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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.
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.
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 believe this issue was settled some time ago, there might have been a lawsuit, but I couldn't find any information.
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. With today's modern broadband connections, kept always-on and connected 24/7, referring to them as "unlimited" is correct. The definition, unfortunately, is old.
However, this says nothing about the bandwidth you are allowed to use. This is today's top issue. We really need another definition to describe this.
With dialup modems, few people really cared about bandwidth consumption, as they were so slow that they didn't make much of an impact, even when continually ran at top speed. With today's fast broadband connections, you can consume a lot of bandwidth in a hurry, and to be affordable at residential prices, they are deliberately oversold.
There's a reason a T1 line still costs $600+/month. You're allowed to run anything and everything over it, no filtering, no capping, and to keep it maxed out at full wire speed, both upload and download, 24/7. Bandwidth to the Internet backbone, unfortunately, is still expensive. I wish it weren't true, but it is. I guess somebody has to pay for all that copper, fiber, and electricity....
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
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).
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.
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.
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
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.