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Comcast Floats a 250GB Monthly Bandwidth Limit
techmuse writes "Comcast is considering the imposition of bandwidth caps and reductions in network bandwidth to customers who, while paying for the use of a certain amount of bandwidth, dare to actually use it! Gizmodo has more on the subject." Reader Acererak points out that it would take some pretty heavy usage (by current standards) to hit the cap described. Bear in mind, too, that these reports are based on the word of an unnamed "insider," rather than an officially announced policy.
Surprise factor here = 0. Comcast just wants to milk people more instead of improve service or actually make their service attractive, since they know they have effective monopolies in many areas and states as nobody else offers a competing service.
250GB ought to be enough for anybody.
God damn it people need to learn if you say unlimited on the ad it means fucking unlimited. If you don't want people using it you need to say so.
It's time people got together and sued these fuckers that do this crap.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
I'm fine with that as a limit if they also agree to stop tampering with the connections of anyone not in violation of it.
Note that Comcast has a monopoly on Internet access in many markets (for example, where they are the sole cable provider, and DSL is not offered.) For users in these markets, there will be no alternative provider to switch to.
250Gb isn't that bad at all. There are some ISP's in the UK that have limits of as little as 1Gb a month.
Although most do have limits higher than that, they're rarely more than about 30Gb a month, if even that.
The few that have no caps (like Virgin) tend to throttle the fuck out of your bandwidth at peak times.
It's all a joke, really. Luckily I live near an exchange with some decent ISP's that don't have monthly caps, but it's only a matter of time I suppose.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Frankly, I'll be glad if they name a cap instead of this nebulous one they may or may not have, and may or may not enforce. And 250GB is pretty good, uTorrent downloads near-constantly for me, and I think I'd have trouble hitting that. That's about 8GB a day.
I've heard you get an angry phone call above 100gb and have kept track of my usage via NetLimiter to stay in or around that number, looks like its time to get seeding!
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This is actually an improvement over their current model of "We have a cap, but we won't tell you what it is".
Like a previous poster said, though, if they promise unlimited, they have to deliver unlimited. They should indeed be sued for not doing so.
Here's how to get started on fixing our cable woes: Go to your city's website and find info on the municipal cable board. They likely meet monthly or bimonthly, and their meetings will be open to the public. Get there early and make sure someone on the board knows that you have something to say. Hopefully, there will be a local Comcast (or, in my case, Charter) representative there. During the meeting, the board will open up for public comment. At this point, make generalized claims about how Comcast is purposefully hindering innovation which is bad for the city (anecdotal evidence will likely not work here unless it supports a generalized claim... the cable board is not there to hear your personal story). Assert that maintaining a franchising agreement with Comcast is beneficial only to Comcast and that residents of your city are being unfairly price-gouged.
Now, here's the tricky part: Keep going to the meetings, asserting the same thing. Heck, try to get a group to go. Make sure the board knows that Comcast is pissing off a bunch of really smart people. This works even better if this happens in multiple cities.... the folks at the cable HQs will get these odd reports of citizens showing up at tons of municipalities and complaining.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
If I can pay 2x my normal monthly bill for 2x the monthly quota, that's cool.
Oh, and "250GB" better be high enough to handle well over 95% of their customers or they will get pushback.
If 250GB is too low then they will need to raise it or cut prices to keep the masses from either going to DSL or grumbling to their Congressmen.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'd be fine with this if it lead to a savings for people who don't hog huge amounts of bandwidth. That's not to assume, of course, that that's Comcast's intent...
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
They'll start with 250GB because everyone will go, ok no big deal. Then they'll start reducing it. Once they implement this people will get screwed. Look at their track record.
COX has a 50GB limit. It doesn't take much to hit that. I hate it. They used to be "unlimited" but are behind the times nowadays as they impose stricter and stricter limits.
My neighbors are going to be pissed when they see their next comcast bill!
250gb a month would be over 8gb a day, assuming a 31-day month (the worst-case scenario). I have no problem with that. I've never even come CLOSE to downloading that much.
But is this just the FIRST cap? Will the cap be lowered to 200gb six month from now? Will it be jimmied down to 150gb a year from now, with the option to pay extra for a $200gb cap? Is this, in short, the opening shot to tiered pricing?
I can't decide whether to terminate service out of principle over this move or not. It isn't like I have many options - for me its Comcast or DSL for the same price but half the speed. Verizon won't sell me FIOS no matter how much I want to hand them my money - they haven't even applied for a franchise in Philadelphia last I checked.
250GB equates to just over 800kbit/sec over a month, or well under 1mbit.
Now i wouldn't have an issue if that's how the service was sold (800kb service, burstable to 10mb or whatever)... But ISP marketing tries to make the service out to be something it's not. And then have the nerve to complain when people try to actually use what they thought they were buying.
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That's exorbitant.
If $50/month gets you 250 GB, then 500 GB should be $100, or less.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Thats a HELL of a lot of porn/pirated material.
8 GB a day is a crapload of data.
In fact, thats 800 kbps SUSTAINED USAGE, 24/7!
Anyone shifting that much data is probably violating a huge number of TOS clauses anyway.
Test your net with Netalyzr
It kind of confuses me though. We're already capped on our upload/download rates and since we pay them like a service we should pay them based on the rate of that service. Garbage, Cable TV and Water are rates I pay monthly that never change. Power is different but Cable TV is pretty much equivalent to cable internet
Comcast lies anyway. I don't trust them any further than I can throw their entire infrastructure. We paid a premium on bandwidth for 3 months and were supposed to be getting 15 Mbps download speed (as opposed to the standard which is 5 Mbps). After several problems with lag between me and my three other roommates, we started doing periodic tests. Averaged around 1.2 Mbps download daily. So we called them and they told us our signal strength sucked. So fix it. Oh, they couldn't. Not only could they not fix it, they couldn't refund us the premium we paid. But they could offer us the 5 Mbps download rate
Liars that don't give a damn about the end consumer. You'll be lucky if the 250 GB doesn't include your digital TV as download or even if they agree to their contractual terms.
My work here is dung.
That limit would be generous for the vast majority of their users, and you can always get another provider. Keep in mind that the people they're targeting with this are using up more bandwidth than some higher cost business accounts. If you want unlimited bandwidth per month, then buy a more expensive plan.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
While living in Boston, I hit 650GB in March, and Comcast didn't say SHIT.
It's AMOUNT they're charging for going over the limit. $1.50 per gigabyte over the limit is completely unreasonable. If I'm paying $50 for 250 GB, then the price should be $.20 per gigabyte. Even if they want to make it a punishment, then upping it to say $.50 might still be considered reasonable.
One of the scary things about this is that it will make new, high bandwidth, applications of the Internet infeasible. If you had been asked what was a reasonable amount of data to download 3 or 4 years ago, you would probably give a much lower value than you do today. Why? You would not have been using many of the services that you do now, because they simply did not exist. Modern services are much more video and audio intensive. Ads take much more bandwidth than they used to. We are seeing a transition of services traditionally provided by the cable companies, such as streaming of television programs, moving to the Internet. Calls on Skype now support high quality video. Software distributed over the Internet (for example, the latest version of your favorite Linux distribution) can easily run close to a gigabyte per instance. You can imagine that new applications will follow soon that we haven't imagined yet. Comcast is attempting to do the following:
1) Eliminate unprofitable users. These are users who do more than just check their e-mail and surf the web. These are the ones who actually *use* their connections Rather than investing in infrastructure, Comcast simply wants to get rid of anyone that it doesn't make money on.
2) Eliminate competition with its own cable offerings. If you can watch the latest news from CNN or TV shows from NBC streamed *from* CNN or NBC, then you don't need to pay $60 / month for cable TV. This is a major threat to Comcast, and they are trying to make it infeasible.
