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Comcast Slightly Clarifies High Speed Extreme Use Policy
Alien54 writes "Comcast has finally clarified what 'excessive use' is when it comes to their cable internet service. A customer is exceeding their use limit if they: download the equivalent of 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures or 13 million emails in a month. '[A Comcast spokesperson] said that Comcast's actions to cut ties with excessive users is a "great benefit to games and helps protect gamers and their game experience" due to their overuse of the network and thus "degrading the experience."'" Maybe they could put that limit in terms other than 'email' or 'songs'?
An e-mail I sent to gamedaily.com about this article. I have a question about the article on your website named:: Comcast Clarifies High Speed Extreme Use Policy The article says the equivalent bandwidth usage may cause Comcast to cut the user off from their High speed Internet service:: "the equivalent of 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures or 13 million emails in a month." Ok, why did they not actually give you an actual # of bytes that the Internet connection would have to download through Comcast's Internet service before it is cut off? Should I assume that an average song is around 3 megabytes each, and so that the actual limit is 90 Gigabytes per month? They are not clarifying anything because Comcast has not released the exact limit..and I don't know why.
Libraries of Congress...
Or British Libraries for Imperial.
Deleted
What's their problem? Why didn't Comcast use standard units?
Everybody knows data transfers are measured in LoC's - Libraries of Congress.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
13 Million emails?
Seems like I almost exceed that already with unwanted adverts for viagra.
I dont read
1/2 MB songs, anybody?
Those bastards don't state the limit for 2 reasons:
1) they don't want it to be a factor in user-choice - naturally the limit is not generous as otherwise they would have published
2) they must have variable limits in different places depending on load (or more exactly - oversell) - so they want to be able to kick out local top 1% of users regardless if they breach some global limit.
I think it's kind of suspicious that they don't put the value in terms of number of Slashdot comments. I mean, you could get cut off right in the mid
They are not clarifying anything because Comcast has not released the exact limit..and I don't know why.
... I have bandwidth monitoring on my network and if they cut me off too soon I'd scream bloody murder, believe me. A few hundred thousand customers clogging their support lines is what they absolutely do not want. This way, however, they can maintain their long-term SOP of vague threats and unspecified "limits" and continue to nail anyone they want to, any time they want. All this does is create uncertainty among their customers, which is exactly what they want so people will be afraid to use their connections "too much". Let's not forget that once they say "this is how much capacity you can use" they would have a hard time justifying the promises made by their marketing department.
That's obvious. If they issue an actual hard limit, customers would hold them to it. I know I would
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
With that crap I'd look for a new calculator.
who get tons of musical porn spam(ok, maybe its not ALL spam) are screwed!
Monstar L
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
How big is a song? What bit rate? What if i like songs from the 70's that is 25 minutes long, or from the punk age at about 2 minutes? what about all these video services that are selling movies? ( like some of comcast's partners )
What garbage..
Oh do they charge for email collection, which is totally out of the users control? I have 10's of thousands of spam a month, would i get dinged by this policy? What about a random DoS attack, do they get dinged for that 'incoming' too?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
By my calculator 30,000 5MB songs is 150GB. Or are you using megaBITs?
The reason they don't give you a simple cutoff limit measured in bytes is, there is none.
It's a moving target, and at some point in the process, it's subjective. I'm sure there's some traffic analysis done, and I'm sure when it's time to free up resources by booting the hogs they make some calls along the lines of "24/7 torrent server vs VPN client"
I'm sure, and this is something I've never seen mentioned in any slashdot threads, they include your credit history with the company in the decisions, as well. If I have to choose between two customers, one who's consistently late, who wastes my collections teams time every month, and one who pays promptly every time - guess who I'm choosing?
Just saying, I pay my bill on time every month, I use all the bandwidth I possibly can, and I have never had an issue. If you want to "push the envelope", it's the least you can do to keep on the cable co's good side.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
the numbers in the story were not printed with decimals.
my pet machine
Because if they give a Gigabits or Gigabytes number, you can calculate the true bitrate you can use (just divide over 30*24*3600 and voila), and they'll open the door for their competitors.
In an article in a local paper attributed to a "Kim Hart" of "The Washington Post", Kim says that "Companies have argued that if strict limits were disclosed, customers would use as much capacity as possible without tipping the scale, causing networks to slow to a crawl."
...it makes sense to me... then lower the limits, idiots! Many of us would like to know exactly where we stand! If I need more bandwidth than I currently have, let me purchase more. Or let me buy another connection and 'double-barrel' it!
--rf
For all the geeks, could we get a conversion to "quatloos"? It might help.
30000*songs = 250000*pictures = 13000000*emails 1 song = 3MB => 1 picure = 360KB => 1 email = 6.92KB Seems right, unless you want to send pictures or songs are email attachments :)
Maybe some people are now relieved to know they're not exceeding the quotas, but why doesn't Comcast just provide an exact limit? Exactly how big are these songs, pictures, and emails? Sure 250,000 sounds like a lot of photos.. but how about 250,000 1x1 spacer.gif files (10.25 MB)? I'm asking because I want to know so I can use up 99% of my quota.
Let's see. At about 50 megabytes per song (I use lossless compression), that is 1,500,000 megabytes or 1,500GB per month limit. OK, so if I use only 1,000GB per month, I'm OK, right?
(am I the only one who has noticed that Comcast still has not given a hard limit, that the limit is still as vague as it has ever been?
Well there's an easy solution:
BitTorrent via SMTP!
Gotta use all that GMail space somehow...
--- To each of us a Truth is given.
Put some money into their infrastructure to cope with the demand? Maybe stop overselling? Oh wait that would cost some dollars so forget that idea. Meanwhile, users on Verizon FIOS has reported to download over a terabyte worth of data a month without so much of a letter from Verizon. (who knows how long that lasts though)
....being in the top 10% of users using the most band width.
...
This is based upon
http://moobunny.dreamhosters.com/cgi/mbthread.pl/amiga/expand/149695
Where Chris had gotten a call. The thing is, He is Blind and his work requires that he upload a good bit of data.
Blind of not, some will say to hime to get a business line or account. He has asked if one can be had for under $200 a month...
30k songs @ 6 megs / mp3 = 180 gigs
250k pictures @ 1 meg/jpg = 250 gigs
13M emails @ 20k/email = 260 gigs
180 gigs / 4.3 gigs per dvd = 42 DVD movies
So that's quite a bit of data for thirty bucks a month.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
How many stones, hands, Rhode Islands would that be?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
if we're talking about data density - but I like it even better for amount of data 'cause it makes no sense.
..........FULL STOP.
...with math skills like that, no wonder you posted anon. 600/5=120 songs.
Dumb ass.
No, we don't "need to assume" anything. The simple fact is that this is not a clarification at all... or rather, not much of one at all. Their "explanation" leaves just about everything open to interpretation, which I am sure is what they want.
Knowing Comcast, you should probably assume the average song size to be about 300 KB.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
I'm also guessing that at ca. 3 MB a song that would round up to ca. 100 GB a month, or 3 GB a day.
Well, to be honest that limit is not *that* ridiculous, you could download (and watch) two movies a day at 1.5 GB each, or ca. 4-5 hours of video at decent (DivX, not HD) quality. Or downloading and testing at least 2-3 Linux distributions a day.
What is ridiculous however, is that Comcast just won't state there is a 100 GB limit - even if it were in the small print in the TOS. Most people wouldn't have a clue what it means anyway, but those who care would at least be able to find it.
However they could probably get sued for false advertising if they publicly admit that there is a fixed limit (they are advertising unlimited use I'm sure). I think this is why they refuse to state this in terms that leave no uncertainty whatsoever.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
I'd say somewhere around 60Gb a month sounds like a realistic figure
Assuming 2Mb per mp3 at 30000 mp3's
30000 x 2Mb = 60000Mb (60Gb roughly)
for picture size
60000 / 250000 = 240Kb per picture (about average for a large jpg)
for email size
60000 / 13000000 = 4.6Kb approx
(yes I know 1Mb = 1024Kb, but this is just approximations)
650 GB/mo seems like a perfectly reasonable limit for a personal, residential internet subscription. I'm glad there's a limit on it; that means excessive users will have to pay for the strain they put on the network, so that those of us who use it normally can get better bandwidth at the same cost.
I spoke with a comcast friend of mine who is at the executive level about two weeks ago on this... He said that the reason they do not want ot specify the exactly amount is that most of the time they do not care because they have plenty of throughput. Meaning, because their network is mostly shared (unlike the telcos) bottelnecks do occur from time to time. He saids that most of their subnets are fine (over 90% in fact), but occasionally they get a couple areas where he says they constantly have problems with getting their digital services to work well and they almost always find that it is because of huge amounts of p2p traffic. He also said that in an ideal world this would be handled at the network level, but that their p2p limiting ability does not work at this point for balancing balancing the traffic. He said he had no clue what routers they are using, though... He said that the worst part is that in some cases, if they upgrade their "uplink" (my word, not his) to fix the issue, it just means that more traffic, and the problem still is there. In short, the end result is that when they have allot of customers call in saying they are having problems with their service in a particular area, they first try to upgrade their "uplink", then if that does not work, they tell the particular customers to please stop it, and in the few cases where this does not work then they finally just pull the plug on the problematic customer. He mentioned that it rarely happens, though, which is why they are completely baffled internally on why the press is so against on them right now...
A video at 30 frames per second would run beyond 250000 pictures in around 2.3 hours.
I think I may be way over, of course this isn't taking into account compression
VERY good point Sir. We just have to assume that the 'limits' are for uncompressed music, e-mails with embedded images, and pictures from a typical 7MP camera. So for the pictures, about 1.75MB per picture; 1.75 *250,000=437,500 MBs. I know that this is very unlikely to be the 'magic' actual limit that Comcast employs.
If we can find a reasonable song size that multiplied by 30,000 would equal 250,000 multiplied by a reasonable picture size (although reasonable is a subjective term). Maybe an average mp3 and a 600*400 pixel 24-bit color jpg image?
I can't think of a good reason for anyone doing this, but if someone were to fill their shiny new 160GB iPod in less than a month, from the iTunes Store, they would find them self being banned from Comcast for downloading content they PAID for?
Who let someone use "Clarifies" in this context? And what's with trying to measure usage in 'songs'? Are they in MAFIAA's pocket too? Of course everyone is always downloading songs from Kazaa and MediaSentry torrents.
It would probably easier to pick a number and setup a page where everyone can check their monthly usage, my college IT dept did this so it can't be that difficult, unless it's not profitable enough for them.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
Comcast Workplace has the same downstream bandwidth limits, you just get slightly more upstream and the ability to have static IPs.
In fact, CW is even more restrictive (at least in my market) because you don't benefit as much from PowerBoost (a bandwidth surge during the first 10MB of any transfer in which residential users may temporarily get as much as 24Mbits/sec).
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
I would think it would also depend on how much you are also sending upstream.
100gb down and 20gb up a month is a lot more expensive the 100gb and
nothing upstream.
I have comcast (business) and do ~150gb of usenet each month for some time now.
a fair amount of torrents as well. how much up I dont know but I never
really seen any evidence of the supposedly comcast reset packets on upstream
side bittorrents.
So I listen to a lot of classical music, which I encode at a high bit rate. One "song" can be 30 or 40 minutes and 50 or 60 MB or more. Do I get more bandwidth than someone who listens to pop?
The typical size of a picture on my computer is probably around 1600x1200. Do I get more bandwidth than someone with smaller pictures?
My e-mails are usually pretty small, unless someone sends me a large attachment. Which of my e-mails are we using as the e-mail unit?
Here in Australia, we have had download quotas since the early days of broadband. This is necessary due to the extremely high costs associated with international data links here (there is a duopoly on submarine telecommunication cables linking Australia to the rest of the world, so prices are high).
While nobody in Australia really likes the download quotas, our ISPs at least spell out the limits in detail, and allow users to check their current usage in real-time. A variety of Internet plan options are available, so heavy users can opt to pay extra to have a higher download quota (e.g. see iiNet's plans and Internode's plans).
Comcast seem to be introducing quotas without really going all the way. I guess they view this as being more "gentle" than actually imposing hard limits, but I'd say that it's just more confusing. Users need to know what their quotas are and how much they have downloaded, otherwise, the whole system just seems arbitrary.
I can see how US ISPs might want to impose some usage limits on their customers. Data connectivity is cheap there, but it isn't free... and people are getting ever-faster home connections. However, if they are going to do this sort of thing, they need to spell out exactly what the limits are, and what the consequences are for going over those limits. Vague statements like "30,000 songs" don't really help anyone.
i don't know how anyone can trust the cable companies. tnhey are notorious for extreme self-intrest governing policies.
new brain first.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
250,000 pictures = 1 feature length film!
:D
I guess this puts a kink in all those online film distribution services! Perhaps they should discuss net neutrality with comcast?
Comcast should have put the limits in terms of GB, but I think we can understand the limits they have put down.
/. people) to be around 4MB. It's what Apple uses as a benchmark as well as many others. It's a decent estimation. That puts Comcast's limit at 120GB per month. If you assume 2-3MP images of around 1MB a piece, the limit is around 250GB.
Songs are considered (by non
Those are limits that the vast majority of people will not come up against. If you downloaded Ubuntu every single day for a month, you would hit 21GB. If you downloaded a high res Xvid movie every day for a month (1.4GB a piece), you would hit 42GB.
Suffice it to say, the limit is high. It's high enough that for almost everyone, it doesn't matter that it exists.
Oh, for comparison's sake, you would have to fully load a T1 connection over a quarter of a month to hit the 120GB limit. You would have to be using more than half a T1 connection to hit the 250GB mark. Cable is a shared resource. If you need a dedicated resource, maybe a T1 is right for you. At some point, nothing is unlimited. We're lucky that the internet adapts so well to sharing that 99.9% of people can pay very little for a lot, but some people need dedicated resources.
Scott Adams 1996/01/25
PHB: I've asked Dogbert to help us get rid of our most troublesome customers.
Dogbert: Ten percent of your customers account for ninety percent of your service costs. They must be eliminated.
Alice: Is that the same group of customers who actually use our product?
Dogbert: Plus the ones who were injured unpacking it.
If you use 5MB for the average song:
30,000 x 5MB == 150,000MB ~= 145GB
15KB for the average email:
13,000,000 x 15KB == 195,000,000KB ~= 186GB
600KB for the average picture:
600KB x 250,000 == 150,000,000KB ~= 143GB
So if you stay under 125GB / month you're probably safe. Not quite unlimited if you ask me!
If Comcast advertises that its service delivers downloads "up to 12Mb/s" (which is exactly what they advertise here on TV), then they are advertising that they can deliver UP TO:
(12Mb / second) x (86,400 seconds / day) x (30 days / month)
= 12 x 86,400 x 30 Mb
= 31,104,000 Mb (that's megaBITS, so)
= 3,888,000 MB !!!
That is almost 4 terabytes worth of downloads.
