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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.
Yep so true.
... so a driver going 79 MPH in 65 MPH zone would likely *not* get a ticket. Personally, I stick with 5 to 10 MPH over the speed limit max, but I know many people who swear by the +15 MPH rule.
... so again, even in lower speed limit zones, such as a 25, one often can drive nearly 15 MPH over that and likely not get a ticket...
... something a driver should be aware of when driving through some small towns that rely on speeding tickets for revenue; PA outlawed radar for most local police decades ago for just that reason and thus many local PA towns are forced to use Vascar instead.
... many of them have figured out how far they can push it.
In many places, such as in Pennsylvania, often the state troopers will give a +15 MPH leeway
On a related note, in some states, such as Pennsylvania, some speed detection methods, in particular Vascar (timing), has a +10 MPH leeway
Of course, if the driver admits speeding even 1 mile over than that above stated leeway likely won't matter... also, some states have "absolute" speed limits - there is no leeway so to speak
Often an officer will try to get the driver to admit to speeding and then play nice cop by offering to write a ticket for only going x over the limit, etc.
Digressed, but there really is a "secret" speed limit in most places, though many drivers quickly figure it out over time...
I'd imagine similar is true for high-bandwidth users
Ron
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).
The topography of DSL and Cable really aren't as dissimilar as you make them out to be. Most DSL is being handled through remote terminals, which are essentially a telco rack in a freestanding cabinet with a battery back-up (preferrably non-explosive) and Fiber back to the Telco's network. The fiber may handle voice and data or just voice, but either way, the data link through the fiber is Multiplexed to all the DSL subscribers fed by that cabinet. Provided the total of the link speeds offered to the subscribers is less than the fiber link, you get "guaranteed" bandwidth on your DSL. However there is nothing besides the phone company's own goodwill that prevents them from overselling the total bandwidth from that cabinet. Hell, most DSL providers won't even guarantee the rate your line will sync at and that's only the rate from your modem to the DSLAM. It says nothing of the speed behind it. I know from personal experience that you can sync a customer to a DSLAM at 8mbit/sec when there's only 3mbit behind it.
SATA150 won't change the speed of a file transfer from a hard drive that can only read 40MB/sec at the platter.
With cable, most areas are fed by a residential gateway that's connected back to their network through Fiber. In places that offer digital cable, the video signal is pulled off for transmission and video on demand stuff and the pure data portion is multiplexed to all the cable modems that are served by that gateway. Now I'm not sure how many homes are served by one gateway, but I've been told that they are setup to handle several thousand customers. Just like with DSL they can oversell the available bandwidth, and if they did it would behave exactly the same way.
So in reality, neither offers "guaranteed" bandwidth. One may offer a guaranteed line rate, but that means nothing without the bandwidth to back it up. It just depends on the providers when it comes to deciding which is better. I'm glad Cox has there act together here in Phoenix (my 12Mbit connection pulls over 13 from good servers any time of day)
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
It isn't the radar that is inaccurate. It is the analog speedometer found in most cars. The NTSB only requires car manufacturers to calibrate within +-3MPH. Most calibrate on the low side, but you can still argue the point. Most states actually require more than +3MPH to ticket for this reason. Additionally most local agencies have policies that require even higher speeds because wasting time in court means one less officer on the street. As much as I dislike authority figures harassing me the truth is that the object is to protect people and if they are tied up in court with traffic offenses they can't stop violent offenders so it usually isn't worth fighting over 5MPH.
Get a web developer
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.
They do not have to, but they do after they ended up being a total laughing stock in a courtroom 10+ years ago when the defence lawyer measured the judge travelling at 9mph while sitting on the bench. As a result the case got thrown out with prejudice.
From there on the staff which processes offences got trained not to try to prosecute if the offence is within the camera precision limit (which for classic Gatso with double photo verification is around 5%). This is where the 5% comes from. The new cameras have considerably better measurements. The speed averaging ones can probably measure better than a car speedo.
Coming back onto the Comcast topic I do not see what Comcast problem is. Their AUP are a classic case of tehcnical incompetence being compensated via admin measures.
1. Downstream they can police at the CMTS. I have yet to see one that cannot do QoS. Even the "Dear Cretins" wankers over here have shown capable of doing that.
2. Upstream - DOCSIS past 1.0 allows the CMTS to tell which station can speak at which particular moment. As a result any station can be throttled and controlled and made to comply to the policy. All it takes is to program the CMTS to start filling the MAPs with some meaningfull information and decrease the part which is "free for all".
3. On top of that they provision the modems and what they do not want to do on the CMTS can be done by simply tftping a new config onto the modem which is something the management system should be able to do in bulk per product category (you do not even need to click on individual stations).
So this is a classic case of "cable and brains do not mix".
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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Only true from the most literal and technical standpoint, and certainly not an explanation for any leeway the police might give drivers. At these speeds, the difference from temperature and wear would be a very small fraction of 1 MPH, particularly just a few months later (versus the entire life of the tires).
Installing tires that are one inch larger in diameter will only add about 2 MPH around 70 MPH. A one inch change in diameter is a far bigger difference than you'll ever see due to wear and temperature. If you're bored, you can see this using a calculator here.
In fact, you can game the inputs to reflect changes due to tire wear. For instance, a regular new car tire's tread depth is typically about 10/32", and the legal minimum in most US states is 1/16" so at most your overall lifetime diameter change due to wear should vary about half an inch, which equates at most to a 1 MPH difference at 70 MPH.
I race cars for a hobby so I'm very aware of tire pressure and temperature changes and how they relate, and the change in the overall diameter of a tire because of these factors would be too small to warrant discussion. There are specialty racing tires made from very soft compounds that would create a small but measurable effect but a heavy steel-belted street radial isn't going to change enough to matter.
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