3) Gain consumer acceptance of limits, then lower them later. The cable companies have a history of raising prices 5-10% per year (much greater than inflation). They can do to this because they have monopoly power in many markets. You can expect Comcast to behave in a similar manner with data. Want to fight back? Do you have many alternative providers? If not, you are stuck.
Isn't this like telling an unpaid intern they are getting a 10000000% raise? I mean, Comcast can advertise whatever bandwidth they want, but if they have a de facto packet shaper on any traffic that would actually use this bandwidth (i.e. torrents, streaming video), then it's all moot.
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Let's see, I've been paying the same rate that I've been paying for cable Internet for the past seven years. In that time my connection has improved from 1.5 Mbps to 16 Mbps. Actually, I do pay $10 more per month for the 16 Mbps service, but even without that the bandwidth has increased dramatically, and at no cost to the user.
The proposed cap is 250 GB/month. As the article mentions, that is a fairly hefty cap and would require a good amount of effort to actually hit it. Above 250 GB/month, it's $15 for each additional 10 GB. According to the article only about 14,000 of all Comcast subscribers would actually exceed this cap.
And for those who claim that Comcast should be sued for their use of the word "unlimited", you'll find that to be a waste of time. The context of the word means a lot more than the word, which is why most advertisers tack on a term like "virtually". The courts pretty much always find in the favor of the business on these matters because the business is not making any specific promises to you.
They just cut me off 2 weeks ago without notice for bandwidth 'abuse.' It was pretty stupid. Somehow I had roughly 120GB used in the month, on a 3Mbps plan. I didn't even care that there's no way even with PSN stuff going on that I could have used that much, just the fact my unlimited always on internet is not unlimited, and that I don't deserve notice of disconnection even by phone bothers me.
I'm no mathematician, but my math says:
3Mbps / 8 = 375KBps
60s * 60min * 24h * 28d = 2419200s/month
375KBps * 2419200s = 907200000KB/month
Which is roughly 865GB.
At their advertised speed, if one were to actually be able to saturate it for their billing period, would be able to transfer 865GB of data. But they cut people for using 1/8th to 1/4th of that.
And they don't just cut you off, but you get a nifty 12 month ban from their internet service. The least they could have done is call me and tell me something, rather than me having to go into their office 2 days later and be told that they can't tell me anything and that I have to call their corporate office.
It doesn't matter if the cap is Eleventy zillion GB. All that matters is that customers accept the idea of a cap, or a tiered usage system, or additional costs for exceeding a cap. Comcast will eventually lower the cap to the point where profit is maximized and "problem" customers like it or lump it.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
...Given that 'unnamed comcast insiders' have generally been right about what comcast is doing or planning on doing next, even when comcast refuses to address or acknowledge an issue, is there any good reason to doubt this?
I toggled a toggle and buttoned a button, but when I got done, I was done doin' nothin'.
What I hate is their ability to run ads for nothing on their local channels. I'm so fed up with talking turtles, I can't even enjoy Gamera movies anymore and that bitch doesn't talk, he just shoots fire out of his limb holes.
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If (as TFA says) 250Gb is an ungodly large amount that hardly anyone could possibly exceed - then what does Comcast have to gain by hitting a tiny number of extreme users?
If (on the other hand) Comcast expects to gain more revenue by doing this than they'll lose by pissing off more typical users then TFA is wrong and it's not all that unlikely that you'll exceed the limits.
Playing team fortress 24/7 is unlikely. Loading one HDTV movie per day is unlikely. But playing team fortress 8 hours a day and downloading a movie every couple of days - plus some other activity - is not at all unlikely for a family with several geek-type kids.
I wonder what their TOS says?
How dare Comcast "consider" things?
The contract is month-to-month (minus equipment lock-in), either party can leave.
Sorry, I have no sympathy for hogs and lots for those on shared circuits whose traffic gets squeezed.
jesus christ, what kind of home user uses 250GB a month anyway? Over here in Sydney we have a 20GB/month cap for a family of 6, 4 of which are very active internet users. A couple of years ago we managed on a 3GB cap (wasn't fun though)!
The only thing I'm worried about is Comcast setting a high cap only to taper it down later. Since more websites are using large amounts of media content, this could become a problem when you have to watch an advertisement video to check your email.
So does Comcast own the infrastructure, or what? Why isn't there competition?
250GB is a lot for ONE person to download in a month...... I could be wrong, but I would guess that most Comcast cable connections are to houses and apartments with MORE THAN ONE person living in them!
With 6 people sharing cable, that impossible-to-reach 250GB turns into a paltry 42GB. Or about 1.4 gigs a day. It would be very easy to accidentally hit that if you watch videos online.
I hope that they plan to tiered service like cell phone companies. Ideally with automatic tiering - so rather than paying ridiculous overage charges per-GB, you just pay for the price of the next tier. (as in, up to 250GB is $X a month, 300GB is $X+$Y/month, etc)
I never thought there would be a day where I'd say "damn those guys at Comcast have it lucky". We have 10mbit from Rogers and just got a letter that they will implementing a monthly cap of only 98GB/m and $1/GB after that. Calculating the maximum speed one can go before hitting that limit... is only 302kbit/s, non-stop (up and down), in comparison to Comcast's 771kbit/s. Bah.
Here in the UK I am limited to 20gb a month (hard cap), with my provider of choice (Zen). While I can buy additional packs of 10, 20 or 50gb for very reasonable prices, I have never in 7 years with this provider needed to do so. Despite being a heavy p2p user, web surfer, code developer and downloader of various ISOs, updates and so forth, I've never gone beyond 17gb a month.
I think people complaining 250gb is insufficient need a reality check as to what that amount of data actually constitutes. Either that or you're not doing 'residential' stuff on your residential cable service, and should perhaps look into getting a professional connection.
I've gotten calls two different months, the first because I used over half a terabyte one month, the other because I was in the top 10% of bandwidth users for that month. Both times they wouldn't give me a clear answer on what the cap is, and threatened that another violation would get my cable suspended for a year. Screw 250 gigs a month, I can't live with those limits in my household of torrent users. Why haven't I switched already? Comcast has a monopoly at my apartment complex and I'm moving to a WOW supported house.
Jonah HEX
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Complain and see what you get America.
You won fight these companies, you wont stand up to your government and all you do is whine..
Its time to take back freedom for the people who have stolen it from you. Comcast advertises unlimited its time to force the issue. Dont sit there and whine.
If heavy bandwidth usage is becoming such a problem, I don't understand why they can't just throttle the heavy users once they reach a certain daily or monthly amount of bandwidth. They could also throttle all users during heavy times on longer downloads. There are so many options they could use that don't include putting caps and cutting people off or charging them more once they've hit the cap.
What about jerking again? What the hell you think that bandwidth is used for?! Geeze!
I just discontinued their service for good two months ago.
I don't trust them. I don't believe them. My personal "experience" with their service has been a horrible one.
As a Cable TV provider, they used their local monopoly status in my area and offered only two base packages: either the locals + public access filler for $16, which prices got jacked up nearly every single month; or, you could get an "everything except Premium or PPV" package for far too much (65+ at last check), which also kept going up every month. Both were out of line IMHO.
It's also my observation and opinion that as an ISP, they are among the most shadiest of "providers". Better watch out - will they define that 250GB cap as most hard drive manufacturers do, as 250 billion... or will it be the more technically correct 250 * (1024 ^ 2)?
Will there be other restrictions in the fine print (like banning WHAT THEY BELIEVE TO BE P2P outright, regardless of the actual source) which make even acheiving 250GB impossible?
For those of you happy with this outfit, more power to you. I believe, however, they're not the most upstanding of companies. Call up customer service and get a $2 "agent fee" on your next bill?! Ridiculous! Make a payment in person and get the same thing?! Asinine. Service goes down... do you get a credit? Nope.
