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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
Take your average decent-quality audio station. Listen to it for 8 to 12 hours a day while you work. There's 80gb.
Add streaming videos, downloadable videos (vongo, anyone?), streaming music services (Rhapsody?), VPN connections, surfing, downloading any other stuff like games, linux, porn, etc. Add online gaming from your systems or consoles. And that's just one person. What if you have two people in the household? Or a family of four or five?
Just because you only use your car to drive to church on Sundays doesn't mean the rest of us don't drive to work, the gym, vacations, joy-rides and the store.
Nope.
Current legal calibration requirements for EU (and AFAIK USA) are +0%/-7% (note the big fat zero for the + error). Manufacturing errors, calibration errors, etc all tend to follow a Gauss bell curve so manufacturers tend to calibrate to -3% and allow +/-3% error around that.
As far as the precision of measurement equipment if police is given high precision measurement equipment like the new speed averaging cameras in the UK they use it without any second doubt. These have sub-1% error because they measure the time it takes your car (recognised by number plate) to traverse 2-5 miles. As a result many drivers who expected the 10%/5 mph leeway usually applied to radar and laser cases where very unpleasantly surprised last winter during the roadworks on the M25 and M4 around london (not me, but I know a number of people who clocked 6+ points on their license in a matter of days).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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.
The speedometer in a car doesn't measure your actual speed, it measures your calculated speed based on wheel rotation. And how much ground the wheels cover differs with tyre wear, pressure and temperature (which affects pressure).
This is one of the reasons why you almost never get stopped for doing 70 in a 65 zone -- if you have new tires with high pressure, have driven for a while, and the weather is hot, the speedometer might show less than you're actually doing, but a few months later in the same exact car, with more tyre wear, less pressure and colder weather, the indicated speed might be higher than your real speed.
And yes, we are laughing
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
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.
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.
I logged in just to post this and save you a giant =( in the Spring.
FYI a T1 is something like 1.544mbps. 1544/8 = 193kBps.
I regularly sustain 1200kBps on my cable connection when downloading, and even average cable speeds are 600kBps (~5mbps) or better. So, whether you realize it or not, you're going to notice a significant reduction in browsing and casual download speeds.
T1s used to be the "rave" because of their increased reliability, and significantly lower latency than traditional consumer options. Today, though, not so much. I haven't experienced an outage from my cable ISP (Cox) in about a year, and my latency to my colocated box in LA (35 miles, 4 networks of peering away) is 15-25ms on average.
In regards to your comments about service availability: T1s are sensitive to distance just like DSL is, perhaps not to the same degree. I'm not sure of the specific ranges, but suffice to say you cannot get a properly performing T1 50,000 feet from your CO (the servicing Telco's "Central Office").
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
It isn't the radar that is inaccurate.
Oh, so a radar gun that clocks a house at 150 MPH isn't unreliable?
Please, radar guns are NOT accurate.
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
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Nah. Its a dupe because it has been discussed in
yush
Depends. Is the house falling off a cliff onto you while you radar it?
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.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
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.
a r b o r l a w -- legal blog for entrepreneurs and small business
It's a mobile home! A very fast mobile home.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
The house and the radar operator were stationary, but there was some wind. Look it up, this has been documented.
"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)"
300-400 GB!?
Thats up to 20 GB a day for a normal workweek. If you do that much for 'work' your employer should be footing your bill for a business line.
Just what exactly do you do that requires you to download that much data in a single day?
It's amazing how brilliant they made my previous cable provider look. It seems to me that a cable company that is unable to provide decent cable services shouldn't be allowed to provide internet service, much less home phone service.
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...
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.
You're right. We should all just shut up and deal with it (and by deal, I mean guess what they expect of us and hope we get it right).
In fact, Comcast should also apply this idea to their Cable TV business. Don't tell me how many channels I'll get for my money, just say I'll get "a reasonable number" of channels. Hell yeah, I'll buy that. In fact, don't tell me what it costs. Just send me a bill each month for whatever you think is "reasonable", Comcast.
- I am made of meat.
The biggest (50%+ marked share) ISP in Norway, Telenor, tried something similar some years ago. There was a monthly quota, somewhat depending on your package/speed (the cheap ones had lower quota. I don't remember the exact number). If you hit the limit, the connection would drop to ISDN speeds. You could then either wait until the next month for the quota (and speed) to reset, or pay some money to add more bytes to your quota for that month. They also had a tool that measured how much you'd used, and one-click buying of more bytes. By paying some extra money each month, you could get "free" internet usage during the night that didn't count towards the download limit. It was widely despised, and Telenor's competitors took great advantage of that in their ads (Telenor was pretty much alone in limiting downloads). They were eventually forced to drop their quota system.
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'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.
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.
The car raises up half an inch not because the radius of the tyre has increased by half an inch, but because its profile more closely approximates a circle. It's gone from a really rather flat-bottomed circle not not-quite-so-flat-bottomed circle.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
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.