Now, I am not saying that one should actually get as much as the theoretical maximum, but if Comcast is actually setting a limit that is substantially lower than that, then the simple fact is that they are guilty of fraud and false advertising.
Further, if there is not a FIXED limit based on recognizable standards that is included in the contract, then they open themselves to liability for suits based on discrimination and arbitrary enforcement of their policies. (If it can even be called a legal policy, not being contained in the contract, and blatantly contradicting what they advertise.)
I think they had better clear this up like right now, or they could be in trouble of their own making.
What competitors? Comcast (as with other cable providers) have regional monopolies.
No, you get to learn to use compressed file formats.
Perhaps it is just that they assumed that most of their customers would think that expressing it in GB is too technical.
Better yet, it could be that the actual value, expressed in GB, was passed on to their PR department who looked at it and said "what the hell does that mean?" Some tech gave the PR department some examples of how much data might be contained in the stated value, and the PR department released the examples (because it made sense to them) rather than the GB.
Comcast is probably calculating the typical song is 4MB. That's 128MB/S, 4 minutes. A meg a minute is pretty typical for pop.
So at best, you're giving yourself 50% too much. About 120G.
Frankly, barely passable. FIOS is going to eat their lunch.
The argument that "if we tell you the limit, you'll just abuse it" is ridiculous.
My cell phone provider tells me how many minutes of talk time I get per month.
Further, if you're going to cut me off for exceeding an unknown and undisclosed and unclarified limit -- then I'm ALREADY "abusing" this limit. So why not tell me what it is? The worst that will happen is that, instead of me going over it by a huge amount as I would have to be doing to be kicked off, I'll remain UNDER it.
"Let's not forget that once they say "this is how much capacity you can use" they would have a hard time justifying the promises made by their marketing department."
Uh, huh. Like 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures or 13 million emails in a month would be a hard sell for marketing.
The only ones who fear uncertainty are those who abuse the network.
One particular user of the internet didn't get the 13 million e-mail quota that they mentioned. After only ONE e-mail, his service was degraded significantly...
I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.-Senator Ted Stevens. :)
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
also, "That's less THAN 1 CD per month."
Dumb ass.
Interesting, I don't live in the US myself (that's why I said "probably" since I can't check it myself), but in Europe the practices are mostly the same. In the EU they get away with advertising "unlimited UMTS" (high speed mobile network) which in fact means there's a 1 GB (!) limit per month. Probably OK for smartphone usage, but not if you use your phone as a modem (for a laptop).
In case they don't advertise it, I really don't see what they have to lose by posting a fixed limit though. They certainly wouldn't have to be ashamed of having a 100 GB/month limit, IMHO.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
OK, so you can only download 30 Kilosongs, 250 Kilopictures or 13 Megamails?
:-(
And I thought "Megapixels" were a salesman abomination.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
If they gave an exact number, the heavy users would just throttle their usage to just under the limit (possibly writing some software to help with this), and the problem would remain. Unless of course they lowered the limit down further and further. I'm no fan of comcast, but the way they are doing it is the only way I can think of that makes economic sense, short of simply charging users per byte.
It could be as high as 150GB cuz I'd estimate average songs at 5MB each. Even on my Road Runner cable connection I'd have a hard time even breaking 90GB a month though! I metered it one time and used it extremely heavily for downloading stuff and gaming, usually at the same time, and got like 40-something GB. I mean come on, even 1GB a day every single day for a month would be a little much. I wouldn't be too worried
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Using this definition, we've got a file size of
Goo goo g'joob.
You mean, maximizing the full potential of a legally purchased service that has defined, yet ambiguous at best, limits of said service?
/ambiguous
Why are the Telco's still keeping the numbers ambiguous with regard to Internet Service. Are defined limits REALLY that hard to DEFINE??
Yes, I have worked at an ISP, and YES we did have defined limits that equate 'excessive use'. It required a time frame of 48 continuous hours of a user having their top rate utilized.
and that is how much they oversell the line you are on.
If you are the only customer of 30 on a loop, there would be a lot leeway to give you bandwidth than if you were one of 500.
If they had a hard limit, they would be kicking off profitable customers in more rural areas and keeping perhaps unprofitable customers in high load areas (due them "hogging" bandwidth and chasing other customers off due to a poor experience).
But I only downloaded "Inna Gadda Da Vida" 29,000 times!"
As for the 13 million emails, the way spam is these days, who doesn't get 13 million a month?
Like FLAC?
ResidntGeek
I wanted to snip this portion.
"He said that the worst part is that in some cases, if they upgrade their "uplink" (my word, not his) to fix the issue, it just means that more traffic, and the problem still is there. In short, the end result is that when they have allot of customers call in saying they are having problems with their service in a particular area, they first try to upgrade their "uplink", then if that does not work, they tell the particular customers to please stop it, and in the few cases where this does not work then they finally just pull the plug on the problematic customer."
So to all the people talking about "upgrade the network/don't oversubscribe"! That only temporarily solves the problem because like a gas, abusers consume all available bandwidth, and will continue to do so no matter how much they upgrade. Better to nip it in the bud than get on an neverending treadmill.
"He mentioned that it rarely happens, though, which is why they are completely baffled internally on why the press is so against on them right now..."
It's not the press. It's just the squeaky wheel gets the most attention, even if it doesn't deserve it.
Of course, that forgets the salient point that your assumptions have as much effect on Comcast as your wishes.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
And they're still interfering with traffic to GoDaddy.com.
We should also remember that Comcast's "Acceptable Use Policy" is probably not enforceable as a contract... especially if it is only available online, and not provided to the customer when they sign the contract. (And in fact, in my experience it is NOT supplied to the customer.)
I believe it would be reasonable to claim that that Comcast could not expect a customer to have agreed to the Acceptable Use Policy, since the customer probably did not have internet service when they signed up! That makes their Acceptable Use Policy legally equivalent to a "shrink-wrap" license... only available AFTER the service or product has already been purchased. The legal enforceability of such a "license" is very, very questionable.
Further, it should be said again (I have made this point in other contexts) that even if their AUP were somehow judged to be enforceable as part of the contract (doubtful), it would still constitute a "Contract of Adhesion" (i.e., a "contract" that cannot be negotiated... a "take it or leave it" proposition), which courts are loathe to enforce. The basic principle is: if it can't be negotiated, then it is not a real contract.
Obviously they aren't going to set a hard limit. If they say everyone can download 90GB a month and everyone does that, their network will screech to a halt. But if they limit everyone to 1GB a month that's even more unreasonable, since the network has the capacity for the small percentage of customers who want to use more than that to use more if they like. The amount is bound to fluctuate. In the days when Napster was the biggest consumer of bandwith, the limit was probably higher. But now, more people want to download 8GB dvds so there is less bandwith to go around and the limit has to change. Jesus Christ, on a site as IT-oriented as Slashdot I would think people would understand that.
They shouldn't just terminate accounts without warning, though. I'm not defending the customer service of Comcast. We really need to upgrade infrastructure so that everyone can stream hdtv to their homes 24/7 without it causing a problem. And actually I don't think any of the current ISPs in the US are going to do that without government taking the lead. So, boo hoo. If you want a large amount of guaranteed bandwith you'll have to pay for it.
...that games should be slowed down in any way.
They don't give an actual limit for marketing reasons.
Up until a couple of years back, Comcast used to advertise their service as "unlimited". They quietly stopped doing that, and certainly never made any effort to inform people that they were no longer advertising an "unlimited" service. But I think it's more than just neglecting to tell customers and potential customers about the shift.
When most people are told about Comcast cutting people off, they still think Comcast is advertising an unlimited service. I believe Comcast benefits from this impression. At the same time, they can claim, when push comes to shove, that they don't advertise an "unlimited service" and feign ignorance as to from where that impression comes. It's the best of both worlds.
Put simply, if Comcast published a limit, it would destroy the myth that their service is unlimited -- a myth from which they still benefit immensely. They'd much rather take the PR hit of a few people complaining of cut-off's by claiming these people were "abusing" the service.
Kythe
It sounds like Comcast needs to go to FTTH (Fiber to the Household). Their shared nodes seem to be crapping out. I can just imagine the problems they will have when all of the channels are High Definition!
"Why are they baffled? They use the word "unlimited". To most people that means "without limit"."
To those who believe a dictionary is a viable substitute for common sense, I can see that.
"They like the sound of the word in their advertising. They just don't like to have to live up to that definition."
In that case, I'm not certain who's dumber? The ISP for using that word, or a forum of people who are so intelligent they call the general public "stupid"? Believing that the laws of physics have been repealed just for them, and any physical connection can be "unlimited". Let alone the fact that they are incapable of reading the TOS BEFORE signing up.
I've heard this canard trotted out by Comcast and its apologists time and again. In my opinion, it's silly -- if people aren't using high-bandwidth applications when they believe the service is unlimited, why would they suddenly discover an interest in doing so when they know there's a limit?
Comcast has never provided any evidence for this excuse, and I suspect they never will.
Kythe
Because if they give the exact byte amount that triggers it, people will find a way to use 99.99% of that 24/7, thus making things worse. It's like the probably urban-legend business school example of the beer factory: under old ownership, they had a "drink all you want" policy on the bottling floor, and there were no problems; When new management came in and said "10 beers per day maximum" suddenly everyone was drunk every day.
Everyone knows A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Assuming English, we have the "...estimated average word length of five..." for a simple calculation:
250,000 X 1000 X 5 = 1,250,000,000 bytes.
Of course all your words would be mushed together and that wouldn't be a pretty word picture, so using the Wikipedia tip of assuming 5 letters plus a space, per word, we get:
250,000 X 1000 X 6 = 1,500,000,000 bytes.
Of course, you could use Unicode characters and double all the byte counts. (And I am not even going to mention the 1024 vs 1000 debate.)
Finally, some think the "picture : 1000 words" ratio is off by a factor of 10. If we use that, then we get 30GB (assuming UTF-16)
So there you have it - Comcast only wants you to use about 100 kbps of bandwidth (1GB/day).
We can also thank them for a new constant - A song is worth 8.3 pictures
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I don't think Comcast advertises "unlimited use" anymore.
Evidently, they used to, and the fact that so many people believe they still do is testament to how hard Comcast has tried to leave that impression in place, while covering their behinds legally.
Kythe
All my emails include 10meg attachments, so at 13 million, I guess I have roughly a 124TB limit. (maybe my math is bad, I dunno -- I never learned "emails" as a unit of measure).
I think I can live with that.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Sorry but thats only 250,000 porn spams this month (based on the image number) If i was a comcast spammer i ask wheres my 12750000 other spam allowance messages gone.
btw: humour
That presupposes that most Internet users have a taste for bandwidth in the same way that beer factory workers have a taste for beer. Most people just don't know how to use that much, and wouldn't be motivated to anyway.
1) FIOS has easily a magnitude more bandwidth more than Cable, and Verizon has traditionally not given a rat's ass about how much bandwidth I use, even with DSL.
2) It's not up to you to define what's reasonable. If all I'm doing is web browsing and email, I don't need high speed internet. The point is I do want to download lots of movies, music, pictures, whatever, without wondering if my ISP has the pipes to handle it.
3) Nobody is asking for guaranteed bandwidth, so your point is silly. But even so, go to Comcast and say "I want double the limit, I'll pay twice as much. They will turn down your money. So they actually have no way to do what you suggest.
4) Internet access via comcast or verizion or whomever is not a "community resource", it's something I'm buying from an ISP like a coat, TV, or a book from WalMart.
5) The electric company doesn't care how much I use. The more the merrier.
People like you are silly. You think because you have an opinion as to what is correct and incorrect that it somehow gives you the moral high ground. I think you're the worst of the internet precisely because not only are you sure you're right, you're willing to interfere with me to enforce your ideas.
What is it with you people?
It doesn't take many people using 99% of their bandwidth to totally fuck up the bandwidth oversell formula used by an ISP, thus ruining performance for everyone in that bandwidth pool.
By the way, my university has a lowish 10GB/week policy for its residence halls, and despite this, most people never even come close to hitting it. They're just not interested.
"We should also remember that Comcast's "Acceptable Use Policy" is probably not enforceable as a contract... especially if it is only available online, and not provided to the customer when they sign the contract. (And in fact, in my experience it is NOT supplied to the customer.) "
Did you ask for a copy? When I signed up for "Home" and used their self-service kit. The AUP came with it, or I could have asked for a copy when I called to get authorized.
"Further, it should be said again (I have made this point in other contexts) that even if their AUP were somehow judged to be enforceable as part of the contract (doubtful), it would still constitute a "Contract of Adhesion" (i.e., a "contract" that cannot be negotiated... a "take it or leave it" proposition), which courts are loathe to enforce. The basic principle is: if it can't be negotiated, then it is not a real contract."
That's not quite true. The boilerplate contract you mention is given additional scrutiny AND it can depend on jurisdiction. But it's NOT a blanket "They aren't real contracts".
We'll just start packaging torrents in RFC822 format. :-) No one could ever possibly download 13 million torrents a month.
I'm sure location also plays a factor as to why that limit isn't published.
Cox's network has 12M in some areas (mine) and 3M to 7M in others with regards to speed.
If they publish 90Gig as a limit, it may tax a 3M network if 40% of users were utilizing 90% of it versus 90Gig not being as much of a burden on a pipe 4 times larger.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
If an "all you can eat buffet" tells people that the limit is 5 plates of food, everyone is going to rush up and grab five plates of food. You know what? Some people are happy with one plate, or two. Most people won't or can't eat five plates, but it's good that those who can know in advance so they can plan for it.
My current ISP recently announced a 100GB/month cap on its version of Extreme service. At ~3MB per MP3 and 30k songs/month, Comcast's vague limit also falls in the 100GB ballpark... that's the same limit as the vast majority of service offers in my area.
When one of my friends who was on said Extreme service got pissed off about paying ~$80/month for unlimited and getting suddenly capped to 100GB, I looked around to check out what sorts of alternatives were available in my area - something I had not done in years. From what I have seen, there are dozens of DSL resellers who are offering a choice between 100GB/month low-latency or unlimited low-priority traffic for only $30/month at 5000/800 speeds. (Well, with DSL, mileage may vary - even more so with third-party service that may be routed through auxiliary networks between the DSLAM and global internet.)
Since my current service contract costs $40/month for only 30GB/month, I will soon start sampling DSL service in my area until my contract expires - the ridiculously low limits make the extra speed seem superfluous... I have about four months left to pick my new ISP and there are about 40 (mostly ADSL) to choose from.
I am guessing Canada must have a law/rule requiring ISPs to declare limits since all ISPs I have seen do state the limits somewhere on their product pages... though sometimes they are a little obfuscated such as being written in an expandable page section that is collapsed by default made to look like a simple paragraph separator line until you pay close attention to it and notice the '+' sign at one end. I suppose this means the law/rule, if any, omitted to state how visible/accessible data on those limits must be.
My current ISP might be too expensive for the ridiculous limits it has on my package but at least I have always known what the limits were... if I were a Comcast customer, I would go for a class-action suit to force full disclosure of this mysterious limit and the methods behind it - customers should not have to guess what the ToS are no matter what lame excuse Comcast may have.