When I decided to disconnect, I had to call two additional times to make sure they actually did disconnect, and wouldn't try to charge me for continued service even after I requested cancellation. Two weeks later I got a call asking me to "return their modem and other Comcast-owned equipment". Problem was, the modem I used belonged to me, and I never had any other set-top boxes or other hardware of theirs.
I Don't Care What They "Announce". They can say they cured the common cold for all I care... I'll never do business with them again.
They suck... in my own personal opinion, of course.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Actually if you had signed up for "Unlimited Usage" plan under their advertisement, you are pretty much sue them to fulfill their contractual obligations.
Contract Law states one party cannot unilaterally change the terms of the contract, and if done, the contract is void.
Either you can sue them to fulfill their terms, OR you can get out of a contract plan easily.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Supposed they lowered their cap to 50GB a month, with $0.20/GB for each additional GB.
Suppose they also lowered their price for below-the-cap customers to $9.99.
Would that be a bad thing? No, it would be a good thing.
They would attract the low-volume customers from DSL, who in turn would probably stay with them for TV and might go with them for phone.
People who were using bandwidth frivolously would cut back.
Those who are willing to pay for it would pay for it. The 10Mb/sec power user who needs 3,000 GB/month will gladly shell out $600 for his service.
The only downside to Comcast is that their existing low-volume users will get a significant price cut. On the upside, that's good for public relations.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
To those who are complaining that they paid for unlimited usage and are now being told there is a limit, you should not be surprised. Nor should you be surprised that Comcast will not lower your monthly bill to make up for the loss of unlimited usage.
Comcast, because it has a monopoly in most areas it operates, does these kind of stunts on a regular basis. In my case, a year or so ago they stopped carrying two channels which were part of their Basic/Standard cable package. The one channel I really liked was out of New York (I live in Central PA) so I got to see news and such I wouldn't normally see.
When I called to inquire if there was a problem, I was told by the nice lady on the phone that Comcast had dropped the channel because it was "out of area service". Which is funny because they had been carrying that channel for at least a decade.
I asked if they were going to replace the channel with something else. Comcast had not decided on any replacement channel. Would my bill be reduced by the amount equal to the last channel? No, Comcast was not going to lower my bill. "I'm sorry you won't be able to see the Mets games sir."
"I don't care about Mets games. I just wanted to see the news out of New York."
"You can always get the WB on channel 12 sir."
"I don't care about the WB. I just wanted to see the news out of New York."
A few months later, I, and everyone else, get notice that Comcast is raising their cable rates because of all the extra channels and services they were going to provide. I called their 800 number (again) and asked the guy on the phone what new channels I would be getting for this increase in price.
"Oh, that only applies to our premium service sir. The Basic/Standard service is not affected."
"So in other words, I'm paying more but not only not getting anything in return, I've lost channels in the process."
Silence for a few moments
"Yes sir. Would you like to upgrade to our Premium service to take advantage of what we have to offer?"
"Thanks but no thanks."
So there you have it. This is what happens when there is a monopoly of service in an area. It's Econ 101 in action. No competition = higher prices and less service.
I'm just hanging on until the end of BSG then the subscription gets dropped. That extra $600 a year will come in handy.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The difference between residential vs. professional boils down to
1) quality of service, guaranteed uptime, etc.
2) non-technical factors like a business sales rep, etc.
Speed of service and overall usage are independent:
There are people with low usage requirements who require 99.999% uptime and an on-call technician when things go wrong.
There are people with no such needs who need full-throttle 24/7.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So if you calculate your max rate if you were to download continuously it would be a pathetic 96Kbytes/sec or 771.6Kbit.
Yes, but once the cap starts it can be raised/lowered. There's a big significance here as far as stating a limit/not, and suddenly you're not just paying for speed but graduated usage as well.
If they happened to offer maximum speed at all caps and had a variable rate of cap is one thing, but that's not the case here, it creates an artificial discrepancy.
Also, yeah consumers are typically not even close to slashdot-smart so I wouldn't be surprised if plenty are confused by the changes or don't even understand the big deal.
So Comcast are deploying more aggressive lowpass filters?
Oh, they're limiting MONTHLY DATA TRANSFER QUOTA.
Come on, this is a technical site.
For all the wailing on this site about the cracker / hacker distinction there seem to be a lot of people who are happy to corrupt other, precisely-defined technical terms.
Also, get off my lawn.
to figure out when exactly bilking and misleading your customers became an open and unabashed business practice. At the extreme you have groups like the RIAA etc criminalizing their customers, and ISPs who routinely advertise unlimited only to get bent out of shape and throttle, cap etc their users when they actually do what they contracted for... This is happening in other industries, giving us things like "secret warranties (which really should be recalls)" and bicast being sold as genuine leather etc. Back in the day, companies at least hid this behaviour. The way things are going, it does not seem to be a stretch that someday a company will lobby to enact laws that require consumers to buy their products.
If they do this will on demand and SDV be next to be caped?
Will you cable box data traffic be part of the cap?
Will you be paying for the ARP traffic?
Will they have a plan that slows your speed down when you hit the cap like ISP in australia do?
Will there be cap free sites / downloads?
Would Comcast's own digital services fall under the cap?
For example, would Comcast's VoIP count towards the cap? If not then should vonage or skype count towards the cap?
Would Comcast's VOD count towards the cap? If not then should other VOD , such as netflix instant play or hulu or jooost count towards the cap?
Could Comcast partner with a video game maker and then say that network traffic for that video game doesn't count towards the cap? For example what if Comcast partnered with Microsoft and said all XBOX live traffic wouldn't count towards the cap. Would Playstation or Nintendo or PC traffic count towards the cap?
Could Comcast partner with a web service provider, such as Google and say that all Google traffic doesn't count towards the cap but AOL or Yahoo traffic does count.
Could Comcast partner with a specific web site, such as Digg and say that all Digg traffic doesn't count towards the cap but Slashdot traffic does count.
The problem may not be the cap itself but who gets to say what falls under the cap. The meter should run equally for all data flowing down the pipe.
If they cap it, they should just charge by the gigabyte like the phone company does. They are going to be measuring it anyway so might as well make it cheaper for their Customers. That is who they are trying to help with this right?
If it becomes infeasible to deliver very high-resolution video for cheap/free (aka bittorrent), then there won't be as great of a demand for ultra high resolution monitors and better offload-to-IC-decoder chips to spare CPU and GPU work when watching video.
We'll be stuck at ugly, low resolution video for decades, considering how glacially slow comcast and other ISPs are to offer improvements to service for affordable prices. That cap will probably be the same in 2018. I don't understand why people are so gung-ho about this. Even if the current cap is 'secret' it is at least more likely to remain dynamic as web content evolves to utilize extremely high-bandwidth and -transfer capacity.
Congrats, people like you have just killed IPTV.
But since you don't use that much, it's okay. Martin Niemoller must be spinning in his grave.
Finally, a sane suggestion.
I mean, really, think like a businessman. Instead of capping heavy users, how about (exploding heads everywhere) making *money* from this opportunity. And a 250G monthly cap sounds entirely reasonable.
Some people need to get outside more if this cap sounds too low. Go for a walk. Grab some coffee. Ride a bike. Go camping. Join a chorus or choir. Go out on a date. See a movie. Eat at a restaurant.
Jeepers.
250 GB/month is slightly less how much bandwidth IPTV would consume for a typical household.
What a bunch of shite! Although 250GB a month is a lot to download what about the gamers who practically spend hours on end playing MMOs, CSS, and others FPS games, while at the same time downloading the latest anime series or pron? Alright last part was sarcastic. I pay $70 a month for 8mb/s for bandwidth because I don't have their TV service (which sucks in Chicago suburbs. they have like 3 HD channels) and to hell with them if they are going to keep charging me that, and cap me regardless if I don't come close to 250GB. Yes I can switch to ATT DSL, but DSL sucks and doesn't have the capacity to go to 8mb/s (yet) because the new type of DSL probably wont be available for a long time in my area. Anyway Verizons FIOS service not their DSL, will be a breath of fresh air into this bloated Comcast Empire that is the Chicago suburbs.
