and I've got no alternative.
So far, I haven't been bothered by their "invisible limit" shenanigans. I doubt I ever will, as I am not a super-heavy user. Even so, I am driven thoroughly mad just knowing that these are the same assholes I send a check to every month.
I was so ticked I didn't even consider it worth my time to rant about these pompous, wretched thieves. It wasn't worth the anger and frustration it would stir within me. It was a pleasant surprise, then, that I read through your post with such revelry. A rational soul was lampooning these bastards for the fraud artists that they truly are! I cackled with mad delight as your sharp analogies illustrated all of my contemptuous feelings!
I thank you for these few precious moments of triumph amidst the endless hours of cold abuse.
I live near DC and have had FIOS for about a year. Its GREAT! I haven't noticed any difference in Capacity than Comcast, if anything the internet is stable and does not go slower when my neighbors are also online. Yay dedicated fiber optic lines!
Care to explain the actual difference between "County Police" and "Sheriff's Department"?
most work-at-home types are screwups anyways. ;)
p.s. my captcha was 'scumbag.' lol
You could instead stay offline and read a good book. Such as http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Cable-Modem-What-Com panies/dp/1593271018/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-7505582-2 160112?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1188245489&sr=8-1
Why don't you just change providers?? Oh, I forgot.. In the land of the free there are only one provider per area.. haha
Unlimited: (From the Merriam Webster Dictionary) 1) Lacking any Controls 2) Boundless, Infinate 3) Not bounded by exceptions It seems to me if they are advertising unlimted access and are capping it then the FTC should take it up as misleading advertisment.
is that the legal definition and common defintion of a term are not always the same.
I would suspect that what the airlines, hotels, dr offices do - overbooking - is not covered by the legal definition of fraud, or there is an exemption. Or, as you mention I suppose, the reason it never comes down to pushing/suing is that to satisfy a given customer, they will make the pot sweeter for other customers, until someone is willing to yield.
Certainly the opportunity would be there to sue big if the legal definition of fraud was being met. The incentives do seem to always forestall that step.
It seems everyone here is assuming they have a physical monopoly over you, that you should sue them. While I think they deserve a class action lawsuit as much as anyone, I have to wonder, is there anyone else you can switch to?
If that happened to me, and I had any choice in the matter, I'd do both: Switch to another ISP, and sue Comcast for bait-and-switch. Suing them and then continuing to pay your bill every month seems a bit hypocritical...
Of course, it's possible I missed it and there is no alternative; you did mention "monopolies such as this"...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
1) It informs their competitors
2) It may not be a hard cap but may be looking at the top 1% of users month to month and seeing if they're consistently high, or just spiked.
3) They could be looking neighborhood by neighborhood, explaining why one poster lost his net and a little while later so did his neighbor. The neighbor was probably close to being in the top 1% and then was when the first person lost their connection.
4) I could see them wanting to limit illegal downloads because of past cases seeking to sue the carriers for illegal data being sent on their network. The largest downloaders are most likely (though not necessairly) transmitting/downloading illegal content.
5) There are several people who posted that they are running their business, or are logged into their business 24/7, and that's not what residential accounts are for. I do use my residential account for work once in a great while, and for less bandwidth than downloading a TV program for iTunes, but if you're VPNed in constantly and transferring large files for work, your employer should be getting you a business account.
6) The other issue I haven't seen mentioned is that really large use could be an indicator to Comcast that multiple people are sharing a connection. With wireless routers and bridges it is possible for multiple appartments/condos/and even some single family dwelling users to share a connection (I get my neighbors unencrypted router at full strength and full speed). I don't know if Comcast would have a better method than 'huge overages' to be able to tell that this is the case. It truly wouldn't be fair if a bunch of my neighbors were splitting one connection and degrading the quailty of my service with only me using it.
7) This could also be a sign that someone's router is hijacked and performing illegal activities without the owner's consent. Sadly, they should be helping the user fix it, but most people at the helpdesk at multiple cable proviers indicate a low level of technical expertise.