Yeah, that sounds legitimate.
If the PR department at an ISP doesn't know what a gigabyte is, the ISP needs a new PR department.
Your camera writes 24MB RAW files? Which camera is this? The D200, even with uncompressed RAW mode, is only at 15MB. The 1Ds Mk II is around 10MB.
Here in Korea, the major ISP actually tried to implement some policy similar to this (although with clearer terms), but they somehow failed to do so. I guess the government didn't approve the new terms, due to the complaints from the media industry so that the ISPs can misuse the terms to lock out competitors and force them to use their own (inferior) service.
There simply are too many bandwidth-hogging services. My mom and dad watches IPTV (real-time h.264 full-HD, 3000kbps minimum, which translates to about 1.3GB for an hour of TV) from a competitor of our ISP, and I also use many video services, which are usually around 2000kbps/sec. Even if we don't abuse anything, I guess our monthly usage would be somewhat around 200GB.
Anyway, it simply looks stupid to specify the policy in terms of 'number of songs'. sad.
I seem to recall something about someone... "sharing" a GMail account where they'd uploaded a lot of stuff.
Hell, for small things like... I dunno... SNES ROMs? You might even be able to email yourself a collection, then have a script to email them to anyone who submits a request to your website. Or something.
Mind you, this is a mostly theoretical exercise, but I'm kinda surprised no one's figured it out. I mean, it can't cost much bandwidth to forward an email with attachments to someone, assuming you can script GMail to begin with (which would be hard, I imagine).
Finally a useful conversation.
Since he's a documented blind individual. He may be able to get terms and services not normally available to you or I (unless either one of us is blind). But one has to ask for them first.
by verizon. Verizon just rolled out fiber to the curb in my neighbor hood. Now I have a real alternative to cable internet. When this becomes more widespread comcast is going to have to stop dicking around with their customers.
Hmm, looking at the images I've got, average size is 1849 KB, for a limit of 440 GB
Realities just a bunch of bits.
They couldn't have been more intentionally obtuse with their answer.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
I think the device I have that uses the most bandwidth must be my xbox, and I can't even buy TV series or movies yet. Just downloading demoes, trailers etc, adds up to a lot of traffic. I must have downloaded about 10gigs of junk this weekend. Downloade a lot of stuff during the evening and before going to bed, I put 6 big demos in the download queue and turned the box off(the-auto-off-after-download-feature).
Then there's all the podcasts which I listen to instead of radio since most radio channels suck.
So I pay money to Microsoft for the live gold subscription so I can download more stuff, and then the internet provider also wants to punish me, great.
I don't think I go over 100gb pr month. I stopped measuring it long time ago where I rarely got above 30GB pr month, but these days I do so much more with the internet since just about every piece of electronics you buy these days has a ethernet port or wifi.(my new denon reciever works great for playing internet radio and podcasts using the vtuner.com list)
Rogers in Canada behaved in a similar way. They sent threats of disconnect for "excessive use" without telling the limit and even without telling people how much they downloaded.
First type of complaints people submitted to Competition Bureau (SEC in the US?), about Rogers using their monopoly position in areas where no competition was available to increase profitability at the expense of customers who had no alternative.
Second type of complaints was to Privacy Commissioner, concerning the personal information collected by Rogers (traffic use). According to Canadian privacy laws, this information must be given to the customer upon request.
This pressure actually worked, Rogers later implemented usage counter and then declared the usage limit in GBs (60 or 100, don't remember).
Well, see, thing is, the standard for digital audio for quite a while now, has been 16bit @ 44,100 hz stereo, leaving the average song (around 3:30 or so at a guess) at well over 50M...
/sarcasm off
Now all you people with your DVD-A and AC3 streamed audio have valid points too, but really, the standard used by CDs is in the majority.
...
128kbit/s mp3s, 360kb photos, 7kb emails... are you living in the 1990's.
I think my spam adds up to more than Comcast's limit.
No sig today...
I just download movies anyway
Just out of curiosity, what software are you using for this?
Whatever happened to the customer is always right?
s5 pro for one does
Moreover, in buying bandwidth, I don't care about sustained speeds, because I don't do p2p downloads, but I do want my web pages and email right away, in speedy bursts. So the claim I care about is the advertised burst speed, rather than the bandwidth cap.
To avoid potential problems with their own bandwidth measuring they are potentially vague. It might be they are only equipped to estimate the amount of bandwidth used by a user. and it would be "unfair' to terminate someone because of an estimated value.
Just pure conjecture on my part.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
That seems to work out to a volume limit of maybe 100-200G/month, or maybe about $0.20/Gbyte at their rates. That doesn't strike me as intrinsically unreasonable.
But why not just state the volume limit and give people warnings when they get close to it?
It seems to me that a better solution would be to allow users to download at will when the bandwidth isn't saturated. As downloads increase, start throttling speeds to users based upon how much they've downloaded over a given period. This way infrequent users will still be able to download at good rates during peak times, and bandwidth hogs will be able to download to their hearts content during off-peak times. Best thing for the ISP is they don't have to cancel anyone's account and continue to collect their fees.
I wonder why Comcast and other ISPs don't do this. Is it too expensive to implement?
Plus the last thing they want is people downloading exactly the limit every month. By making it vague, they ensure that people will stay significantly under the limits that would give them trouble.
The cake is a pie
Very interesting that they don't mention video in their examples.
The cake is a pie
I don't think Comcast advertises "unlimited use" anymore. The ads I've seen talk about the following features of Comcast High-Speed Internet:
Actually, when I signed up they did. So are they in violation of their contract with me and everyone else who signed up?
Oh and here is the advertisement at the time I signed up.
either way, the company is irresponsible in the manner it treats its customers. You get one phone call, no idea how much you are allowed to consume in a month, then get terminated for 12 months if you don't meet their "mysterious" bandwidth cap.
And yes, it's happened quite frequently. People more and more are hearing about my blog and posting their experiences there.
Most don't believe the numbers being quoted. People who have been monitoring their usage can prove what they have used. But when they tell Comcast they are wrong, they are gone anyway.
It doesn't take many people getting screwed by the company before this starts to become a real problem.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
if you assumed a size of 3-5 MB for each song, and a 6 Mbit/sec connection (that is what they are selling you for broadband), then you would be allowed to download at most about 150 GB per month, and yet you would be paying for the capability to download about 1950 GB per month. 30,000 X 5 MB = 150 GB 86,400 sec/day X 30 = 2,592,000 sec/month 2,592,000 X 6 MBit/sec = 15,520 GBit/month / 8 = 1920 GB/month By my calculations, they are saying that they are selling a 600 Kbit/s connection, with a possible burst speed of 6 Mbit/s. Since I don't have a comcast account I cannot say what their customer agreement promises, but they should certainly be held accountable to their promises, and this doesn't appear to be anywhere close to a broadband data rate.
It has been replaced with:
The customer owes us profitability!!!!!
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
100 Gigabytes eh?
So
Suddenly someone who downloads more than a movie a day might want to think a little.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
That's probably around one Ubuntu DVD per day, or a couple of movies per day, neither of which seems totally unreasonable.
Or, to put it differently, if you are watching a high-quality video camera that you're watching (e.g., keeping an eye on your business), you'll exceed that with just a few hours per day.
Who would get a pipe that guaranteed a minimum throughput (by throttling you if you hit the maximum) but explicitly spelled out how big your traffic contigency (up and download) was? What if there was no guaranteed minimum throughput? Is connectivity more important to you than high-speed access?
Just curious.
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
It says clearly "no P2P" and "no servers". So, anybody who runs a P2P client or any kind of server can be kicked even if they use very little bandwidth.
Now, if you can find someone that gets cut-off while staying completely within their TOS, let us all know.
In fact, the way people may hit this bandwidth limit may be through Internet TV. And, frankly, I don't want my connection to be slow because someone else spends 24/7 downloading videos. If you want that kind of service, pay for it: Comcast has higher end plans that let you do that sort of thing, and they don't cost a lot more.
At least that way you would have an actual number for comparison with other services. You would rather have an arbitrary limit? More power to you, but I am not compelled to agree.
You are not getting the service they are advertising. That is fraud. You can like it or not, and you can defend the practice if you want, but that does not change the facts.
This is somewhat silly. When you buy bandwidth you, in my opinion, are buying however much bandwidth per second they are willing to give you. If you buy a 3Mbps connection, for example, you are purchasing 3 megabits of data per second. How much is that in a month of 30 days? Well a day has 86,400 seconds. A month has 2,592,000 seconds. So you are purchasing the right to 7,776,000 megabits in a 30 day month. About 7,593.75 gigabits a month(~950 GB I think...). The limit should be exactly what you pay for: your bandwidth limit per second. If there's a limit within a limit (think of a car commercial that offers a 30000 mile or 2 year, whichever happens first, warranty) then it should clearly be defined. Personally, I can not imagine myself using a terabyte a month but I do feel I am over the ambiguous limit set by Comcast.
If they have not accounted for the total bandwidth capacity of a shared cable line and broken it down correctly then the fault should rest with them and they should install some extra lines or not sell it in the first place unless they agree to the limiting terms. Whatever the actual bandwidth capacity of a cable line is (tv+phone+data), surely they can divide it evenly per household or do they need a physicist to tell them what 100/3 is? I refuse to purchase cable because of the line sharing. Not only is it fluctuating throughout the day but the security is questionable. I actually consider internet availability based on where I consider living.
On a side note, could they be including in their bandwidth limits the tv and phone information as well? Certainly a constant digital tv signal would eat up a considerable amount of bandwidth.
Sorry if my math is a bit off.
Wow - sure sucks to be designing desktop icons and animated GIF's weighing in at 5KiB each right now - they must only get just over a MiB of total monthly bandwidth!
Of course one could sue Comcast for false advertising based on the fact that these numbers are, by current standards, quite reasonable. The "pictures" are where they screw themselves. Most current digital cameras take 7-10 MP pics. 2-3 MB a shot. It's hard to argue that this isn't "normal" since every camera in Best Buy has these specs.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Like how much pr0n I'm allowed to download.
It depends on the area. We seem to benefit from PowerBoost here and I have a Comcast Workplace account at home. Last I knew the consumer level accounts were 5Mb/s whereas I have 8Mb/s + 1Mb/s upstream. I also have the largest package they offer and would buy more upstream if I could. Problem is with the design of the technology, when my server is hammered, my neighbors have difficulty with their connections. Business class accounts have priority. One of my neighbors got very angry with me about it. Most people don't want to pay $160 a month for Internet access.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Well, based on this, I think the good news is that there is no limit on uploading.
Now that they have clarified their policy, Comcast would have no ground to stand on if they tried to shut you off for sharing torrentz.
What further clarification could they give?
Consumers don't transfer data, they consume content.
Let's see. I rip my songs in reasonably high quality, so 30,000 songs for me would be 300 Gigs. I take high quality uncompressed photos, so 250,000 pictures would be 2.5 Terabytes. But I apparently get really small emails, so 13 million emails would only be 200 Gigs.
I'll take the 2.5 Terabyte number, thank you very much.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
I don't know the details, but can say with certainty that Comcast does something to torrents.
When Comcast took over Adelphia, my torrent downloads dropped from max speeds of 550 KB/s to less than 25 KB/s. I suppose it could be a coincidence and all of the highly seeded torrents I've tried over the past year have just been crap torrents, but it seems unlikely.
But I'm sure their business packages are different.
Maybe not
and the telecoms wonder why we call for net neutrality.
The point is that the definition of "a song's worth of data" is very variable. I'd find 7MB for a 4 minute song to be reasonable, while someone else would consider half that size for the same audio to be an acceptable quality. "A song" is by no means a concrete limit, and using FLAC as an example is meant to emphasize that fact.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
What's the big freaking mystery anyway? If they announce the number their service is no longer "unlimited"? We already know it's limited.
I downloaded OpenOffice 2.2 tonight. How many song equivalents is that?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
So how many WV Beetles of emails am I allowed to download again?
You can't handle the truth.
"Put some money into their infrastructure to cope with the demand?"
So you shouldn't have a problem with your bill going up to pay for the increased demand?
"Maybe stop overselling? Oh wait that would cost some dollars so forget that idea."
No, it would mean that you would no longer have a cheap connection to abuse. Yes it would cost some dollars, but like I asked you earlier. Are you willing to part with those dollars? Maybe that's another idea we should forget?
Now some people are claiming things like "Gee, that works out to x number of DVD's per month," are missing the crucial point. The quality* of the stuff we download constantly gets better. Years ago, it was incredibly rare to find any mp3's better than 128kb/s or video files that were above 320kb/s. These days, we're pushing HD-DVD iso's and Bluray iso's over the same infrastructures. Suddenly those 42 DVD's have shrunk down to around 7 HD-DVD discs. In addition, we're also trying to get proper streaming media formats in decent quality. How much streaming HD video do you think you could watch before your quota is filled up? Then tack on all of the data that you download whenever you use Google Earth or World Wind. If you live on your own and spend most of your day at work, then you're probably not terribly concerned about having "only" 180GB/mo. However, if you live in a house with more people and each person does their own thing, that number only shrinks. Suddenly, you only have a claim to 60GB/mo because your two roommates have used up their quotas. Good luck finding an average /. user that is able to get by with only 60GB/mo.
The "clarification" is purposely ambiguous.
They don't want to put a number on their "unlimited" service.
I signed a contract for unlimited internet access.
If comcast thinks they can alter that contract and I should "pray they don't alter it further", 30% of their subscribers are going to be pissed.
I smell a class action for breach of contract.
They're using their grammar skills there.
"Plus the last thing they want is people downloading exactly the limit every month. By making it vague, they ensure that people will stay significantly under the limits that would give them trouble."
It's not just that. When they say people are being 'excessive', that's different from saying "They downloaded n gigs of data even though it says unlimited in our plan".
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
To provide service to anyone. They have the right to refuse service for whatever reason they please. It's not very nice, but that's the way it is.
Perhaps they should define that in the "Library Of Congress" value, which is defined, but still up to interpretation....
I don't think there's any room for interpretation of the word "unlimited." If they use that word, they need to be sued.
But by and large, this is the reason the utilities commissioners need to push for higher global infrastructure standards. These clowns don't want to upgrade their systems and when users begin to push the limits of their infrastructure, they tax the users rather than upgrading their network as they should.
These monopolists do everything they can to keep the willing competition from delivering what the people want, pay the politicians and commissioners so they don't have to upgrade their infrastructure and then over-charge the users. It's time the people got some representation for a change.
Last summer, we set up a new swimming pool and electric sauna, and it boosted our electricity use way up, so we called the electric company, and they moved us to a new rate category which moves some rates around (i.e. midday use is more, but the rest of the day is a lot less), but ultimately saves a ton of money. It's called "High Usage Saver". You might call and ask.
But it is ironic about more usage costing less. My dad used to manage a smelting operation, and the electricity costs were a fraction of residential rates simply because they used so much. I guess they like to charge you more until you're a big customer, at which point they'll give you a break for using more electricity. Maybe if I open a smelter in the basement, my rates will go down.