An analogy:
Once upon a time all calls to 411 information were free. Well not free really, but included in what you paid for telephone service. Then the telephone companies cried out how much 411 was costing them. (They weren't already making enough profits.) They claimed that this high cost was caused by only a few people who used the service excessively as opposed to using the nicely provided telephone directories. They got the regulators to set a limit that only the first 15 calls to 411 each month would be "free", after which you'd have to pay per call. This would only impact the "excessive users of the service" they successfully argued to quell public opposition.
Well, you guessed it. That 15-free-calls-per-month quickly dropped in broad steps to 3-free-calls-per-month, and then 411 service was spun off into its own profit-making enterprise and now you pay every time you use it. And you phone bills were never reduced from this "savings".
How long before Comcasts 250GB/month cap becomes 220GB/month. 200GB/month. Down so low that you can't watch video online (unless you watch Comcast's video delivery service, which will mysteriously not count against your bandwidth cap) without paying extra. Just watch it happen.
Two interesting things about this Comcast proposal:
First: For the heavy user, simply buying two accounts at the ~$50/month rate and having two modems is a far cheaper way to get to 500GB/month than paying the cap-breaking charge.
Secondly: Although Comcast decrys how a few heavy users are overloading their system to the detriment of all the other users on the cable loop, simply by paying more money WITH NO IMPROVEMENTS TO THE CABLE LOOP AT ALL this heavy usage problem magically goes away and you can use all you want to pay for.
Obvious conclusion: Comcast Lies like a Rug to try and squeeze out increased profits in every manner possible. Something that should not be allowed in a regulated monopoly.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Now. If I'm buying an advertised 800kbit service, and that 250GB is my monthly limit, then no-harm/no-foul.
BUT
If they are advertising a 6mbps service (for example -- I don't know what they are offering) but cutting you off if you actually USE it, then that's something for the FTC to get involved in.
6mbps should be a smidge under 2TB of data transfer. 4mbps (what I have with my TWC/RR service) is about 1.2TB of transfer.
Granted, I don't know any
I would almost go out onto a limb to say:
Make it fair at least.
As applications arise that use more and more bandwidth, this kind of thing is inevitable.
Real bandwidth costs have never sync'd up to the costs charged to residential users, on the assumption that residential utilization would always be low.
As residential utilization goes up, you have to either raise the cost to better reflect the real costs of bandwidth, or you have to limit usage, especially amongst the outliers.
How much is 'real' bandwidth? Well, consider that companies buying a gig of bandwidth from a mainline provider are paying roughly 30 dollars a meg. Get down into the weeds of of someone who wants 5 meg, and it's easily 100 dollars a meg -- just for the bandwidth itself. Plus the costs of the the connection infrastructure.
Maybe you can get a great deal on business grade, no limit 5 meg circuits for $289 (and that would be a HECK of a deal).
That's a big difference from $42.95 that Comcast charges out by me. And right now I get way more than 5 meg on my downloads for all the various content I grab, so in reality, my experience is MUCH better than it would be with a 5 meg circuit.
BTW, for those who claim they can't get bandwidth; T1's work just about everywhere. And you can get a T1 with truly unlimited service for about $249.
Oh, right, this is Comcast!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
And just as Apple is trying to kill off BluRay High Def discs in favor of HD downloads.
All the pieces for a royal screwing over are falling neatly into place, and people are walking meekly into the slaughterhouse.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
In Alberta Canada every ISP has download caps.
The 2 main ISPs telus and Shaw have different things.
Telus goes with a 20GB cap on there normal Internet plan. and a 60GB on there HIGH SPEED EXTREME blah blah.
I lived with that 60GB cap quiet happily. This includes a few months were I downloaded enough to have 3 months of straight music to listen to. Really if you stay at home all day downloading movies to watch you MIGHT be in trouble.
Shaw service as i have seen ranges from 10GB on there light internet which is for people who just want cheap internet for email. 20-30KB/s tops when iv tried it.
Then 60 for the normal plan. Hitting 100GB for the high speed extreme 10Mbit down 1 Mbit up.
Im on the 100 GB plan and its nice knowing its there, but really i dare any 95% if not 99% of slashdot users to show me more than 1 month a year they get withing 10GB's of that 100GB cap.
In the future say 4 years from now this might be a little low if you wanna do all your media via internet. But for now this fits fine for 99.9999% of people and it prevents people from using up a 25% share of the tubes, while allowing practically "Unlimited freedom".
Right! And a single 30GB BluRay equivalent High Def download/rental takes out 4 days of that per movie. Think of that the next time you hear about Apple trying to kill off Netflix and rentals by mail in favor of their more expensive AppleTV and iTMS replacement.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Or, as your math suggests, did you actually think your service speed rating entitled you to max it out 24 hours/day? If so, what led you to think that?
I'm largely a lurker here, but I am an ISP Systems Administrator.
The whole ISP business model is to oversubscribe. Tier 1&2 bandwidth is expensive. To make money you have to sell more than you have. When people pay residential rates and actually use what they have, you lose money on that customer. With unlimited plans you just hope that the people who aren't using it all will subsidize the ones that are......Or you impose limits.
This is the ISP business model, learn to live with it. Or start your own ISP if you honestly think you can do it better.
If you truly have literature that says the service is unlimited and they're capping you anyway, then that is poor customer service on their part and you have a right to be upset about it.
---Bless those silly trolls---
As internet TV like Joost get more popular you are going to see big bandwidth increases. Also web hosts advertise monthly bandwidth all the time but end up dividing it equally among the number of days in a month and will cut you off if you are over the resulting daily limit. Comcast might be sneaky and impose a 8GB daily limit which means burst usage will force many to upgrade.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Franklin
Every account has fixed costs and variable costs.
There are also fixed and variable costs that are not allocatable to any specific account.
The trick is generating enough revenue to cover all these costs without being perceived as unfair.
Past the point of "free samples" or "introductory pricing," when the marginal cost to the customer his higher for high-volume users than low-volume customers, it's perceived as unfair.
If the average user really does use 30GB, it makes me wonder what things would look like if they charged everyone $1.50/GB with a reasonable monthly minimum, say, $12/8GB. Your "average" customer would pay $45, about what he pays today. Users that used 60GB would pay twice that. Users that used 15GB would pay half that. Users that wanted lower bills would have an opportunity to cut back, users who are willing to pay for higher usage would have an opportunity to do so. Well-heeled high-speed users who used 3,000 GB would shell out $4,500.
With costs of $1.50/GB, services that required high-volume use like non-Comcast-provided video-rental providers like NetFlix would see a large drop in usage, making these services less commercially viable unless those providers negotiated very favorable rates with Comcast or filed anti-trust complaint so the VoD arm of Comcast is treated the same as IP-based movie providers.
The numbers we really need to see is what is Comcast's real marginal cost to service a customer who pays $45/month but is on vacation and uses 0GB, a low-volume customer who uses 5GB, a low-medium-volume customer who uses 10GB, and so on for every 5GB up to MAX_FIREHOSE usage. If the incremental cost is a line, then you have a good marginal cost that you can build a pricing model around. If the marginal cost to Comcast is "bumpy" based on actual usage or if it varies from customer to customer, neighborhood to neighborhood, or city to city, then things get much more complicated.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I think the real crunch is the time of day usage peaks. From the stats I have access to at one ISP I do work for, usage starts to climb at 8am, from 10am-midnight is consistantly high, but doesn't totally drop off until somewhere between 1-2am.