8) It's been a while since I checked but I think the agreement says you won't run servers off the residential line. They might be assuming that the large useage is resulting from something like that.
Since joining the corporate world I usually find that strange and illogical policies like, "Unlimited usage within reason" are the result of some kind of assumptions being made that don't translage well into policy. It could be as simple as a consultant saying, "A 300 GB/month user HAS to be hosting an illegal HD-DVD sharing site and you could get sued by Hollywood for not doing something about it," or, "Those limits are being hit by multiple units sharing a single connection and costing you money while degrading their neighbors service."
They should just work with the customer rather than, I suspect, assuming you're a criminal and cutting the service. "Cut down the usage," is probably corporate relations way of saying, "We know what you're REALLY doing, now knock it off." Clearly if you stop illegal file sharing your usage would snap in line with the 'average' user.
As proof of the corporate simple thinking I offer this personal experience: I once lost my cable the day after a windstorm. Calling the company I was told, "We're showing an outage in your area." Ok, windstorm was bad and a temporary loss is ok in cases like that. Days and then weeks go by and they keep telling me, "We're showing an outage in your neighborhood. I then find my neighbors (in a condo complex) are connected. Apparently "area" is your box in your house only. I realized that my neighbor across the hall moved away without telling anyone. Several phone calls later I convinced them to come make sure they hadn't disconnected my cable when disconnecting the neighbors cable. "Sir, that doesn't happen, but we'll come check but if that's not the case you're paying for the visit." Sure enough, wrong switch, and they reimbursed my lost time.
it's real simple why comcast does this. it helps them to maintain their market share.
a majority of broadband sales probably result from advertising campaigns. comcast's business model based on overselling allows them to claim "unlimited" bandwidth in their advertising.
if they defined a cap they couldn't advertise "unlimited" and this would reduce their ability to financially gain via overselling. this would also put competitive pressure on comcast from other suppliers who sell 'value-added' broadband services (i.e. broadband not based on overselling). it would make sales for these competitors easier. because right now the notion of "unlimited" is probably the single biggest influencing factor on most purchase decisions. comcast doesn't want to lose this carrot.
a competitive isp who's business model is based on adding value needs to jump through extra hoops to explain to potential customers that comcast is lying about their unlimited offering. even after explaining, more folks than not (i'd wager) will still opt for comcast because they really want to believe they are getting unlimited bandwidth.
comcast's deception helps them to maintain their market share.
Stop advertising the service as 'Unlimited'
I had a similar thought whilst RTFAing... this guy tried to use up the "excessive" 300GB/mo. on his new ISP and couldn't even break 50GB. And cable modem is shared. Hmmm... What if ALL the usage by EVERYONE on that particular branch of the system somehow got flagged to a single account? Cuz that's what it sounds like happened.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Comtrash offered a 6 mbps cable feed but, they only delivered 1 mbps. After repeated calls and repeated visits by technicians, I finally got an honest reply -- Comtrash was intentionally throttling the bandwidth to make room for their VoIP products. The tech told me nobody knows how to measure download speeds and he was surprised I could and do it in real-time Kbps chart. Even getting caught didn't phase Comtrash. I was paying almost $60/month for 6 Mbps and that's what I wanted. It wasn't in the cards.
So, I did what any intelligent person would do - I switched to DSL for $25/mo for 1.5 Mbps. So, I got 50% more bandwidth than Comtrash would deliver, a faster upload and for less than half the price.
Comtrash lies and intentionally cheats their customers.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
To summarize, "unlimited" is an old term from the days of dialup modems, and refers to the maximum amount of time you are allowed to stay dialed in and connected: minutes per session, hours per month, and so on.
Erm.. In the late 1990s, for me "Unlimited" meant no more than 150 hours per month on dialup (irregardless of traffic).
And with a dedicated phone line, 150hrs/month is really was easy to hit.
And no, I wasn't on AOL. I believe AT&T Worldnet and/or SpryNet were doing this crap.