As to the bit about community, I see what you're saying, you feel like everyone has a stake in making the bandwidth work out, but the trouble is Comcast doesn't think that way. It's their wires, and they'll penalize who they want when they want. I know last few months on Comcast, I've been downloading 500-650GB/month, but Comcast doesn't care. I even called, and they said "No problem, we'll let you know".
So they seem to be okay with most people using a lot more.
Incidentally, I did call comcast about getting more bandwidth via a business account and they said not to bother... the only things business lines get you are (1) email with your own domain (2) Ability to use a VPN... apparently using a VPN is against their TOS. Don't tell them, I guess (3) A different support line (4) A static IP. It doesn't actually get you more bandwidth. They lady said I shouldn't bother unless there is an issue.
Is anyone out there familiar with Charter Cable's terms of service?
ALSO: Charter has digital channels (not talking about their pay-movie packages) - if I decide to watch one of the digital channels for a hour-long show (as opposed to watching an analog channel) I wonder how much data THAT is?
(I know that about 8 digital channels, or 3 hi-def channels, fit into the 6Mhz bandwidth of an analog channel)
AND: could I agree to let them lock-out my digital channels (there's nothing really to watch on them anyway) and transfer oh, say, the equivalent of three or four hours-worth of THOSE bytes a night to my data service limit?
Maybe I should ask my state's Attorney General to check into that...
If the PR department at an ISP doesn't know what a gigabyte is, the ISP needs a new PR department.
Remember, we are talking about Comcast here.
IF cablevision can allow people to download whatever they want and have the highest speeds out of all the cablecompanies then why dod the rest cap downloads. HEck cablevision ubncapped the boost packagaes download and the top speed is limited only by what the top speed of docsis 2 is. I really dont udnerstand how cablevision can do all this and that other cable companies cant
download the equivalent of 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures or 13 million emails in a month.
Oh nice, nice, nice. Good thing I just use my Comcast connection for HD video broadcasting.
What would happen if I were to send 13 million e-mails each containing a song as an attachment? Or, perhaps, to send a single e-mail with the entire human genome as an attachment? What if I were to download "Harvey the Wonder Hamster" by "Wierd Al" (35 seconds) 30,000 times? I'd be getting ripped off compared to somebody who chose to download the 4th movement of Beethoven's 9th symphony (28 and a half minutes) 30,000 times. Just a thought.
Your might as well just state that your provider is videotron.
I'm in the same boat but, as I'm sure your aware, that 100GB limit is combined download+upload traffic. This is an important fact for a generous leecher.
checking Torrent stats: 177GB in 1351 hours... If I was on Comcast I would barely be half-way to being banned - I feel so un-leet now.
sic transit gloria mundi
Canadian ISP's publish precisely what the limit is, and my ISP, Shaw, even provides graphs update bi-hourly showing your exact MTD usage down to the MB, so you know almost exactly how much is remaining for the month. I merely go to http://secure.shaw.ca/ , type in my account info, and I can view them. They, directly on their product page, give the exact difference between download caps between their different offerings, with the lowest one having 60GB a month, and the highest having 160GB (the middle one has 100GB).
I've also gone up to 10% over on a few months, and even then they didn't do anything.
Furthermore, most of the people whom I've talked to (which is many considering I work for a Canadian ISP) don't know what their bandwidth cap is, and don't come CLOSE to using it. This isn't surprising, considering most customers use the internet primarily for web browsing/online shopping, MSN (MSN is easily the most dominant IM service in Canada), gaming and music sharing. Movie sharing is still relatively limited and not used by most people, and any video service outside of Youtube has a rather limited reach.
Slashdot readers may use a whole giant crap-load of bandwidth, but the vast majority of the other 99.99% of the population don't use all that much.
When services like Joost and other HD services that use bittorrent, or even ones that don't, become more pervasive and mainstream, thus bringing higher bandwidth usage to most consumers....then the ISP's are gonna be having problems. Right now though, any fears that people will intentionally use up all of their bandwidth are, quite frankly, ridiculous.
http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/
That's true, but still has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue. Publishing a limit isn't going to make people spend time and energy finding things to download that they wouldn't otherwise download, just because they want to make sure they use all they can.
People seem to handle strict, defined limits on cell phones every month without displaying this kind of pathological behavior. I have 800 minutes a month on my cell phone plan, and usually use about 200. It never occurred to me that I should be making a call and leaving it sit there for several hours just just make sure I used up 799 minutes every month. If everyone used ALL their minutes every month, all our bills would go up very quickly because the system is oversubscribed, just like cable.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
The guesses I have seen are that the Comcast limit is about 145 GBytes per month. That works out to close to 500 Kbits / second, full time. So, you could watch a 1 Mbps video channel. such as the end bit rate ones from AmericaFree.TV channels, for 8 hours per day, every day, and (supposedly) not run into trouble, but you better not leave it on full time (like some bars I know).
As a data point, 100 Mbps residential fast ethernet costs $ 36 per month now Japan. Somehow I don't think that there they cap the service at 0.5 Mbps sustained use.
Mod parent up. The explanation of the grand-parent, that GB is too technical, may be the actual reason, but is still downright ridiculous. As I've said elsewhere in this discussion, Canadian ISPs publish their limits in GB, and some also AFTERWARDS provide analogies to songs or pictures.
Hell, Apple, the king of simple, does this. Apple provides an estimate of how many songs or video their iPods will hold, but right there on the back, and on the box, is the precise amount of storage. This is Apple, a company that simplifies their marketing materials so much it sometimes makes my head hurt.
Comcast is being deceitful and dishonest, end of story.
If, after having this controversy brew for years, Comcast's PR department still doesn't get it, they do, in-fact, need a new PR department.
http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/
Ummm, with all due respect, that is downright stupid. What in the hell does the prevailing standard in CDs (a PHYSICAL FORMAT) have to do with the prevailing format for DIGITAL DOWNLOADS, which is MP3s. You're comparing Apples to Oranges.
http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/
Does anyone know if there's such a limit on optimum online? I know they've at least in the past used the word "unlimited" in their ads. I use a decent amount of bandwidth, though I wouldn't think I "abuse" my connection, but I don't really know if they have a policy of cutting off customers after a certain limit. In 10 years, it hasn't been an issue.
Ummmm, whoops, didn't notice ur sarcasm tag. Yep...I'm a moron. Ignore me. Mod my post down please.
http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/
Bullshit. Canadian ISPs all publish their limits. Despite that, AND a lower population density by a factor of 10, we STILL have faster internet than the US, and are higher than the US in terms of broadband penetration. I can name the limits of my ISP, which is the DOMINANT one in my area, off the top of my head (60GB, 100GB and 160GB depending on package). They're lying to you. Canada doesn't have broadband fairies, we merely have stricter laws which still haven't stopped the ISPs from raking in handsome profits in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/
You're joking right? The high-end of consumer accounts for my ISP is 25MB/s down in Canada. I knew there was a divide, but I didn't think it was so big that our consumer services dwarfed your business services. Does Comcast have any decent speed offerings?
Of course, most people won't actually use the full-speed, but yeah.
http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/
High bandwidth users are not a protected class. I don't particularily like it, and I'm glad I don't have to deal with them, but thems the breaks.
I guarantee if you check the contract, it introduces no obligations on their part.
They don't want to give a specific limit because some people are habitual line steppers. I've discovered this with administering forums. You try and think up a set of hard and fast rules governing what is and isn't ok and write them down. Then you get a group of people who continually try to do as much as they can to be problems within those rules. They dance right up to the line and bitch if you come down on them. It's a situation of "Obedience to the letter (sort of) not the spirit." As such it works much better to have the rules more simple and open ended. Basically "Don't be a dick." Though they may pretend they don't know what you mean, they do and it works.
Same deal here. You put a number on it people will cause problem with it. They'll try to max that out every month, if they get cut off they'll say "But my traffic monitor showed I did only 199.999GB, you said the limit was 200GB that's not fair!" It'll be continuous problem with people who want to stretch the rules as much as they can.
Also, I imagine they care more about the impact the traffic has than the traffic itself. If you are on a segment with only a few subscribers, and you do all your heavy transactions at 3am when nobody else is using it, chances are they don't give a shit, even if you use a lot of bandwidth as it is just sitting unused. However if you are grabbing as much as you can via P2P (which due to the large number of connection hogs more than some other kinds of traffic) during peak hours every single day, they may get annoyed as you make things worse for everyone else.
I don't know anyone here who's been cut off (we have Cox not Comcast) but I do know people who have been throttled and/or yelled at. In EVERY case it was a person who loaded up the torrents or eMule and let them run 24/7 at full blast. Gee, wonder why the ISP might get a little annoyed with that. I have thus far yet to meet someone in person who was cut off or otherwise censured for anything except extreme amounts of P2P.
Cablevision does cap uploads, though - I personally have been capped many times for what they said "excessive uploading" (namely: I uploaded about 6 gigabytes to my web server once and got capped the next day to 200kbps upload speed).
I think all of your are completely misreading unlimited. Remember way back when you first got internet over the phone. You paid so much a month for so many hours of access. And so much more per minute if you went over. Then everyone started offering 'unlimited' access. Stay on 24/7 if you wanted. That is the context in which they are marketing "unlimited". High speed internet 24/7, no time limit. They aren't referring to unlimited bits.
I think its reasonable for them to just put sane caps on their download plans, announce them, and offer higher usage plans for people that want to use more.
I think you guys in the US have had it too good for too long
As with all of my units of measure, including distance and temperature, I want this given in numbers of Libraries of Congress.
I used 5MB a song to figure out that its about 150GB/mo limit. I then divided that up by the max throughput I used to get as a comcast subscriber on downloads of a single stream. So 387KB/s (Kilobytes per second that is) So basically they advertise unlimited service with a data rate of 12Mb/sec. The problem is that you almost never see the actual data rate you pay for...in fact I never have...and their limit now puts you at 4.6 days of streaming 387KB/sec.
:^)
:^) Over time you'll be paying to use more of what you already have connected to your house.
Now, what they advertise is significantly different. 12Mb/sec =~ 1.5MB/sec. Anybody notice the fact you've already not gotten better than 2/3 of what you pay for? 387KB/sec vs 1.5MB/sec? Lets put that on the shelf for a second. So 1.5MB/sec ~= 5.4GB/hour ~= 129GB/d =~ 3.8TB/mo. 150GB is around 3% of 3.8TB.
So first off, per stream, you only get less than 2/3 of what they say you will get. And then they limit you to just over 3% of what is theoretically possible in a given month. I'm not seeing the value here. Perhaps you should pick the mean of 3% and 33%, so 18%. Pay 18% of your bill and say your compensation for their services is more than fair considering what you are delivered.
I think its the case you all should vote with your feet. Move off their crap network and call up Verizon or ATT. I have Verizon and have not been able to find evidence of such quotas in any of my agreements. Well actually there is if you consider your fiber channel connection can do way more than 30Mb/sec...so its not exactly unlimited.
I mean when you think about it, with this going on, what is there to stop the cable company from selling services that offer unlimited downloads at speeds of up to 10Gb/sec....Actual speeds may vary? In effect....nothing!
Oh, BTW, I didn't use 1024 as the conversion factor. Its late, I'm lazy, I just moved a decimal point. Individual calculations may vary.
My all-time record was early this year, when I managed a smidgen under 600GB in one month on Optimum. I was careful to limit my upload to a fraction of that and avoided getting throttled. I'm sure glad I wasn't on Comcast!
Da Blog
Comes down to about 4.8 Gb per day, should be enough for anyone. Not damn bad if you ask me, just don't call it unlimited.
I'm with TPG 512k (true) unlimited here in Aus.
:)
They also have a 150gig plan for ADSL 2+ but its not in my area.
TPG has very fair prices/quota.
The local content in South Korea is so developed and appealing to local people, they don't really need much bandwidth in/to foreign countries.
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
Then get the boost package. nobody has been capped on the boost package so far.
The franchise agreement would prohibit that. Your contract with Comcast doesn't.
Someone start downloading 250,000 5mb bmp images. Make sure it's well documented, and then sue comcast when they cut you off.
From the content of your post, I'm assuming you're referring to Videotron in Quebec. If you're in the Montreal area, try out Colba-Net - ADSL2+ in areas of Montreal and expanding fairly quickly (their techs even post on the DSLReports forums).
If not, my bad.
i had to create an account on /. finally after years of just reading.
I recently moved to a house near my campus (instead of living in the dorms, shitty) and we can only get comcast cable internet (not fios like i have at my real home). i had been following comcast in the news about this nondisclosure, because on fios i routinely download 600+gb a month just on newsgroups, not to mention the occasional torrent, web streaming, and all my other traffic.
here is the transcript of my comcast online chat i just had with a decently rude chat associate named Shawn:
user Eliot has entered room
Eliot(Mon Sep 17 2007 00:56:31 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) what is the transfer cap for high speed internet from comcast?
analyst Shawn has entered room
Shawn(Mon Sep 17 2007 00:56:39 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) Hello Eliot, Thank you for contacting Comcast Live Chat Support. My name is Shawn. Please give me one moment to review your information.
Shawn(Mon Sep 17 2007 00:56:42 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) Good evening.
Eliot(Sun Sep 16 2007 21:57:14 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) hi
Shawn(Mon Sep 17 2007 00:57:06 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) I am unsure of what you are asking, can you rephrase that for me?
Shawn(Mon Sep 17 2007 00:57:09 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) Please?
Eliot(Sun Sep 16 2007 21:58:09 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) What is the limit or cap on cable internet transfer/downloading from comcast?
Eliot(Sun Sep 16 2007 21:58:28 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) ie. how many GB
Eliot(Sun Sep 16 2007 21:58:34 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) per month
Eliot(Sun Sep 16 2007 21:58:44 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) if such a limit exists
Shawn(Mon Sep 17 2007 00:58:35 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) Ah, not unless you are using newsgroups.
Shawn(Mon Sep 17 2007 00:58:58 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) There should be no cap otherwise.
Shawn(Mon Sep 17 2007 00:59:01 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) Why do you ask?
Eliot(Sun Sep 16 2007 21:59:30 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) what is the limit if i am using newsgroups
Eliot(Sun Sep 16 2007 22:00:36 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) hello?
Eliot(Sun Sep 16 2007 22:01:59 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) ?
Shawn(Mon Sep 17 2007 01:01:46 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) that would depend on who you are signed up with. Comcast newsgroups have a limit of 2Gb
Shawn(Mon Sep 17 2007 01:01:55 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) Sorry, I was doing some research.
Shawn(Mon Sep 17 2007 01:02:18 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) I do not know what other sites limit theirs to.
Eliot(Sun Sep 16 2007 22:02:59 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) i am not asking about a limit imposed by a newsgroups service
Eliot(Sun Sep 16 2007 22:03:24 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) i am wondering if there is a limit on the amount of data transfer for the cable internet service
Eliot(Sun Sep 16 2007 22:03:38 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) regardless of what it is used for
Eliot(Sun Sep 16 2007 22:03:49 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) a limit on the connection itself
Shawn(Mon Sep 17 2007 01:03:32 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) I am merely informing you that would be the only limit that you should run into.