My suggestion to Comcast would be to use a time-based rate limit. From 8am - 2am local track the bandwidth, from 2am - 8am give untracked time.
All us geeks can schedule our torrents and other downloads to run during that time.
My stuff is all legal, but I can easily consume that much bandwidth in a busy month. I download a handful of DVD ISOs (Fedora betas, previews, releases, CentOS releases, MythDora betas and releases, Live CDs) and all that can wait until off-hours.
My day usage for work (I work from home 2-3 days a week, sometimes the entire week) is often pretty constant as well. I've typcially got Cisco MeetingPlace sessions going (seen the new Cisco commercials with the little girl selling cookies? I sell the stuff that makes all the work), with multiple VPNs going on back to the office and customers all day long, downloading Cisco patches (CallManager 5/6 "patches" are 1.5gb each), etc.
Plus, we're going to see more and more streaming TV/movies going on. We've a MythDora box, and if ever they removed all the DRM junk and just let us download movies to watch how we want, we'd be watching them on there.
Comcast needs to get over the fact that we may have our own "set top" boxes that don't come from them (like my MythDora) and may get our content from another provider, using our unlimited bandwidth.
Again, my 2am-8am solution would work here - I don't care about seeing most shows the same day/time it is on. There are some things my Wife wants that way (American Idle, Dancing with the Stars) as people are talking about it the next day, but all the rest can wait a day (and we probably won't watch it for many days, perhaps a week or so). If I want to download this from my own content provider, I could schedule this for 2am-8am.
That, and 250gb/month is going to seem very small very soon. I recently turned up a 1gb/s internet connection to CSU CENIC at my children's district office, which in turn has 1gb/s internal connections to all the district schools. They don't even know how to use that much bandwidth (yet) having come from sharing something like 40mb/s before.
I'm betting my local junior college will be getting a similar connection soon as well and could offer high-bandwidth classes, and for that matter many schools are offering that.
I've got 4 kids, ages 7-10, and right now there internet usage is rather light (lego.com, disney.com, etc.), but there all a bit on the geekish side like me, and I'm sure we'll always be a top-0.01% "normal" usage household (not downloading anything not legally available) - at least for another 11-15 years or so (depending if they stay at home to go to the local JC and CSU).
If Comcast wants to pull this sort of stunt locally, they may also find themselves losing their franchises.
This is all the provider's fault, because they've raised expectations in the consumers.
What a typical DSL product offers is "download speed bursting to 8mbps shared amongst 20-50 users" depending on the contention ratio. The problem is that the infrastructure can't handle modern internet usage - streaming video, etc, when more than a few people are using it at the same time. In order to provide a fair internet service to the other people who are also using that connection they have to throttle big bandwidth users. This wasn't a problem even a couple of years ago, internet use was mostly bursty, with gaps of inactivity.
Internet service should be sold based upon a minimum guaranteed bit rate, and the burst bit rate. I'd rather go for 256kbps/2mbps than 64kbps/8mbps.
Oddly enough some services never seem to have a problem. Virgin Media Cable in my area is great, even at peak times you can get 250KB/s downloads on their budget 2mbps package. Yet in other areas it apparently sucks Satan's scaly cock.
I really don't mind the idea of reasonable bandwidth caps, as long as they increase by ~25% year on year. 250GB/s is a lot of bandwidth, that's more movies than you can find the time to watch in a month, even in HD. Probably an issue for shared geek hohuseholds though.
And carry over unused bandwidth to next month.
So I could use 20,20,500,20,20.
I think this is going to be an issue as folks use the internet as cable. I don't think 250gb will affect normal P2P much. It took me about 15 months to download one terrabyte of data so that is about 80 gig a month.
The problem is... 250 now... then 200... then 150...
The other problem is...
200mb shows now... 700mb shows three years from now (as we all go HD).
People wouldn't pirate if prices were reasonable. If anime were $22 instead of $80, I would buy it. Sometimes, it's easier to wait for prices to come down than to download (X-Files, La Femme Nikita, Get Smart).
I currently have a 1,000 hour backlog of things to watch on purchased DVD's. That's enough that some things, i will probably never ever see.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
When stored on a Blu-ray disk, 50GB is 9 hours of HD video or 23 hours of SD video.
Don't know about you, but 45 hours of HD (5 x 50) won't get me through a month. This is all about squashing the competition (like Tivo Unbox, where you can download a movie from Amazon) before it can gather an audience.
It's only a matter of time before streaming video gets counted towards your download limit, then they've killed internet television (hulu, etc.) as well.
The funny thing is all these comapnies are tying to tout HD om demand over the web..HASHAHAHAHAHAHAH
Right, with an average of 1.5-3 Mbps and a 250GB cap.... OK
The stater of the Internet here in the US is pathetic, and its thanks to companies like Comcast who do little to improve anything knowing there are no chioces out there.
Up yours Comcast... Im glad I dropped you.
who can't get an initial page load of google in less than a minute most days, I doubt like hell they have ever delivered that data rate to anyone on my street. If that cap bites your movie and music freeloading but raises my effective bandwidth why should I complain?
...but the chances of that are nil.
I should complain because Comcast is our local cable monopoly and have been such a perpetual data rate drought that their customers are pitted against each other instead of the real culprit.
If they charged more AND USED THE MONEY TO IMPROVE THE SERVICE, I might actually welcome it
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
It's much more likely the cap will be:
250 giga BIT = 31.25 giga BYTE
31.25 giga BYTE = ~1GB/day
12 kilo BYTES per second 24/7 for 31 days
The above scenario seems much more inline with the Comcast business plan (offering lightning fast email, searching and instant messaging to non tech savvy families).
Have you considered going to your municipal/state regulators, and then to court, over this? It's breech of contract on Comcast's part since they sell "unlimited usage" and caps are not clearly spelled out, and your regulators should be on your side. If they're not, you need new regulators.
Seems to me that you now have 12 months of extra time on your hands to pursue this.
(Btw, Comcast typically can't identify where a cable modem is. Get a neighbor on the same cable loop to get the service while you're paying them for it, and then move the modem back to your house. Unless they've installed in "internet filter" on your drop, you should be just fine again.)
And there's always open WiFi's in any neighborhood, which will let you get your neighbors kicked off as well. Then you can all get the pitchforks and torches and go visit Comcast en masse)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If I were you, I'd upgrade my router to WPA-PSK2, turn of SSID broadcasting and name it something random, and use a more secure password.
BluRay movies tend to come in at around 30GB. That's far over your 8GB limit per day under a 250GB cap per month.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I was just lectured by my provider (Service Electric/ PennTeleData) for exceeding their usage limit as well (I've been between 200-300gb/mo for the past year).
...
When I politely replied and asked what the actual limit was, they told me 50gb up/ 50gb down.
I wish I hadn't asked
You assume that this completely trial balloon unimplemented cap will actually come in at 250GB, and stay at 250GB afterwards.
Would be great if the regulators who allow this afterwards WOULD NOT LET COMCAST EVER REVISE IT DOWNWARDS by so much as a single byte. Then we might find it reasonable.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Anyone under the impression that they are "paying for bandwidth" should go read their contract, and learn what Unspecified Bit Rate means. You are merely paying for a signaling rate, and for the right to brag about how many megabits in your last mile. It doesn't matter how big of a tube you plug into your ISP's oversold network; as a low-budget home user, you have signed away the "right" to any kind of sustained access.
250 GB might sound pretty good now, but what about 2 or 3 years from now? When 50GB Blue-Ray and HDTV is the standard and everyone is streaming TV from the Internet?
Its just like agreeing that 640K mem was enough for everyone. It might sound like lots at the get go, but over time, it becomes an increasingly small insufficient number.