Use a NAT box which can measure your bandwidth usage (avg, max). If it's a linux box you could log those stats and use them to argue with the poor comcast customer support rep on the other end. So long as you're polite, patient, yet assertive, my experience has been you can get them to cooperate. You may not get an answer regarding how much is too much, but you can ask them if your measurement matches theirs. If it doesn't you can then ask for the case to be reviewed. You could point out how you're worried that their numbers aren't right, cast doubt on the security of the network (yours and/or theirs), etc.
costs 200$ can
now if say the guy paid 40 USD about 60CAN for 200 GB
times 5 thats the same and is a limited account like the business.
UNLIMITED MEANS UNLIMITED.
now up here in canada they have 30GB accounts for 40$ CAN
thats 1320$ per terabyte SICK I TELL YAH.
and yah cant tell me that all the extra is overhead
multiple that 1320 time say 5-6 million users and you get an idea of the billions they soak out of us
its like oil, and music cds A freakin rip off.
1 megabit = 80Kbytes a sec /hour
......
times 60 = 4800 Kbytes/sec ( 4.8 megabytes a min )
4.8 times 60 = 272 megabytes
272 times 24 = 6528 megabytes a day
1024 bytes = 1 KB
so roughly 6 gb a day ( 180 GB a 30 day month )
now 4 megabit = 180 times 4 = 720 GB
most high speed accounts are 4 megabit
5 megabit
or 6
my isp adverted 5 megabit accounts and i told htem they are 4 megabit
530 Kbytes a sec is 4 megabit rouglhy
675 is actually 5 megabit.
bittorrent by nature will slow your use as up speeds are not same as down speeds
think seeding 1 to 1
so in a 4 megabit account with a 1 megabit up with half time up and down your cna max out around 200GB,
a leech might go way more
I looked "above," as well as to both sides and on the back, but saw no more references to bandwidth quotas.
I'm pretty sure I did see a reference to a method of checking your bandwidth usage if you're a logged-in customer, so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt on the availability of the bandwidth cap for those who really need to know. Also, it's worth noting that they warn then restrict instead of cancelling. However, it's not very comforting that it had been posted publicly and now it's not.
Simultaneously on the lighter and darker sides, does this guy's blog remind anyone of the original BOFH bits? "What was your username again?
Wil Langford - opinionated bastard - Linux rules
I got the call this morning around 8am.... telling me that I have d/l almost 500gb last month and it's a lot of pressure on their network. I told them that their contract did not state anything about a download limit. He pretty much cut me off and told me I reached the top %1 and if this does not change they will ban me for a year. Anyway... this is crazy.
I live not too far from West Jordan, UT. I am from South Jordan, UT and I seem to be facing a similar predicament:
I just got called by Comcast for using 485 GB of transfer in a month. That might sound excessive but there are 5 CS students connected to it. We use the internet for everything: homework, projects, web, games, TV, music, the works.
I then asked: "What is the limit so that I can set our usage accordingly?"
The Comcast Rep then said: "It's like growing grass, there is no set limit. Your account just showed up on our audit trail."
I responded: "Is that not false advertisement? You claim that your internet usage is unlimited, yet you're calling me telling me that I used too much? And you will not tell me what your real max transfer is?"
Comcast Chick: "We do claim unlimited internet connectivity not unlimited transfer."
My Response: "So what is the max transfer I can use so that I can lower our usage to it?"
At this point I felt the distinct presents on an infinite logic loop that was spiraling nowhere. And the lady must have as well because she offered that I can get a second cable modem for the same price or a single enterprise account for $1500!
When the rep said that we should get a second modem, I immediately remembered when we first set up our internet. We tried to get two modems from Comcast but they said that only business accounts can have more than one line. Also saying that business accounts are well over double the residential price!
Being enraged at this point I, in no uncertain terms, made it clear that I did not agree with their policy and that I do not have control over how much internet my roommates use. I then hung up.