Eliot(Sun Sep 16 2007 22:04:03 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) "should" or "will" ?
Eliot(Sun Sep 16 2007 22:04:57 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) because i have been seeing comcast in the news lately that limits may exist that are not disclosed to account holders
Shawn(Mon Sep 17 2007 01:04:47 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) That is the information I have. We do not place limits on the connection for any reason except newsgroups.
Shawn(Mon Sep 17 2007 01:04:59 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) The news is incorrect.
Shawn(Mon Sep 17 2007 01:05:13 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)) There are no limits regarding th connection alone.
Shawn(Mon Sep 17 2007 01:05
Yeah, that sounds legitimate.
He could just be this guy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLpmGB3CPVk
They didn't give you a number because it probably changes from day to day.
30,000 songs uncompressed or AAC/MP3? 250,000 pictures uncompressed, TIFF, JPEG high quality, JPEG low quality? Every JPEG photo my fairly typical 6 MP camera takes ranges from three to six megs or so, not counting RAW files. An MP3 is three or four megs. So 30,000 songs is approximately equal to 25,000 pictures from a camera in the most common format, not 250,000. Their numbers don't make a bit of sense unless their definition of "picture" is something other than "a photo taken by a typical camera".
If we assume 30,000 songs based on a 3-4 meg MP3, though, that's about 100 gigs a month. If you buy movies on iTunes, that's about 200 movies, or 800 TV shows. However, if they ever start selling high-definition movies, that will be less than one movie a day with no other downloads.
Bottom line: instead of bitching about people "abusing" your service, Comcast needs to stop whining and actually fix its bandwidth problems. Their current policy amounts to "Boo hoo. We can't oversubscribe our upstream bandwidth as much as we used to." It's an attempt to try to shift the blame to other people for their poor customer service.
I am so glad I'm not a Comcast customer---not that I use nearly that bandwidth, but it is clearly symptomatic of a larger problem---specifically that they value the almighty dollar more than actually providing service to their customers, which in my book makes them crooked and not deserving of my business.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Your point is noted although I'd be careful in extrapolating it to other nations. Let alone other parts of Canada.
"Right now though, any fears that people will intentionally use up all of their bandwidth are, quite frankly, ridiculous."
"Using up" isn't so much the problem as the nature of P2P and TCP/IP combined with the asymmetric shared nature of most broadband communication services. Which means that the few will affect the many, and all will suffer.
There is probably a legal reason that obligates them to warn customers about excessive usage before disconnecting them. If they don't give them a chance, then the customers can sue for reinstatement or reimbursement of damages. However, with the warning letter this allows them to disconnect freely.
Now, the reason they don't specify a number is this: If you get that letter, they have already decided to disconnect you. You are now screwed. However, if they specified a hard condition for you to avoid disconnection, then they would have to comply with that amount. Comcast realizes that in this case, people could behave for awhile, and then go back to offending again. Legally, though, the first letter establishes a precendent that Comcast must warn them before disconnecting. So, in essence, it would make this cycle:
Month 1: Abuse, Receive warning
Month 2: Behave
Month 3: Abuse, Receive warning
Month 4: Behave
etc.
Because Comcast sent the first warning letter, they are now obligated to warn the customer because the customer is expecting a warning due to the precedent already set. Eventually they might build up a case for a flat disconnection, but it will take longer and waste more bandwidth, time, and money.
The interesting thing to see would be this: Has anyone received this letter and *not* been disconnected? If there is a 100% (or close to it) disconnection rate following the warning letter, I think it could be fairly easy to prove that customers were, in fact, being disconnected with no actual warning at all, and the lawyers could have their feast.
When I see these reports I'm glad I live in Denmark where all providers (I know of) give you actual unlimited traffic. You can get the capped stuff as well if you want (in the sense that you pay for every Mb above a certain limit) for a lower monthly price.
I love how their announcement still says nothing about how much bandwidth you actually get. I'm pretty sure there is a difference between my 30 second theme song and a 15 minute opera in wave format. Or how the slashdot logo gif compares to NASA satellite's tiff files. Or even better yet, my emails containing both a "song" and a "picture".
Measurements without real units are worthless.
I only download 12,999,999 emails with 500mb attachments per month, so i should be fine!
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I'll wait. But I won't be holding my breath.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Cell phone service contracts contain similar vagueries: While unlimited off-peak usage is advertised in bold type, the fine print reserves the right of unilateral termination in case of "excessive use". None that I've seen mention a number, but T-Mobile's, for one, states that customers who display "unprofitable usage patterns" will be terminated.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
My Canadian ISP (Videotron) doesn't have a limit on the specific plan I bought (which is why I bought it). I haven't found another ISP without a limit, so I'll be sticking with this one. Anyone know of any other (local or national) ISPs which offer no limit plans?
This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
An average song in raw CD quality is roughly 60MB.
An average raw camera picture is roughly 20MB.
13 million e-mails though... if this includes spam, we could be in trouble.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
or 99,9997824% of that Ubuntu dvd....
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
3 megs/song suggests about 100GB/month. Which would give 0.4Mb/picture and 7.7kb/email.
Don't sound too unrealistic to me.
Still a strange use of the word "unlimited" to me though. But that's the Tweedledum-&-Tweedledee Dictionary of Advertising-Speak for you.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Gigabytes?
Man, today it's all about how many libraries of congress you can transfer thru the tubes. Keep up with the time pops.
the avg mp3 is abought 5 megs and the avg pic is around 500 kb. so that makes the limit 150 gigs like most people orignaly thought. im pretty shure thats the table they use.
that seems like alot but it relly isnt. when iptv hits mainstream this year on the xbox 360 and pc people will easly eat up 150gb in bandwith and comcast will eyther be forced to expand that limit or not count that traffic on your monthly limit. or they will start having some majer issues.
This makes me want to send them 13 million e-mails with a 1GB attachment out of spite...
I use XPlornet in southwestern Ontario and they don't have any limits, other than their speed. I'm out in the country so can't get DSL or cable, and XPlornet has a 900MHz fixed wireless service here that I use. They're a GREAT ISP and I highly recommend them, although most DSL packages are faster.
I have a fixed IP address and they specifically told me there are no limits as to what I can do with my bandwidth. I can host web sites, run P2P, whatever. The only downside is that my actual bandwidth is usually around 1300/300kpbs.
www.clarke.ca
When they cut me off they also claimed it was a summation of upload and download, so in reality you get even less of what your paying for. AT&T never gave me problems so I switched back. DSL has about 10% lower latency in my area also.
Because, sadly, most internet companies assume users don't know what a megabyte is. I always cringe at TV adverts for computers that say "hey, it's got a huge hard drive that will allow you to store XXX music tracks or XXX pictures" (can I store XXX random files of data, or is it only capable of music tracks and pictures?). More to the point, how big is "huge"?
One dull advert tried to convince a customer why you would want a dual core CPU. "So you can do two things at once, like send email and browse the web at the same time". I could do that on my 14mhz single-cored Amiga!!
It would be a bit much to say "so you can still log into your box after a process tied to a core has fork-bombed itself", but pullllease.
Another rant: COMPUTER SELLERS, If you're going to list the CPU and the RAM in a computer, I also want to know what graphics chip it's got. It's no more or less complicated than saying it's got an Intel Core 2 duo Ti1234, but it has a pretty fucking huge impact on how the computer is going to perform.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
By definition, ANY usage is an "unprofitable usage pattern", because they achieve maximum profit when people buy their service and NEVER use it.
Such language is ridiculously vague and self-serving. I were a judge I would probably call the lawyer who wrote it into my chambers... and punch him in the nose.
Ok, this really isn't that complicated - why nearly every comment is demanding a precise GB limit is kind of depressing to me. I've been on both sides of this for a long time (large network admin, Comcast subscriber) so this debate is pretty old to me (at least 10+ years old).
Lots of people are demanding a precise bandwidth limit - it's just not that simple. Or rather, they could, but doing so would actually provide a lesser product to you in the end. A few people have mentioned this - it's when you use it and where you live that matters. Comcast's network capacity is tremendous, but it's not completely even across all customers, which is normal of any large network. So, while some customers would actually be ok with 25TB/month, others can't get that without disrupting their (and only their) area of the network. You could argue that they should have even network capacity for all, but that's just not financially realistic.
So enough people have demanded that they give some kind of limit, so they're doing what they can to appease the customers - but to avoid the people who toe the line as was mentioned above, that just makes it worse, really. This is them doing the best they can while still giving themselves legal reason to kill off the ones doing the real damage.
Everyone here knows that P2P is mostly mp3s and movies and junk, and that it's what is causing the problem. It's been like that since P2P started in the 90s. Yes, there are legal reasons for P2P and all that, but, y'all know that most of the traffic isn't that. Don't get me wrong - I'm no better here, I use P2P also. But I know if I max my peering all day I'll move TB and impact others so I don't do that.
Bottom line - there is no hard limit, there isn't going to be, and you don't want there to be, since that would mean people that right now get to have great nighttime and other bandwidth won't have that luxury at the cost of the few guys that leave P2P running all day. Comcast is doing the Right(tm) thing here.
There is one other possible, though unlikely option, which is for Comcast to implement dynamic per-connection bandwidth reduction, so that if you try to hog bandwidth at times when others are trying to get their share, they slow you down just for the moment. There is hardware to do things like that, but, Comcast has what they have now and the amount of profit they will get as a company just by doing this kind of solution is likely pretty small. In time, as they do normal upgrades, you may see things like this improve, but it won't happen overnight with what's out there now.
I think this discussion is somewhat over the top. Obviously, all the g33ks on /. would be outraged at a 100GB cap on downloads, but it's perfectly legitimate to question the validity of their usage model. 30.000 MP3's of 3 MB a piece. If I were to assume a 224bit or even higher sampling rate, we're looking at 4-6 MB for a 3-4 minute song. By that definition, we're talking about 25 KB per second of Audio.
If you divide 90 GB by 25 KB (ie 94371840/25) you get 3774874 seconds of audio. That's roughly 1050 hours. Assuming 24 hours to the day, you are looking to download 44 days of continuously streaming unique Audio per month. A month, may I remind you, ranging anywhere from 27-31 days.
This means that every month yields a month and a half's worth of data to peruse *if* you do it full time. Subsequently, you would have one year's worth of listening per 8 months.
Anyone who complains about that download limit is seriously deranged, in posession of a Tardis or immortal. You choose.
I guess you never heard of the modern age of video downloads that use a whole lot more bandwidth than an mp3 that an average user can literally just point their web browser to and end up zapping a whole lot more bandwidth than that and hit the said limit after watching a bunch of those videos from *normal* usage.
The solutions set for sizeof(X songs) = sizeof(Y pictures) = sizeof(Z emails) is a line in 3 space that passes through the origin. Thus, it would be just as valid to say that the size of the emails, songs, and pictures were all 0KB. Do the math, it works out the same.
create software the stitches together photos for download then unstitches them when they are downloaded. Turn 10 photos into 1 so I can download 2,500,000 photos. Do the same for songs then sell the product to become rich and stick it to Comcast.
In the movie, "Wedding Singer", the main character ("Robbie", Adam Sandler) was paid with meatballs after giving an elderly woman singing lessons. In the spirit of ambiguous measurements such as "pictures", "songs", and "e-mail messages", I wonder if they'd accept something equally as ambiguous, such as meatballs, as payment for their service.
The average user that is doing DVD-rip downloads is doing illegal downloads anyway. They don't get my empathy. If I'm downloading divx rips, nine out of ten times I'm still doing it illegally. If I'm looking at youtube streams or some such, the bandwidth I'm consuming is much, much less. I haven't yet looked at a counter for my NIC while doing that, but I can imagine I can cram 50 minutes of "tv" in a 100 MB stream.
/., newspapers, watch Youtube or play games for that money.
If a 700 MB Divx is 1.5 hrs of video, one second is roughly 130KB. This means that roughly 330 GB will give you 24/7 video to watch for one month. 90 GB will therefore give you 202 hrs of video. If you went to the Blockbuster, this would be the equivalent to 134 movies. 80 Dollars a month would therefore give you a price of $1.65 per movie, assuming you don't read
134 movies spread over 30 days still yields 4.5 movies/day. Unless you're on the dole or independently wealthy, I don't know a soul who would have the time or inclination to watch that many movies.
DVD-rips are where things get interesting. Let's say you download 4.4 GB DVD rips. 90 GB gives you 20 movies. Which means that you watch one movie every weekday. This is a more realistic approach. This you can actually watch while remaining a sane human.
Anything over that volume is ludicrous. Which makes this whole discussion ludicrous. There are just no two ways about it... a 90-100 GB cap on bandwidth consumption is perfectly reasonable for those $80 per month.
So shut up and get on with your lives if you have one, will ya?
30.000 MP3's of 3 MB a piece.
/.
exuse of Linux ISOs - Massively overstated on the whole, I'll
agree, but every few months, it easily adds another 3-5GB to
my total.
I use FLAC. Try 4+MB/minute.
I also prefer losslessly stored images to JPEGs, on the order of 10-20MB per picture. As for email, I'll readily admit that those take up only a few KB each.
Anyone who complains about that download limit is seriously deranged, in posession of a Tardis or immortal. You choose.
I chose "D - The listed metrics do not represent actual usage".
My downloading of music, pictures, and email accounts for probably quite a bit less than 10% of my total. Videos (legal) alone probably come in at 3x music+pics+email. Game demos probably match that. And then I have the low level of background traffic to monitor systems I remotely admin for friends and relatives - Low at any given moment, but probably 20% of my total overall. And don't forget the ever-popular
And don't forget the growing popularity of "real" movies-on-demand... Netflix already offers quite a few in a very viable way; bandwidth alone keeps that from exploding into the mainstream. You could easily suck down half a terabyte every month watching a few movies every night after work.
Makes you misdirection and their lies stand out for what they really are, just a collusive attempt by the major players to ramp up prices. They are feeling out the market, testing what they can get away with, seeing if any member of the telecom cartel will break. Next will come the insults targeted at consumers, only pirates and leeches need more than 100 gig, only thieves, hackers and terrorists could ever use 100 gig.
The typical family watching legal video streams, making vid calls, transferring family videos between friends, buying games online, doing work from home, and they could, shock, horror, even individually be doing more that one thing at a time on line, now ain't that just amazing.
Of course the telecoms and their spruikers will tell every lie in the book, arrange for a whole bunch of rubbery statistics, get all the junk consultants to start spreading junk reports, pay their mass media advertisers to spread the spin far and wide, as well as of course flooding forums.
Thanks to the current administration and it's corrupt practices, the telecoms will be looking forward to bringing you yesterdays internet, tomorrow, complete with low download, restricted access and inflated prices.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
So start a class action for deceptive advertising.