My recommendation is that the number should be based on some formula that changes once or twice a year based on the items in that formula. Formula might look somehting like:
VARIABLES:
==========
1) Average cost of peer bandwidth they pay for to their peers (i.e. 5 cents / GByte)
2) Infrastructure Costs per subscriber over lifecycle of equipment (i.e. $500 per client over 5 or 10 years or whatever the average lifecycle is).
3) Company Expenses (employee salaries, R&D, etc etc)
4) Profit % (10 - 20%?)
FORMULA:
==========
Peer BW cost + Infrastrucutre cost + Expenses + Profit % = ??? $$$ / GigaByte.
This way as costs increase or decrease, the customers are treated fairly. Of course you'd need watchdogs monitoring these variables from the outside so that the company doesn't lie.
This way, maybe in 3 years as Peer BW drops in price, the average consumer also sees a reduction in their bills or an increase in their BW caps which should in theory keep up with other technologies (iTV, torrents or whatever turns your crank).
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
And please tell me how if 250GB/month is killing the system as it is, that paying twice as much for a business account suddenly isn't killing the system on your local cable loop? Yes please tell me, because I do not understand it otherwise since Comcast isn't changing anything about the hardware in the process.
Comcast has the capacity. Heavy users aren't the problem in technical terms because the solution to all this is simply money to Comcast in the form of higher bills.
And yes I wouldn't be so angry about it if Comcast had actually been honest from the beginning and not said that they were selling "unlimited" all-you-can-eat Internet. But they did sell it, and I bought it, under those terms. And I hate being lied to.
As for your 20GB limit, I want to rent movies and watch missed television over my internet. You obviously don't. That doesn't give you the right to criticize how I think a fat data-pipe into my home is best used.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Wow. I can't even believe this is actually an issue. 250 GB is a LOT. Here in Canada we have a 100 GB cap, and I've never come anywhere close to reaching that.
Like someone else's reply, if you're using that much bandwidth perhaps it is time to step away from the computer and go get some fresh air with the other humans.
None of those options generate any extra revenue for Comcast. In fact it costs them money to upgrade their system to support your sensible ideas of traffic flow.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
And there is your BIG MISTAKE. Of course they have to start at something "reasonable" to get everybody onboard. You don't really expect them to STAY at 250GB do you?
Well do you?
Would you like to buy a bridge?
The only way to profit from this is to own Comcast stock, then you can cheer every increase as offsetting your monthly bills.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Just tell me what that is in hours of WoW and I'll be good to go.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Just wait for weekend Gigabytes, and TV commercials explaining Gigabyte friend circles and how you can carry your Gigabytes over from one month to the next !
The thing that should worry anyone is that cell phone companies make much of their money from overage fees.
I predict that if this goes into place, rather than improving the service, their effort will go into ever more complicated and confusing fee schedules.
That is grounds for a pretty hefty lawsuit.
250 gigs might sound like a lot today but what about in the future when HD video dominates the web. Currently web-video with youtube's poor quality doesn't make a big bandwidth impact. But if 1 hour of 1080P HD video takes 5gigs then that is only 50 hours per month. The average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day so that would only get you 12.5 days into the month and you would hit your limit. And that is for only one person in the house. This is the cable company trying to block competition before it becomes viable.
Videotron has done this with their 10Mbps home plan. You get 100GB/month and they don't throttle. My Bell Sympatico friends were laughing at me with their 'unlimited' bandwidth until they started throttling. I download a fair amount and I don't even get close to the limit. You can also upgrade to the same speed but business plan if you need real unlimited. Not saying I am a big fan but it hasn't wound up costing me any extra money, I get the advertised speeds. Comcast's proposed limit is 2.5x mine so it should be even less of a problem.
Uncle post mentions "monopoly"
Do you not know what that even means?
No, you cannot "always get another provider".
When dealing with a monopoly, you have 3 options
1. Bend over and let them screw you
2. Go without
3. Try to get the government pissed enough at them to act
I just moved out to a horse farm with my wife and our only internet options (other than dial-up) were Wireless or Satellite.
I went with the Wireless option because there were some advantages over satellite. I guess because of the Fair Use Policy Act (is that correct?) I'm limited to 10gb a month on my plan. Ugh, very frustrating for me. I have to plan my machine updates for the end of the month to make sure I have bandwidth available. I don't download movies or rent them from my 360 because not only am i paying a rental fee but probably a bandwidth fee if i go over. So very very frustrating. Not only that but I'm paying double or triple what most of you pay I bet, AND I only get 1.5 download speeds, AND I'm limited to 10gb of bandwidth a month. I'm like a fiend when I go to friends' houses with my laptop "free bandwidth?!? downloaddownloaddownload"
Then fyi, I believe its $2 a gig for each additional gig if i prepay and $5 a gig if I don't prepay... I could be wrong about that last number but its close.
after that, they cap you to 56k!
Tell me what you are selling me. If I choose to buy it, then give it to me. That sounds like what Comcast is proposing. That's my kind of free market right there.
If you don't want sleazy back-room tactics, and you do want the consumer to have the power of the purse, then putting the limits right on the label is exactly the right solution. If you are a high bandwidth user, you should be paying more. The only other option is for them to optimize their network for the heart of the market, which is exactly what they've been doing, and which results in extreme dissatisfaction for the tails of the market.
Assuming that this is meant to replace a broken network (ie: one on which some packets travel better than others), I am 100% in favor of it. It is exactly the way a market economy is supposed to work. Tell me what is for sale. If I buy it, give it to me exactly as offered. No hidden bullshit.
If that is what Comcast is doing, I applaud them, and I will finally get off my crappy DSL service (and get cable teevee again... and watch too much of it... on second thought - maybe I don't like this idea, haha).
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Comcast has cable modems, right?
They mostly have 10MB interfaces? Then 10mb/s =600mb/m =36000mb/hr =4500MBytes/hr?
=108000MBytes/day?
Ok, this is Ethernet. Derate x.6 for CSMA/CD (I know it's switched. Don't believe you can get 100% utilization on a switched line). And do we get 64.8GBytes/day?
Wow. Let me do this again:
10mb/sec x.0 =6mb/sec =360mb/min =21600mb/hr = 2.16GByte/hr? (Byte = 8 bits?) For those of you scoring at home, this about half the speed of a streaming DDS-3 tape drive, probably LVD, with compression.
Crap, I can't add any more. Maybe if we approach this differently?
250GB/mo = 8.33GB/day. Somwhere I read that a Blu-Ray single-layer disc is 25GB. If we assume that a typical BR movei will take half the disc (not supported by evidence) then we need 12GB to dump a movie. We can dump about 20 movies a month and still have some cap room left to play Halo.
But the math escapes me. If my cable modem is indeed 10MB, now much fracking data can I pump through it 24x7?
I thought this would be easy. Needless to say, I am not a rocket scientist.
Of course, if DOCSIS 2.0 is the system, it's limited to 30MB/s. Go look up the specs yersef. So I can't get more than 30mb no matter, and that's the limit. megaBIT. Math. Crap.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
In Canada, Rogers has set the cap at 60GB per month for their standard "Express" service and 95GB per month for their "Extreme" service. 250GB per month is very generous.
This 250 GB monthly bandwidth cap sounds like a lot to you, but you don't have a 17 yo son who prefers to watch his Japanese anime undubbed in the original but subtitled Japanese because the voice actors are better at getting the raw feel of the story.
Look, South Korea has people who use that bandwidth in a DAY.
We live in a backwater here in the USA.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I wonder if Comcast will run afoul of any anti-competitive/monopoly laws. Don't forget that Comcast is also a content provider and content creator.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
While not being a fan of regulation in general, it has its value sometimes.
Is it time for some FCC regulation between Comcast's cable TV division and their Internet division? It seems to me that Comcast itself stands to benefit by slowing streaming-video adoption. It's definitely more costly to implement--at least to support streaming to every one of their subscribers vs. suppling regular TV to each of their customers as they do today.
