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.

Comments

If it really is 300GB

[Sycraft-fu]

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).

Re:If it really is 300GB

[Seumas]

Business class of service? According to comcast, the EXACT same rules and limits apply to business accounts. In fact, business accounts have been banned for too much bandwidth, too.

I went out of my way to call comcast and say "Look, I don't want to abuse anything. I want to be a good, paying customer. I need XYZ amount of bandwidth per month and I'm willing to pay for it. I'll take a business account or two residential accounts (or three if you want). Just tell me what I need to pay to get the services I need and not be kicked off by you guys?".

The answer? "Yeah, we don't have anything like that -- sorry".

Ruled unconscionable for AT&T already

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:+/- 5 or whatever is not a secret limit.

[zero_offset]

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.