Not a single thing of what you've just written down is based on empirical, measurable facts. You've just written a piece of propaganda without content. Whereas what I wrote is calculated by bits and bytes. I know the cost and effort involved in maintaining a large IT and Network infrastructure. I know the cost and effort involved in maintaining a help-desk or even call-centre of any kind.
I know that renting 20 movies a month (dvd rips) or 134 movies a month (Divx rips) or 1050 hours of audio a month is more than adequate for your average family. I know that I do not buy 20 large video games per month. I know that I don't purchase more than 1 or two movies per month while downloading the odd one, seeing some on TV and then renting a couple from the Blockbuster. I know that when my boy will be born in February, somewhere along the line I hope I will get him to play soccer outside and read actual books sometimes.
So I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you're full of shit. 90/100 GB / month is a perfectly plausible usage model which 90% of internet users don't even begin to nibble at. It's the 10% freaks, geeks and conspiration theorists that do the heavy downloading. Not the average 2.4 kid family. Bollocks, bollocks, trice I say bollocks.
An email can be as big as around 10 mb..
10mb * 13 million emails, is 130 million megabytes. Which is about 127 thousand gigabytes.. or 127 terabytes, per month!
Works for me!
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
I worked for an ISP in Oz back in 1994 when the Internet was only just becoming publically available. The standard price for 'unlimited' dil-up was $25/month at 33.6kb/s. Telstra did not offer an 'unlimited' service, you paid a set fee up to the size of your plan, and then 19 cents/megabyte over. Telstra also charged ISPs the same 19c/meg. In 1995 connect.com started to offer data to ISPs for around 15c/meg as long as it didn't come over Telstra's network, but Connect's connectivity sucked. Alternatively you could buy 'hours' online 'Compuserve' style, but the market rejected these plans for all but a small number of small business users who basically wanted email and nothing else.
Modems that held up to the constant heat were expensive - I remember us getting 2 racks of 12 USR modems that cost about $4500 per rack. There was no way most new ISPs (and they were all new except AAPT, Telstra, private corporate RAS and the Universities) could afford to have all modems saturated at those costs and prices. All plans had small print explaining exactly what 'unlimited' meant - it usually meant "you can dial in as many times a day as you want, as long as you were only connected on one line at a time, and you will be kicked once a single session exceeded a given time/data limit, but you can attempt to dial in again immediately". This was completely legal, but pissed off the people who didn't read the plan before signing up.
... of usage per month then, presumably? (4.5MB x 30,000 songs)...?
Right on the mark.
If you check out Sympatico, their High-Speed Plus service has also been capped to 100GB/month while their regular $40/month (with phone and 2-years contract) HS is capped to a more reasonable (compared to Videotron's) 60GB/month - still looks bit expensive next to the $30 100GB/month DSLs.
As for which DSL to try, I was thinking TekSavvy... if I am to believe reports on canadianisp.com, it looks like it may be one of the more dependable alternatives currently available. If I read Colba's offer correctly, they have unlimited 24Mbps service and this will translate into potentially incredible download speed when you are lucky enough that nobody else on Colba is downloading anything or crappy speeds when Colba's backbone is more evenly loaded. If enough Videotron Extremers and Sympatico Plusers jump on Colba's allegedly unlimited 24Mbps service, things are going to get ugly over there. To avoid this highly likely scenario, I'd rather go with an ISP that states realistic sustainable limits up-front since they are far less likely to get hit by Extremers/Plusers exodus.
IMO, 100GB/month would be a fair limit for $30-40/month low-latency/priority-traffic service - the effective backbone bandwidth cost for this is less than $2 so offering anything less is excessively greedy. I consider myself as a moderate/mild downloader and I routinely download 25-35GB/month total from multiple locations to stay safely within the 20/10 caps and "improve" the subscriber base average. Comcast/Videotron/Sympatico/whatever crying over "abuse" at ~200GB/month on their $60-80 service treads on the pathetic side of the scale... their premium service costs twice as much as the DSLs' 100GB/month service so it would be only fair that premium service provided at least 200GB/month given that fixed costs remain generally unchanged therefore most of the surcharge ends up as pure profit... minus ~$1 in extra effective backbone traffic cost.
Just for fun, I called Videotron the other day to ask if they had any plans to increase caps before my contract ended. When I pointed out that Sympatico offered twice the caps for the same price and that there were ~40 DSL providers offering 100GB/month for $30, the Videotron rep went ballistic repeating over and over that this was impossible and that if it was true they'd know about it. Seems like Videotron ordered its PR bunnies to do an in-denial dance... they do not want people to find out that there are cheaper, nearly just as fast alternatives that offer more than triple the usage caps.
I pay for bandwidth two ways: First, a Residential RoadRunner subscriber, and Second: as a commerical client at a co-location facility.
My "home" stuff: I get a measley 5mbit down and 460kbit up.
My "commercial" stuff: Is so fast I can't really accurately measure it with any of the speedtest sites.
I never really knew why that mattered, I only thought transfer speed was what mattered. But I learned about how bandwidth works when I got a bill for it from my co-lo facility. Apparently, we were on a 256kbit monthly commit. I thought "well, we get faster than that obviously" and never thought more about it. But they calculate out what the throughput is both in and out over a month to get this 256kbit number. If you multiply it out, 256kbit = approximately 80 gigabytes of transfer. The conversion they gave me is 1megabit = 320gigabytes of data.
Using what Comcast allows you to buy (12mbit down x 1mbit up) = ~3.8 terrabytes of data down, and ~320 gigabytes of data up. Even if you use only 25% of what you've paid for (above numbers * 0.25) = 960gb download, 80gb upload, that's still a fair bit higher than 30,000 songs, 150,000 pictures, or 13m emails.
If they are not capping at below those numbers, they are, in my opinion (IANAL), selling something labeled as one thing but not delivering all of it.
They must stop calling it 12mbit service if you can't really download 12mbit.
Something else: They don't say if the 30,000 songs are in WAV format (10MB/minute X 3.5 minutes/song X 30,000 songs = ~1TB of data) or if it's 128kbit MP3 (80K/minute X 3.5 minutes/song X 30,000 songs = 84GB of data). They don't say if the 150,000 pictures are in RAW format out of a Canon 1DS (~25MB/pic X 150,000 pictures = 3.7TB of data) or if it's a crappy 2 megapixel digicam (~1.5MB/pic X 150,000 pictures = 225GB of data). And their 150,000 emails: Are they plaintext, HTML, mixed, and do they all have attachments?
It also says they guarantee 1500 kbps. If you're going to hold them to PART of that ad, you must hold them to all and accept the lower speed.
Well apparently it's Mr Matticus and you who get it. Amazing what experience does to a subject under discussion. The majority here are basically arguing, My rights!, My rights! were there are none, and ignoring the other side of the issue. Two posts for the bookmark file.
"They don't want to give a specific limit because some people are habitual line steppers. I've discovered this with administering forums. You try and think up a set of hard and fast rules governing what is and isn't ok and write them down. Then you get a group of people who continually try to do as much as they can to be problems within those rules. They dance right up to the line and bitch if you come down on them. It's a situation of "Obedience to the letter (sort of) not the spirit." As such it works much better to have the rules more simple and open ended. Basically "Don't be a dick." Though they may pretend they don't know what you mean, they do and it works."
Read this book, and marvel at how flexible people are when it comes to "what they want".
The reason they don't publish the actual limit is that they are smart and they understand game theory. If they publish a limit, abusive users will carefully monitor bandwidth and go right up to the limit, and then switch accounts. It's standard practice not to publish exact limits when you don't want to be "gamed". You can hate Comcast, that's fine, but give credit where credit is due. They are smart a-holes.
I know I'll get modded down for this but, if anyone from comcast is following this thread, I'd like to add my voice to others replying to this message and say this guy's use is far greater than anything I'd consider normal. If sending him a warning letter makes my (and my neighbor's) internet better, please do.
Sincerely,
your other kind of customer
I don't see what the big deal is here. Assuming ~20 megs average for a FLAC file, 30,000 songs comes out to just under 600 gigs. That should be plenty for anyone!
She's confused on another point. One most language like that is written for the minority who see it as their God-given right to abuse a resource.* The majority never run into that and it's a shame that humans need little addendum's like that in order for society to function properly, but there you are.
The other is while one can take the company to court and possibly win. What do they gain from it? Sometimes picking one's battles is the smart thing to do. And being an abuser, doubly so.
*line steppers I believe someone called it.
Here in Australia "unlimited" meant "around 10GB"
Yep, past tense. It's now 12GB. Uploads + Downloads. Then 64kbit shaping. Or $150/GB excess.
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
> watching a few movies every night after work.
Let me guess, you work 14 hours a day. The rest of that time is spent browsing your 500 GB music collection and watching 2-3 movies every night. Then you finish one game per 24 hour period (like The Godfather, Blackhand edition, even though it costs me 30 hours to get through one story arc).
It seems to me you must be overweight and pasty of complexion, haven't seen your neighbors or family in the last decade or so, think that relationships are best had on-line, never had sex and last read an actual book back in 1982 when your kindergarten teacher made you go through Momo or something like it.
"Most" people don't use FLAC. "Most" people don't store their photo's "Raw". I am a big photography nut, but I've never had to print billboards. Which means a 2.5 MB 6 MP jpeg (which I store and manage locally) is fine for me.
Again, you're still not demonstrating to me how ComCast is screwing the average John Q Subscription-payer. You, sir, are a member of a very noisy, unreasonable fringe movement.
Don't get me wrong. I am a geek too. But since I've spent the better part of 12 years working in the industry, I actually see the benefit of pursuing interests that don't force me to sit behind my damn monitor on my time off. And I suggest that all of you who are complaining about their 100 GB Cap on downloads do the same.
Who knows? You might find out that the sun still exists if you step out the door.
The ISPs claim that the term "Unlimited" is described as meaning "Unlimited right of access", "always-on", "available 24/7"; as opposed to offers which limit the amount of hours you can be online.
They do now, not when I signed up along with my neighborhood 4 years ago.
I posted the link to archive.org on my blog which positively proves this. It was on Comcast's web site until a couple years ago apparently.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Anyone checked what a limit would mean for their favourite online game?
I just checked BF2142 and it appears to only use around 15kB/s. That's enough to eat 52 MB/hour while playing. Looking at the stats online it appears people are playing as much as 10 hours a day! This isn't enough to make a dent in a 90GB/Month limit though. Even the extreemes only rack up 15 GB/Month playing BF2142.
Anyone know of more bandwidth intensive games?
I figure you can bust a 90GB/Month limit playing 7-8 hours/day if you use around 125kB/s.
Over to videos... (Yes, the legal kind!)
Watching videos online gives me 1500kb/s streams. That's 187 kB/s and at 80 minutes each you would have to watch 105 movies in a month to bust the quota. That's only 4-5 hours a day and definately doable if you wanted to.
I'm just glad I don't have a limit.
It also says they guarantee 1500 kbps. If you're going to hold them to PART of that ad, you must hold them to all and accept the lower speed.
that would explain WHY it was always slow in the evenings.
Thanks for the clarify.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
... it means. I am only assuming here, but apparently as long as a company defines the words they use, they can use whatever words they want. For instance, I like Papa John's Pizza. We order from them on occasion. They have an offer for a Cowboy's Special (this is in Dallas). "Unlimited" toppings! Wow, huh? Put 'em all on, twice! In this case, "unlimited" means "five (5)".
Now I personally don't see how 5 == unlimited, but that's what the asterisk says. So apparently Comcast can have an asterisk as well. "* 'Unlimited' means whatever the hell we say it does. In this case, 'not unlimited', or even better: 'limited'."
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
File a complaint against comcast with your local utilities commissioner. Comcast has to have permission to use the right away in front of your house and has to provide services for everyone in that area, they can't pick and choose, unless they don't want to be able to run cables in front of your property.
Don't Vote for Norm Dicks! http://www.nodicks2008.com Another nutless dirtbag that voted for the FISA bill!
Please point out where it says "unlimited" in any official Comcast material. I'll wait.
So, following your theory, T-Mobile and Verizon can stop telling people exactly how many peak minutes they are getting with their plan, because "abusive users" will carefully monitor their usage and go right up to the limit and then stop using it for the month, thus denying them the overage? They should just sell it as "unlimited" and cut people off who in their minds talk on the phone too much, right?
You say "abusive users", I say "maximizing the value of the service that I'm paying for".
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
...and here's betting you'll be less satisfied then.
I have 5,528 emails on one account totally 773MB. That's about 146K each. 13 million of those translates to a sustained 3.2Mb/s 24x7, which in my area is the maximum burst speed they're advertising.
If you don't think that's excessive use on a $39.95 cable plan, what on earth would you consider "reasonable?"
The first GIS return for mp3 size is 3.5MB ala Cnet
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGIH_enUS233US233&q=average+size+of+an+mp3
it's not unreasonable that they just googled "average size of an mp3" for fake press conference numbers.
3.5 * 30000 = 105000
I'd propose that 100GB per month is the limit.
I'm a FIOS user, I could exceed that in 15 hours (theoretically)
That said, If correct, I don't think it's an unreasonable number at all.
In terms of 700MB CD, that's 142 CD's of data a month. (avg divx movie fitting on a cd, maybe two)
In terms of Joost streaming TV, that's 300 Hours. (roughly 10 hours a day)
Anyone that's not a 24x7 superleaf p2p node is likely to be ok.
The real problem is the invisible limit barrier with a notice then ban you immediately.
Comcast should be sending more than one notice, It sounds to me like these people might need a little more time to work it out. Perhaps they're harvesting the numbers before the people actually get (or read) the letters. Wouldn't hurt to wait another week and send out another notice. It would also do wonders for PR if they explained P2P flooding to the masses. a 30 second commercial explaining P2P traffic and why it can't always be accomidated would be a good gesture.
If you have a dorm's worth of people running 24x7 p2p unthrottled, it's a huge strain on the infrastructure. The more you throw at it, the more they'll take.
I see both sides, but Comcast isn't handling it very well.
I sometimes will avg from good providers 1MB per sec. If my calculations are correct I get 16GB per hour. 5 hours of max'd downloading would seem unfair to me. "I used at least 2 of those hours yesterday"
Of course i'm using your 90gb cap as a reference and I'm not a math wiz by any means. I pay for Comcast's game invasion and get 8mbit.
90GB is way low for what I do. I'm not much of a torrenter but I do craploads of gaming stuff from fileplanet and I'm pretty sure I've exceeded 90gb more than one month in a row over the last 5 years.
Between NetFlix, Fileplanet, Filefront, FileForum yada yada yada... I'm definately in the top 5% at least. maybe not the top 1% as I know warez-monkeys will download everything and have 4tb of space storing 0-day for 30 days. "idiots"
To date I've never received anything from Comcast except a hefty bill each month. My fingers are crossed.
Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
According to Apple, this would be about 120 gigs. (160GB iPod ~= 40k songs in yo' pocket)
Those who have telepathy have no need to RTFA.
at 20+ megs a track.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
With Comcast's limit on bandwidth how do I guage how many football games I can watch using my Slingbox? Since Comcast was given a monopoly as the cable service provider in the my area are they allowed to legally just cancel someones service?