I am sure the long-term thinkers in their cable TV division are concerned about not being the central middleman of TV content in the future.
It's a long term strategy.
If Comcast does this, it won't piss off too many people *today* because 250GB/month is somewhat reasonable, *today*.
However, in the big picture, bandwidth usage rates are expected to continue to rise at the same rates as they have historically, which means that in not too long 250GB/month will be unreasonable. I doubt that Comcast has it in their plan to raise the caps to something more reasonable as typical usage starts to exceed any limits set now, say in three years.
Also, what is the UPLOAD cap? Typical game servers (with 30-60 users) such as NWN upload about 300gb/month. And don't forget about services such as MMOs..and VOIP....
They are a telecom; their whole business revolves around charging premium rates for decades old service technologies.
What the world really needs for the last mile problem is a cheap scaleable wireless router mesh project which would establish an Internet completely outside the control of anyone. You want access, get a router and join the community..... (would work very well in high population density areas, assuming the radio engineering side of it can be worked out and that you can get a decent range on the things, like 1-5 miles) Oh, and yes, no service fees because the hardware ownership is distributed....
I have no problem with them offering different price /usage plans as long as they are not deceptively advertised (i.e. the previously mentioned "unlimited bandwidth" that is capped).
Of course a rational plan might be something like:
"you get bandwidth U/D each until you exceed limit X or Y, at which point your bandwidth drops to U'/D'".
I would expect Comcast and other providers to offer a variety of plans, some of which are truly unlimited upload/download at a particular bandwidth.
Also, what would really help is if ISPs plans could include several classes of service. My FTP downloads and other high bandwidth non-realtime services do not need priority. I am happy to let the ISP throttle my BitTorrent or FTP download if their network is congested so that people playing online games, or using VOIP can have better service.
The ISP plan might include unlimited upload/download for the "available bit rate" category of traffic while having caps for other classes of service.
I totally agree. I would not use 250GB in a month, and if I wanted to, I'd probably be willing to pay extra for it. But by gosh if you advertise "unlimited," you better not cap it. It's dishonest.
If they make a cap, fine - just advertise it as "A ton of bandwidth" or "more than most people will ever need" and specify the actual amount somewhere in the ad. Most people won't care, and those who do will know.
Go talk to them about setting up a business class connection. really go try it. The first thing they will ask you for is your Corporate Tax ID, if you don't have that they will tell you to get lost.
If it done right, high-latency transports such as satellite, sneakernet, or a bunch of trucks full of DVDs, are fine for transporting large packets of data.
To get the maximum benefit, you need to send your packets in parallel, and not wait for a return-receipt.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Comcast hasn't advertised unlimited anything in more than 5 years. Go check their site and their advertising.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Well, there is a solution:
Divide telcos into arms-length subsidiaries:
Company 1 is the wire company. They provide "dark wire" from households to switching centers.
Company 2 is the TV company, i.e. traditional cable, + VOD.
Company 3 is the voice phone company.
Company 4 is the Internet company.
Allow competitors in the switching center. Company 1 treats competitors the same as it does companies 2-4.
It's a nice idea but it probably won't ever happen. They tried it once with ATT and the baby bells.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If they charge $0.20/GB if your rate is 6MB/sec, and $0.18/GB if your rate is 4MB/sec, or they charge the same but have a higher monthly minimum or a flat $5/month surcharge for the 6MB/sec customers, it still provides different services levels for different prices.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Don't forget this is upload and download. This limits your ability to run as a server and will lead to a more centralized internet.
Put your glasses on, pal. You're obviously very near-sighted. This would just be the beginning. Before long you'd be paying for access the way you pay for your cellphone.
This is fine, as long as it's disclosed prior to closing the deal. Do it for new customers at first, and gradually impose it on existing customers after whatever minimum contracts they've agreed to, have expired. Just get informed consent, and then there will be no basis for the false-advertising or fraud gripes.
The only problem I'd see with that then, is for people in a situation where Comcast is the only game in town due to a government-granted monopoly. But shit, 250GB is an awful lot for a month; I wouldn't be surprised if my lifetime total to-date is an order of magnitude less than that.
Hmm.. except that total-to-date probably doesn't count TV itself; I suppose that would be a factor in the future when more people switch to TV-over-IP. If this is a step to serve Comcast's conflict-of-interest by blocking TVoIP to encourage customers to continue to subscribe to their increasingly-obsolete TV service, then that problem should be addressed too. Maybe they shouldn't be allowed to impose the cap in any locality until after their current franchise has expired and it has been disclosed as a term of their new franchise negotiations. But that's the same issue as above: just get informed consent. Be fair, don't commit fraud by changing a deal after it has been sealed. That's only fair.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
But, I thought I already had an "unlimited" plan. Isn't that what the pretty television commercials say (which I pay Comcast to stream to me)?
I actually meant a dedicated line when I said a commercial line, rather than some arbitrary cost uprated account on the same piece of cable from the same provider. I fully concur there is zero benefit in doing that, as you're still clogging the same tube, regardless of what you pay.
I watch TV as well over BBC iPlayer, I still don't come close to my cap. I wasn't criticizing how you use your pipe, I was merely commenting on how much 250gb actually is. Consider yourself very lucky that Comcast is setting the bar so high. On my 8mbit/0.5mbit dsl line as I said previous, the limit is 'just' 20gb, which despite terming myself a 'heavy' user, is still plenty sufficient. And that includes running some servers locally (my upstream doesn't count, just the downstream). So really my total transfer is probably closer to 40-50gb as I think I push more up than down. Even so that's still a fraction of 250.
No, this not only will confuse (and easily scam) loads of people, but also create artificial price points that don't exist. It's an very capable way to create confusion and fight competition. Different service levels for difference prices is fine and logical as well, but this creates ways of having 2 different prices for the same service. That is not the same.
This would be like an ISP where one has a 250GB cap with a transfer rate cap at 6MB/s and the other just has an 8MB/s connection; people will be confused by the comparison, and I'd bet my wallet it would definitely be compared deceptively like that, intentionally.
Either way you still have a real theoretical cap; just put it on there and be done with it. If your cap is 300GB a month, then let the connection go as fast as possible; people will cap out either way and the market will show that people want higher speeds and are willing to pay for such, which will show that infrastructure needs to be built out more. Of course we already know of DOCSIS limitations on that, but whose fault is that for not researching ways to increase speeds, or for example doubling the number of cable lines.
I have to throttle traffic on my side or else risk losing my connection from noon to midnight until my usage drops to 11.9GB/30 days.
My sat modem now plugs into a Linux box that manages traffic for me as it's pretty easy to blow through 17GB, even on a 1.5Mbit/s line. Between the cap, to cost and the latency, WildBlue ends up being a pretty poor solution to anything. I can't even run my Credit systems over it per long/inconsistent ping times (~1100ms round trip). It's faster just to have them dial up. I'm thinking I just need to figure a way to justify the cost of a T1 into here.
Yeah, I guess ISPs have misused the term so badly it has taken on a new meaning... but can't /. at least use it correctly?
Bandwidth = transmission rate. If you get up to 8Mbps, that is your bandwidth limit/cap. If you get 250GB/month, that is your monthly maximum data allowance (data transferred = bandwidth * time, obviously!).
No ISP offers unlimited bandwidth! They are offering (though obviously not really allowing) unlimited use of the bandwidth they give you...
Anyway, I'm sure people will argue conventional usage has changed the meaning. I just wanted to remind people of the real meaning, since it seems to me that the incorrect one just lets the ISPs keep customers confused about what they are getting.
Doesn't cutting off a customer decrease their revenue by about $50? Besides, I doubt it would cost that much to do throttling as they currently have the capability to do speed bursting for the first x seconds of a download. Besides, they're not only losing out revenue on just the internet. I've never been cut off from them, but because of their antics, I discontinued both tv and internet service through them, so now they're losing out on $100+ of revenue.
