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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.
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.
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!!!!
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.
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 :)
Well there's an easy solution:
BitTorrent via SMTP!
Gotta use all that GMail space somehow...
--- To each of us a Truth is given.
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.
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...
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.
3MB per song $0.99 per song 53333 songs per 160GB iPod $52800 to fill 160GB iPod And your worried about your connection being cut off?
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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).
Like FLAC?
ResidntGeek
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
So heavy use is "abuse," now? Thanks for clarifying that. I was under the false impression that when you pay for access, you're allowed to make the most of it.
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.
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.
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
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.
.2) It's not up to you to define what's reasonable. No, it's up to Comcast, because it's their damn service. Deal with it or go somewhere else. 3) Nobody is asking for guaranteed bandwidth, so your point is silly. The point isn't about guaranteed bandwidth. It's about your paying for a residential service and then out-consuming 95% of other customers to the point where you place an unnecessary strain on a community resource. The nature of cable requires bandwidth management in order to assure steady access to all customers. That's exactly what they're doing. 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. You buy water and electricity too. They're all finite resources tied to community sources, overuse of which places strain on other users. It's a communal pool of shared access, not your private and dedicated infrastructure. 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. You think because you have an opinion as to what is correct and incorrect that it somehow gives you the moral high ground. Morality doesn't enter into this. There's a finite resource, controlled by a private party. They are managing it to best serve their interests and those of 95%+ of their customers.What's truly repugnant are people like you who fail to understand the limitations of a service and expect to do as you please without recognizing that YOUR INTERESTS are not the only ones that matter, and the trivial $30 a month you cough up doesn't buy you unilateral control and ownership of ANYTHING.
You're using too much and interfering with the use of other customers on a congested service. You can switch to a business account (they'll happily take your money, contrary to your little rant), or you can go somewhere else. You're willing to interfere with MY access by overusing your share, but you want to complain that Comcast, the OWNER of the service, wants to manage THEIR service more equitably for everyone? That's the bullshit, right there.
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.
They do give you a ticket whenever they feel like it. All a speed limit does is serve notice that exceeding that speed puts you in the "eligible for a ticket" category. Given that speed limits are set at an 85% rule (at least in CA, but this is derived from the Eisenhower Interstate System plan), 15% of people are by definition expected to be driving in excess of a given speed limit. Simply exceeding the posted speed is not itself illegal, but this is too complicated a rule for the masses, and publication of exact threshold policies would lead to the average speed maximizing to the maximum legal level (that is, above the speed limit).
The same approach works here. There is a general notice which you should be aware of if you're anywhere near crossing that threshold. They're not required to kick you off for exceeding it, and instead reserve the right to manage traffic by isolating egregious offenders as they see fit to preserve the smooth, safe, and efficient flow of vehicles (or data packets).
Bright line rules are extremely rare. It's absurd that Slashdotters expect a hard limit here, where everwhere else they complain about how black-and-white rules don't take circumstances into account. Here's the moral of the story: situational and relative rules are unclear by definition!
If they provided a rule that said, 150GB monthly limit, period, there'd be an equal amount of bitching. Since Comcast is run with regional franchises, and each community has different infrastructure limits and customer loads, it doesn't make sense to force a hard limit. You'll get cut off if you're causing a problem for other users. You'll be notified if that occurs. What is unfair about that?
"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)
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.
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/
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/
You might have, as part of your plan to get the best possible rates for your home, a rate schedule which uses an artificially sustained rate to minimize major swings in bills. 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. Absolutely. Residential rates are substantially higher than commercial rates. Same goes with business costs--their price per byte is rock-bottom. But that's offset by the fact that their bills are several orders of magnitude higher. If you could supply that much business, you too could have those low rates. But that confuses vertical rates (what we're talking about here) and horizontal schedules (different classes of service). So they seem to be okay with most people using a lot more. Sure. Their concerns about bandwidth vary from location to location based on a huge number of factors, which is why they resist setting any concrete figure. They'll be more tolerant of "overuse" in places with low demand and when it occurs during off-peak hours than if you were consistently saturating a connection during peak hours on an oversold pipe with a large number of customers. That's why they decline to state when they start to "care" about how much you're using--because it's a complex matter sensitive to time, geography, and local market conditions.
Your 600GB isn't a problem in your area. In my area, my 200GB could be a problem. It's fundamentally unfair and also inevitable, so it's a lose-lose situation for Comcast to say anything about it. Laying new cable is the obvious solution, but also a poor business decision--copper coax isn't very futureproof. The cable companies have the misfortunate of undertaking a massive infrastructure rollout that missed the PC/Internet bandwagon by just a few years. They had no idea how critical bandwidth to the home would be, and they're running into the same wall that the phone companies did--an expensive and limited infrastructure. Cable smashed dialup/ISDN/DSL--and they're about to be smashed by FiOS and others. Until those technologies are widespread and cheap, we have to work around the limits of cable. They lady said I shouldn't bother unless there is an issue. An issue like being told you're going to be disconnected
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.
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.
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