A computer may beat me at Chess, but I always win at Kickboxing.
The reason they don't publish a number, is that it would develop into an expensive arms race between competitors. Let's say you have two fictional companies. We'll call them Comm Warner and Timecast. Right now, neither publish a number, so either can start cutting people off at "around" 100GB/mo. They have a gentlemen's agreement not to publish any numbers, so both companies benefit from the ambiguity, and the only customers that they piss off are the top 0.01% of users. Keep in mind that only 0.01% (just a made up number, but let's agree that it's a very small number.) of customers even see this monthly limit. Now, for marketing reasons, let's say that Comm Warner decides to break the informal agreement and publish that their d/l limit is 100GB a month. Until now, both companies have just tacitly kicked people when they neared this limit, but now one of them is actually publishing a number. Users of Comm Warner are now entitled to 100GB a month. Timecast sees this as an opportunity to pick up new customers, so they start advertising a 150GB/mo service. By and large, American consumers are stupid. (Not trying to knock Americans, because I am one, but US consumers will swallow 99% of the BS that marketing departments shove down their throats.) They see 100 and 150, and obviously 150 is better than 100, so they switch. So Comm Warner starts offering a 200GB/mo. service. Never mind that most users never hit this ceiling. Now repeat this process until both companies are publishing that their service is unlimited. Now, they are obligated under truth in advertising laws to have a truly unlimited service. Neither company has gained any significant number of users, but both have lost the ability to kick "annoying" users that download a lot of stuff.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Let's assume my wife and I use a lot of 'net services:
We download ~3 game demos a week (PC/360, 1-4GB, let's say 2GB each on average, although this is generous, and varies widely by manufacturer/publisher) [6GB/week]
We also both play WoW. (Estimating 1GB/week, although I'm not sure exactly how much bandwidth this uses - weeks with large patches downloaded to multiple client computers would bloat this as well) [1GB/week]
We call friends and family often through Skype, and talk with guildmates via Ventrilo. (Let's estimate 1GB a week here as well) [1GB/week]
2 nights during the week, and once on weekends, we rent a HD movie through XBLM (5-7GB each, we'll say 6GB) [18GB/week]
My wife loves streaming video, and watches quite a bit on YouTube (Let's say 1GB a week, although I'm honestly not sure here) [1GB/week]
Allowing 2-3GB/week for miscellaneous stuff (misc browsing, email, work, etc...not a hard figure, just an estimate) [2-3GB/week]
That right there is just under 30GB/week, which in an average 4-week month works out to ~120GB, over the mystical 100GB "limit". Admittedly, the above isn't particularly sustainable (seldom are there multiple weeks with 3 worthwhile game demos, or 3 movies worth watching), but it is an example of how "regular" and most importantly *legal* use could indeed break this 100GB "limit" without too much trouble.
I have two comcast commercial accounts at locations about 20 miles apart.
4 hops apart-- all inside comcast...
80% of my traffic is from a permanent vpn from each location to the other.
in your situation- would they allow as this doesn't hit your cap? especially as ALL the traffic is within your ISP's network?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Can you imagine the uproar if they started capping TV viewing? "Sorry folks -- no more than the equivalent of approximately 400 sitcoms or 90 baseball games a month!"
// This is not a sig.
I personally have always hated device/service marketing which gives you approximations of how much crappy low-grade media you could pack onto something. 9 million pictures (20x20 png images), 30k Songs (midi) etc. It's just obnoxious. There really aren't any other decent providers where I live so I'm getting quite sick of Comcast's shenanigans. Just tell me what the limit is or better yet don't have one or else I'll move somewhere I can get FiOS.
This actually happened to me like 2 years ago. First time was a letter in the mail from Comcast stating that I should check my [wireless] network security, if I use wireless, and enable WEP/WPA so that other people cannot leech off my broadband connection. The second time, they put my cable modem on "abusive mode" which gave it an internal ip address for the comcast network. I think at this point, I was only able to go to the main comcast web page. I had to call them up and release the restriction, but they told me that if I exceed the aggregate bandwidth transfer cap/limit/number, then I would have to find another isp. Now, Comcast offers tiered service: standard 4/384, 6/384, and 8/768. I would assume that purchasing the higher tiers would in essence increase the aggregate transfer limit cap by that fraction. There was a massive download I wanted totaling 80gig by itself, and before I downloaded it, purchased the highest tier. The 3rd tier is essentially double that of the standard service, so if 90gigs a month was the magic number, then my new cap should be 180gigs a month. Ever since then, I haven't had a problem with my transfers (knock on wood!).
You don't have to be at the computer to be using bandwidth, idiot. I believe it is you who belongs to an unreasonable fringe movement. See what I did there?
This user would like to support legal file sharing. Download limits are not interesting, since I aim to get a share ratio greater than one. Uploading 40KB/second translates to 144MB/hour, 3.456 GB/day, 104GB/month. I did this, more or less, last year or so, with DSL (I used speed scheduling, so that I used less during the day, but cranked it up late at night). I still have no idea if this is excessive, or not. If Comcast gave me information (e.g., times of day when bandwidth is more available) I would be happy to adjust my usage to be more helpful. I would back switch to DSL if it were not for bizarre noise issues (DSL worked fine for 4-5 years, then it started hissing despite lots of filters).
Who do you think you are? "See what I did there" I haven't heard since I saw Billy Crystal portray Buddy Young, Jr...
Of course you don't have to be at your computer to use bandwidth, and if you would actually *read* the arguments I've brought to the discussion you would discover I never questioned that. My question has always been the following:
Why the hell are people so bent on using all the bandwidth in the world if it results in data they have no use for? It's like causing traffic jams by cruising up and down the highway in rush-hour traffic for no other purpose than to cruise up and down the highway.
So I do see what you did there. You missed the point, called me an idiot and managed to look like one yourself.
Well, many users tend to want to support that.
However, I wish people would only up- respectively down-load things they actually Use/Watch/Listen to. I have plenty of friends in Israel that download things because they are "free" as in "gratis". This results in people that are sitting on 300 burnt DVD's they haven't seen yet, downloads of crappy movies or bad music and games for their cracked PS2 they will never play. This even causes a degree of cultural contamination. It drives a demand for shit. It makes the internet the stinking arm-pit of popular culture.
You see, I'm from the generation of internet users that started with BBSes and Tape-swapping. I/we take offense in people sending mail in HTML format with a bunch or rotating widgets and animated smileys, because I don't think an e-mail should be anything else than text with links in it. SMTP is not designed for funky stuff or 25 MB Home-video attachments. I take offense in the continuous mis-use of the public bandwidth with PetaBytes of uninteresting, unnecessary, blasé and objectionable data.
I fear that as time goes by, Internet is just becoming the same as commercial TV. A load of crap buzzing around with one promille of quality on the fringes.
And I suggest that all of you who are complaining about their 100 GB Cap on downloads do the same.
You'll notice I didn't actually complain about that as a limit - I consider it quite reasonable, for now. Even given all that I said, my monthly usage usually comes out to only 25-35GB. I don't think I've ever broken 50GB.
I do, however, have a problem with companies that first offer "unlimited" yet kick off those who use too much; Then simply don't mention limits anywhere; Then phrase their limits in terms not applicable to the very people to whom they most apply.
Yeah, John Q probably thinks in terms of songs/pictures/emails per month, and goes "ooh, big numbers!" when limited to 30,000 of them. But to John Q, the idea of a monthly cap means nothing. He not only has no chance of hitting it, he also has no idea how much he actually uses every month.
But these caps don't exist for John Q. They exist for geeks who know very well how much they use, and chose an "unlimited" service for precisely that reason. And I for one find it highly insulting that Comcast would phrase their limits in subjective terms not even remotely applicable to the people most likely to get nailed by such caps. You and I both know, as you pointed out, that Comcast means 30,000 3MB MP3 songs, not 20+MB FLAC or 50+MB raw WAV files. They need to say as much, not play games solely for the purpose of making it harder to comparate pricing between broadband providers.
Oh well, I'm heading back to the threads on Microsoft and the RIAA so I can get back to feeling pissed off.
Overrated Moderation: This posts sucks... because.
I wonder if Steven Wright holds any Comcast stock? I was going 70 miles an hour and got stopped by a cop who said, "Do you know the speed limit is 55 miles per hour?" "Yes, officer, but I wasn't going to be out that long..."
In Soviet Russia a beowulf cluster of these things imagines you welcoming your new, neural-network overlords.
Listen, TANSTAAFL. And you know it.
.1 % of their customers than to actually market a "limited but very cool" package. This is true for any business.... The restaurant, the car manufacturer and the ISP alike.
Mercedes had a slogan in Holland in the eighties. "Every owner can become a millionaire". They sold their cars under the premise that any Mercedes can clock 1.000.000 kilometres. Now if I bought a Mercedes, chip-tuned it, took it for a rally in the ice of Finland, crossed the Sahara with it at a speed of 120 kph through the sand, and then complained that the thing broke down after 200.000 km, anyone would tell me this is unreasonable.
You can only become that millionaire if you treat your car right, use it like a normal human would do and everyone knows it. I don't think it's up to Mercedes to explain that to anyone as it's common sense.
At a restaurant where you eat "Spareribs Unlimited" you don't expect them to go out and shoot a pig once some 300 pound glutton single-handedly finishes the night's supply of baby back ribs and still asks for more. People that buy into the "Unlimited" thing should start to realize that nothing on this green earth is, as a matter of fact, unlimited.
Objectively speaking you're right. It would be "fairer" to indicate a reasonable limit. But maybe it costs them way less to deal with the complaints from
Additionally, you're completely forgetting the recent rise of High Definition media. To my knowledge there's no standard published in the warez community yet, but up to 10 GB per movie are common with some (few) films being in the 20 GB region.
Assuming one 10 GB Hi-Def movie a day (people are quite likely to watch more than one on a lazy weekend day, compensating not watching one on some weekdays), a bandwidth cap under 300 GB seems really inappropriate. By the way: We haven't figured two or more people sharing an internet connection while not always watching the same films in. Oh... Wikipedia lists about 200 linux distributions, if somebody would wan't to try them all over the course of one year, you'd have to add some 30 GB per month to account for that, too.
30,000 songs at 5 to 6 MB each (high quality vbr mp3) adds up to about 160 GB.
250,000 pictures, at 2 MB each (that's about average for what comes out of my digital camera) adds up to about 480 GB.
13,000,000 e-mails at 50 KB each (averaging my inbox, with a few dozen attachments, and a few hundred html or plain text) adds up to about 620 GB
Averaging these out it comes to 420 GB. I'm pretty sure I've never reached that much in a month.
Of course all these numbers are arbitrary, and Comcast can see if you're downloading more than 99% of the other users on that segment (or whatever it's called), and either give you a warning, or shut you off, at their discretion. But you have to be doing some serious downloading to get those kinds of numbers...
Bike Messengers on crack
Fixed gear bike tricks
Bike tricks (with horrible music)
Unicycle tricks
You also might not be the only old fart posting to slashdot.
Haha awesome.
Old fart... Bloody hell, I'm 32... :-D
Anyway, it's funny that you say that p2p file-sharing would be the saving grace to internet content (which is not true) and then you refer to four YouTube links (thanks for proving my own point).
Even though they state the limit up here in canada, they don't always enforce it. :)
The provider I am with (Cogeco) for 10MB service, gives us "100GB up/down" combined. In actual practice, they have never enforced this limit, and don't even issue warning letters, unless the RIAA/MPAA sends one, then they just anonymously forward it to the customer without telling the RIAA/MPAA who it was. While 100GB seems like a lot, it depends on who you have living in the house. With 4 people in their mid 20's here, with a total of 4 laptops, 3 towers, 2 servers, Xbox360 PS3 & Wii, 4 DS's & a wifi PDA, we get our money's worth. There are months when we go over a TB of up/down traffic easily. Now, before you freak out and say that is impossible on cable, consider 1TB @10Mb of continuous transfer would only be 10days, 4 hours, 20 minutes & 9 seconds of usage - less than 1/3 of the month.
http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/calculate/downloadcalculator.shtml
Even if you took into account non continuous usage combined with overhead and rounded that number up by an extreme 50%, you could still pass 2TB of traffic a month on cable...
The closest I have gotten to this was 57 days of usage (tracked thru the wan port of my router, between restarts) at 3.2TB.
And no, that doesn't mean I'm stealing every movie known to man. We just watch a lot of streaming stuff, like divx.com & download a lot of game demos.
I guess Comcast thinks you should get all your video from them. Pay per view, things like that.
No games either. Those are getting up to 4 or 5GB these days. I think we need to get Steam lobbying on the side of customers.
And if it included those crappy Motorola DVR's they have rented with all the known problems there, then all the better!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
So, following your theory, T-Mobile and Verizon can stop telling people exactly how many peak minutes they are getting with their plan, because "abusive users" will carefully monitor their usage and go right up to the limit and then stop using it for the month, thus denying them the overage? They should just sell it as "unlimited" and cut people off who in their minds talk on the phone too much, right?
:)
Sounds like a good idea. They'll annoy the rest of us less with their jabbering.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Instead of a geographical global limit, why can't Comcast throttle connection speeds instead of cutting customers off completely when they use "too much" bandwidth? I'm not a network guy so I don't know technically difficult that is, but this seems like a good way to not void their contract with the customers (providing "unlimited bandwidth" given your connection speed) while maintaining a useable network for all to use. In reality, the amount of bandwidth you use today doesn't affect another user tomorrow. So if someone is using 10Mbit/sec all night when hardly anyone else is online, why should it matter? It's how much bandwidth you use during peak usage times which would cause other users a degraded performance. This is why throttling would be better than saying "you used 150GB this month, we are disconnecting service" for using too much. For all we know, that person may have been downloading during non-peak times when the network was hardly being utilized (say from 10pm to 6am).
Bottom line is, there will always be a top 1% of bandwidth users. It seems more logical to throttle the heavy users than cut them off by declaring they crossed some imaginary limit that affected everyone on the netowrk when in fact they may not be the case at all.
"Most" people don't store their photo's "Raw".
You obviously do not do serious work in the photography industry, because I can tell you that you are flat-out wrong.
But, given that your post amounts to little more than a long-winded ad hominem attack, it doesn't surprise me that your facts are a little off.
I do not work in the photography industry per se, but I'm tech support for a company that sells a DAM software product and most all we do is talk to people who work with RAW images.
I'm from the BBSes and Tape-swapping era myself... But I like where we are now much better. All those smileys and widgets that you lament about were the products of people experimenting with the new medium. They had to get past the learning curve and now things have improved (at least a little). If it makes you feel better, think of rotating-widgets and animated-smileys as the shag carpeting and avocado green of the internet age.
If it wasn't for the commercial success of the internet, we would not have fast access at home and we wouldn't have the fast backbone either. So be grateful for that at least. No one would spend money for telnet, ftp and gopher access. It's the http and flash video that makes the money. ISPs know this.
Comcast knows that it's the downloading of MP3s and video that generates the demand for their service. Hell, Comcast advertises how fast their network connection is, do you think that we would only use that connection for email? Of course, Comcast would prefer that you get all that content from their servers...
I think the problem we have is that people (especially slashdotters) expect more than can be accommodated. If you give some enough bandwidth to download 2 months worth of media, they will download 3 months worth...
The best thing for Comcast (All ISPs) to do is to guarantee a certain level of service for its customers, and throttle down people who are taking more than their fair share. Face it - we can't be trusted with the occasional speed boost from off-peak usage, so we need to have our bandwidth rationed to us 24/7.
We wouldn't mind this throttling if it made for a more consistent connection. I paid for unlimited access at 6Mb download speed give me that. If you don't have the resources to allocate 6Mb to me then stop advertising it. If they just throttle me down to 3 Mb during peak times and give me up to 6Mb during off-peak by all means be up front about it. I think what upsets people is the fact that Comcast can't be up front and rather use access rights rather than traffic shaping as a cheaper way of guarantee overall service in a market area.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
5) The electric company doesn't care how much I use. The more the merrier.
The more you use, the higher your rate plan goes. Exceeding the set baseline puts you into a higher per-kWh charge. You pay for the amount you use.
Rising cost per unit of power with rising usage is a government mandate, imposed due to pressure by enviromentalists. Left to itself the power company would be happy to give you a lower rate with increased usage - as it does by giving lower rates to large users. Especially if your usage is not during their peak power period, when they have to use the more expensive generation to meet the demand.
In fact, if you look at your bill, within each government-mandated tier you're actually paying less per unit of power as you approach the high end. This is because there's a flat "be connected to the grid" fee that is amortized over a larger amount of power.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm well aware of the different formats, that's why I mentioned a size and the fact that it got somehow ripped from DVD. :-D Obviously, there will be formats that will demand more space/bandwidth. I don't assume these are the formats that are currently most downloaded.
Go to any torrent tracker or p2p search engine, go to iTunes, e-music right now, and you'll see that 99.9% of content is Mp3 (or equivalent loss-based compression schemes), Xvid, streams or things like it. As you know, any business model takes time to adapt to shifts in technology. Just because Warner decides to make Die Hard 4 a Hi-def 20 GB movie, that don't mean your ISP is going to have triple the fibre infrastructure running along the railroad track the next morning.
If you had told yourself 5 years ago you could get 24 mbit down, 2-5 mbit up (or like I had in Sweden, 100 up/down) for 80 dollars a month with a 100 GB cap, you would have invited half the block for a party out of sheer joy. Now all of a sudden, the ISP's are the bad guys because their infrastructure has limits?
And the funny thing is that we're talking movies, music and such. Back in the day when you had no other options but to actually purchase an LP, the amount of people that had a 50000 song library could be counted on one hand in any given population. Now that it's potentially "free" as in "gratis" or low-cost, all of a sudden everyone wants everything for as little money as possible.
I am a good example. I buy CD's if I like the music. I have a collection of 1100 CD's, most of which are actually purchased. When I went on-line with a P2P client, however, I downloaded 24 different versions of Mr Bojangles just because I could. They are now gathering dust in some corner of a 250 GB HDD I have mounted.
Which in turns makes me say that we're devolving into spoilt children.
Given the amount of time it took for every household to have a VCR, a Dolby Set, a DVD and such things (they still don't), my guess is that it will take quite a while before everyone on the planet (haha.. solve aids and food first) will have a 42" plasma on their wall (or have a wall, even) sitting on top of a Hi-Def DVD player.
In the mean time the early adopters and fans of geekery are asking companies to make billion dollar investments to cater to the need of a niche of the market. In simple terms of dollars and cents, it simply don't make sense. There is a reason why McDonalds and Coke are a bit more ubiquitous than bottles of Bolly seventy-two or Beluga caviar, you know.
TANSTAAFL. Remember that phrase. And shut up about "coulda, woulda, shoulda".
SaskTel in Saskatchewan has no limits. I currently pay for their ADSL "high speed plus" package which is advertised as 5Mbps down and 640kbps up and can max it out without hearing any threats from them.
I attempted to post an intelligent reply to another comment, and was stopped by the message "Please use fewer junk characters." Has this ever happened to you? What exactly is a "junk character," and HOW MANY DO WE GET??? :)
You, sir, just wrote the first well-balanced post in this discussion. I'll grant you all the points you made.
:-D
Bravo.
I also think it helps that you weren't whining about the amount of Hi-def dvd's you want to download for your kid's friend on the fifth PC in your villa.
I bet they'd save a lot of bandwidth if they'd simply cleanup their network. I'm sure a lot of people here have linux routers with their comcast setup.. You ever tcpdump your comcast interface? Wonder why your lights are always going crazy on their modem? I'm in a 20 bit network (thats a lot of IPs) with Comcast, and get a FLOOD of ARP requests ALL DAY LONG to my modem. There is no reason all of those ARPs need to be broadcast like that. Thats poor management, and costly in terms of bandwidth as well.
M.
-- If we don't stand up for our rights, now, there will be no right to stand up for them later.
You're right - the availability of a 20 GB per-film HD format doesn't mean many people are going to use it or force the ISP to prepare it's network to accomodate such use. What seems wrong to me, however, is advertising unlimited access (explicitly as well as implicitly) or using bogus metrics when advertising a limit, in which cases I'd find using up your 24/5 mbps up all the time perfectly legal behaviour.
;)
Oh, and about the becoming devolved spolit children: This has started waaay before the internet. It may be the lastest of such spoildom to occur, but please don't forget about not fire, living in caves anymore, communities of people, medication, social systems, availability of fresh water, ability to purchase food for money instead of hunting it, ability to make money, only having to work 6, 5 instead of 7 days per week, free speech and so on...
Oh, TANSTAAFL won't be right for much longer, too - I'm sure Google will soon start offering ad-sponsored Google Lunch.
I never said it's OK to advertise unlimited and not offer it. I just said I understand why it's being done and I understand why things can never be unlimited really. So, having said that....
/. discussion being made out of a non issue. It's not like Comcast is waging war on autonomous countries halfway across the globe, now is it?
/. crowd people who make mountains out of mole-hills.
I guess my main point is just that this is a typical
In Dutch we would call (some of) the
I just was rolling through this SUPER site and saw this. I must add: I was traveling through a remote area and was ticketed going 57 in a 45 zone. I noted to the officer in my shocked and shivering voice that I hadn't seen a speed limit sign in quit a while. Going back and checking, it was over a half mile (signs must be posted no greater than a half-mile in Pennsylvania). The magistrates office kindly corrected my ticket to 57mph in a 55mph zone.
The ugly truth is... if they want you, they already have you.
"Please point out where it says "unlimited" in any official Comcast material. I'll wait."
You could very easily type in 'Comcast' and 'Unlimited' and find lots of cases of it. I could also point out that up until the switch to Time Warner a few months ago, I was a customer of Comcast's for years, and I was offered 'unlimited' internet through them. It may not be happening today, but it most certainly has happened a good deal. Denial of that doesn't change history, sorry friend.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Those that do not are likely to suddenly come out of nowhere and start kicking users off their networks once their backbone links start choking and cause service degradation for "normal" users. Since the limits are stated up-front, going well beyond the limits while it looks like a bandwidth buffet is like living on borrowed time.
A group of four 20-something years old is not exactly representative a typical residential unit and is not, in general, the target group for those 100GB/month service packages!
I have two friends who are also sort of trying to download the internet... their "slow" months are around 300GB. Given that they have full-time jobs and other hobbies, I seriously question where they find time to watch all the stuff they download. More likely than not, it ends up in a dark corner of some HDD or randomly misplaced DVDs, never to be seen or thought of ever again. Even at 30-40GB/month, there is already a fair amount of stuff I download but end up not watching/using/whatever... and by the time I want to watch/whatever it, I forget that I already had it so I end up downloading it again.
Calling someone dumb does not make it so, even if you do it twice. I read it the first time... do you have a problem of some kind? My point was, and I believe I have made it quite well (and by now repeatedly), is that the speed they are advertising is apparently more than 100 TIMES the average speed they actually let you use. (Yes, I know very well what an average is, as you would know if you had actually read the rest of the discussion as you claim.)
YOU are stating that it is not misleading, because it is an "instantaneous" speed, and not an average. Gee... do I have that straight so far? Pretty good for a dumb person, huh?
What I have been trying to get at is that you would not accept that much difference between advertised and actual performance -- even as an average -- in just about any other kind of business you would do. Try to convince me otherwise! You would probably fail.
So... why is it that you have not understood that argument, when I have understood yours?
That should read, "2 or more orders of magnitude".
Comcast is certainly monitoring network usage statistics and comparing trends in usage with its capbabilities and what they need to do to upgrade their networks to stay ahead of the ever increasing usage. I bet they also track it by geographical area. For example, I bet the 'average' user in Silicon Valley uses quite a bit more bandwidth than people living in a more manufacturing based town with fewer technical residents. "Unlimited" needs to be higher in the first place than the second one.
They're probably noting statistics, trends, etc., and finding certain 6-sigma users who are placing undo load on the system. It is too bad they advertise it as unlimited, but a reasonable customer doesn't buy into advertising hype but actually thinks about what the reality of the situation is. Of course you're not allowed to open the pipe full blast and leave it running constantly.
So, based on their statistics they probably figure that 100 GB is pretty generous based on the usage of the population, minus a very few users who are pulling down the network. But in time, 100 GB might be totally normal (who knows, we might be watching HDTV streamed through IPV6, anythign is possible) and then 'resonable' might be 500 GB. It does say in the comcast contract somewhere that you won't run a server out of your residential connection so people who have major servers maintaining bit-torrents or somethign would appear to be in violation of the protocol too and could be subject to termination.
But they can't put the results of their dynamic quotas based on continuous statistical analysis in an advertisement.
Interesting to note that in Japan where ISP's provide 100 Mbps symmetrical service that by capping the overall transfer of data to 90 Gb a consumer would be limited to just over 2 hours of connectivity.
Mark Hewitt mark(at)mark-hewitt.com
9 out of 10 people you talk to there will have absolutely no idea about the cap. The only person at Comcast that ever admitted to me there was a cap was the "Policy observance" department that cut off my service of "overusage".
Try it yourself. Call comcast right now and ask if you can upload/download at the maximum speed 24/7 all month long. I bet you get a YES. They hide behind the fact that these people are just uninformed, but if your salespeople give false information consistently that is a big problem.
On behalf of comcast, it is my duty to inform you that your connection has been cancelled.
hawk
But 1500 kbps * 86400 seconds/day * 30 days/mo / 8000000 kbit per GB = 486 GB/mo if used 24/7. This is greater than the 120 GB/mo that I estimated near the top of this article's comment section based on a 4 MB nominal "song".
I am willing to play your silly game one last time, though I really don't know why I bother.
Your statement is simply incorrect. Being insulting *IS* being argumentative, almost by definition. It is a pretty good bet that you did not do it just to make pleasant conversation. Other people here, even those who have disagreed, have not felt it necessary to be so insulting. The fact that you did says a lot more about you than it does about me.
In any case, you have added exactly nothing to the discussion that was not already stated better by others, so I have nothing further to say to you.
Also, look at the customer agreement you agreed to ON THE DATE OF THAT AD, most notably this clause:
"6. b. In addition, Customer agrees not to:
vii. restrict, inhibit or otherwise interfere with the ability of any other person to use or enjoy Comcast equipment or services, including, without limitation, posting or transmitting any information or software which contains a virus or other harmful feature, or generating levels of traffic sufficient to impede others' ability to send or retrieve information;" [emphasis mine]
http://web.archive.org/web/20010405061019/www.comcastonline.com/subscriber-v3-clr.asp
Now, I'm no lawyer but it sounds like you gave up your "right" to saturate the link all day every day, or even during peak times. In fact, that could be read as "You agree that we can limit your usage if we feel that you are taking more than your share of our service." I suspect that is where Comcast and others get to set a limit and not provide a precise number.
Can you even add, now, duh, what is 20 movies, plus the audio, plus streaming TV, plus browsing the net, plus email, plus video VOIP. So you are well and truly full of it. Don't look at yesterday, try going beyond your lies and start planning for tomorrow.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
This post reminds me of something Samuel used to say: "English. Do you speak it, motherfucker?"
Now, I'm no lawyer but it sounds like you gave up your "right" to saturate the link all day every day, or even during peak times. In fact, that could be read as "You agree that we can limit your usage if we feel that you are taking more than your share of our service." I suspect that is where Comcast and others get to set a limit and not provide a precise number.
Ok. So tell me what that limit was? What did I purchase in the "Unlimited use for a flat monthly fee" service which was also upgraded when they said I needed to upgrade to a Business account?
Answer?
You don't know and they won't tell you.
Oh, and we have YET to break 50 Gigs a month. My current ISP has tracking tools and I can see exactly how much I consume thank you.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Since I run 3TB a month easy and sometimes more over my home phone I guess I would not be able to use any standard line in the entire USA. Good thing I live in Japan where technology rocks and not greedy corporations. Of course having my own blade server and 50TB data storage facility at home also helps. Americans are SO LOW TECHIE! I wonder if you guys will ever catch up to the real world? Good Luck, you need all that you can get.
You have children, does that not by definition make you one, or has the plumber been paying calls on your household for defective pipe.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
>>>>>The average user that is doing DVD-rip downloads is doing illegal downloads anyway.
..... It seems to me you must be overweight and pasty of complexion, haven't seen your neighbors or family in the last decade or so, think that relationships are best had on-line, never had sex and last read an actual book back in 1982
>>>>>
Dear Clueless:
What about the people who are LEGALLY watching videos on sites like nbc.com, abcfamily.com, youtube.com and so on? And let's not forget live webcam-chatting amongst teenagers. Figure 700 megabytes per 40-minute show (fullscreen mode), and a 100 gig cap, you would hit the limit after only 90 hours of watching the latest videos. Don't just assume everyone downloading videos is a thief. There are such things as LEGAL video downloads off official TV sites, and even for an "average user" that uses a lot of data very fast.
>>>>>Anyone who complains about that download limit is seriously deranged, in posession of a Tardis or immortal.
And your attitude in your posts is extremely arrogant. Who are YOU to judge how the "average user" (or 3-4 member home) chooses to live?!?!? Yes an entire family can watch a lot of legally-streamed online TV/movies; so what? That's why TV sites provide these videos; to meet consumer desire.) And no I'm not fat; I weigh a healthy 130 pounds (BMI=20).
Go frak.
Ah, I see. You say you'll wait, but you're as vague as Comcast is about how long. Heh. Guess 'unlimited' was never an option with you! Buahaha!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I'm done. You may have the last word.
In Soviet Russia a beowulf cluster of these things imagines you welcoming your new, neural-network overlords.
I have an Olympus C-8080, for which the TIFF format is ~24MB a photo (23,424Kb to be exact).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"