As a former Comcast tech, we were told there was a cap, but it varied by local market. From my experience it was 'if the pipe is full, cut off the top 5% users'. Same experience I had with Telus, who also advertised 'unlimited', although they don't any more. Used to run 300GB/mo. Not hard, really, with several heavy BT users on the same LAN.
mpeg 2 is what most HD is currently encoded in. H264 brings HD into broadband ranges. If you've seen how bad the compression is on digital cable or sat you could get comparable quality in HD at around 6-10MBps using H264 (see apple HD trailers.) Normal DVDs could have just barely handled HD or at least the 720 stuff without a physical media switch (which was more about new DRM anyhow.) A lot of the HD tv owners I know are limited to 720 and didn't understand that they were not getting full HD anyhow.
I think industry messed up on the whole digital move. I can see them spending billions again in 10 years to start migrating so they can pack in more channels or go to "super" HD using H264 (and ignoring H265 or H266.)
I would have designed in more scalability so 720p TVs could play "bit pealed" larger scale video like 4048p. At least delaying whole system upgrades for a longer period of time. 1080p isn't enough for everybody. (Well, I think it is for the next 50 years simply because the global econ will not be good enough. 3D? yeah, when cars fly...)
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If you want an agreement that they can't change, that's called a Service Level Agreement and those cost money. On business class lines you usually get one, and the better and more expensive the line, the better the SLA. On my business cable modem I have an SLA that specifies things like how long it can be down before they have to pay compensation, minimum speeds, and so on. At work we have a couple of OC-3s and they carry a much stiffer SLA, that includes things like the fact that the company can't terminate service until the end of the contract and so on.
So if you want that kind of thing, well go pay for it. However, like most things in life, you can't have everything you want for free.
Maybe you're too young to remember this, but back in the days of AOL, Prodigy, Compuserv, etc. You would buy service by the minute or hour (much like how telephone companies charged.) The basic AOL account at one time was as low as 8 hours (of 2400bps dialup) and then you paid by the minute above that. You paid for this time when connected, regardless of whether you actually downloaded anything or not, and most of your data came from AOL itself, rather than through connections AOL had to other servers.
This turned out to be popular, but people wanted more. Soon you saw 20 hours, 40 hours, 100 hours, unlimited. As in, you were able to leave the connection on all the time. Not that they expected you to actually use the full bandwidth for all of that time.
Now, always-on connections are ubiquitous, so the word, "unlimited" seems like it must refer to some other limit that doesn't exist. Which is why the providers have quietly been ceasing to use that word in their advertisements.
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I'm growing very tired of the bullshit Comcast pull. If they even think about capping my bandwidth (and by the way, I use _well_ over 250gb/mo with online games and large downloads from BitTorrent, ALL LEGAL!), I WILL CANCEL. I will get ALL my family members to quit, and even my neighbors.
Wow, now Comspastic is going the way of the cell-phone plan market.
"Did you know you went over your macaroni minutes today?"
Disclaimer: I work for Comcast.
The current cap is 400GB for the internet (this number does NOT include TV or phone service).
Management is currently only discussing the possibility of lowering the cap to 250MB.
Time Warner is testing bandwidth caps at the moment, and if successful Comcast will follow suit.
Have you driven a fnord... lately?
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Learn to read the small print.
How much monthly bandwidth do Comcast cable television subscribers receive for the Comcast cable tv channels? It's gotta just be incredibly lopsided versus the amount of money billed for internet on a data size/unit time analysis basis. Perhaps the Federal Trade Commission needs to examine whether internet monthly price is gouging at a stratospheric percentage basis.
Internet and cable tv are sent on the exact same fiber optic cable are they not? Say the average Comcast subscriber bill is %50/%50 cable tv/internet. What is Comcast charging per GB of commercial infested spam on the cable tv side? Compared to that, the profit margin on internet service must be absolutely GINORMOUS. And the profit margin on their VoIP phone service must be even more ASTRONOMICAL.
Now think about the US laws passed making digital signals mandatory. You've completely further subsidized a price gouging monopoly for the delivery of content. Eliminating analog eliminates cheap spectrum competition. Public domain airwaves will be completely eliminated.
And these telecommunication companies are not paying market rates for spectrum. All spectrum must be limited to 5 or 10 year LEASE periods, with renewable competitive bids.
Networks need to be privatized at individual and community levels, with corporations SERVICING, not selling bandwidth. Only such a system will ensure market competition for the highest quality at the lowest price.
The solution may be forced divestiture of companies selling both bandwidth and content. We could forcibly break off the internet bandwidth service from Comcast and force them to sell a certain percentage of the cable at a comparable rate to their cable television data size per unit time.
Somebody get me some hard numbers on how much data space cable television channels use.
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If they simply cap the monthly usage @250GB and give me a means to see how much i'm currently using in the month (via their web page, for example), i actually have no problem with this cap. :-)[/dreaming]
But if they say the cap is 250GB AND we're gonna impose a limited-rate of up to 800Kb/s so you don't go over your 250GB cap, then i have a big problem,
[dreaming]unless they give me the 800Kb/s as a CIR
That's exactly the right model. And I happen to agree with you :)
The problem Comcast faces is it's trying to sell "Free". That's unpossible. Stuff costs money, and if you're trying to peddle something "for free" you're not eating the cost, you're trying to spread it out over all you customers, and you get burned if you bet wrong.
This creates a vendor vs. customer antagonism which is bad for both.
An even bigger issue is that Comcast sets this limit right at about what is reasonable for replacing Cable TV with Internet content. So, especially where they own the local monopoly, they have a conflict of interest.
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OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I pay for 100 GB per month in bandwidth. It's not speed capped, but I have to pay if I use more. Alternatively, I can pay for a 1 Mb line, which rate caps it so that I'll never be able to exceed my 100 GB - or so they tell me. I'm not actually concerned enough to do the math yet.
If Comcast did something similar, offering the ability to have blazing speeds or protection from overage charges, I could stomach them for a while longer.
Consider yourself spoken to.
If you used a online backup service like dropbox then you'd pay over 500 dollars to retrieve 1TB of data after a disaster.
I have local backup, but I keep a offsite backup of my data in case of a natural disaster.
It's comcraptic, the big old ultraexpensive cable company, and especially even more wonderful since they have a de facto monopoly in my area as far as "highspeed" internet service goes.
Even if I did have other choices, I'd still be pissed as I do NOT believe in caps of any sort when a service is originally sold and even promoted a non-capped type of usage. Once a cap is in place, you can bet that they'll be lowering it with every single excuse that they can come up with.
It'd sure be nice if they actually spent money fixing their jury-rigged network than paying out big bonuses to asshats and other private sector bureaucrats.
Won't work anymore. At least in California, one of the subtle things the old AT&T Wireless did before before selling to Comcast was to do away with local franchises.
Now it's statewide franchises.
Complaints now have to be registered at the state level. Good luck trying to effect a change there!
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I'm living in Korea where 4 major ISP's fight constantly for customer contracts. I pay about $35.00/month for broadband (5Mbps). I got the first 3 months free and a free Nintendo DS for signing a 1-yr contract. Yes the population density allows cheaper service blah blah, but the fact is if Comcast had 3 rivals with capabilities on par with themselves in every market they go into, we wouldn't even be seeing this type of article.
In classic monopoly fashion, Comcast reduces supply and raises price by maximizing the number of low GB subscribers at the expense of high GB ones, which are intentionally cherry picked for delay or cancellation in discriminatory fashion to avoid congestion or undermine competitive content. This allows Comcast to push network bandwidth capacity to the limit of peak congestion, and at the margin, adding low users is more profitable than high ones at identical fees.
When congestion does occur, Comcast blames the customers, like P2P, when Comcast actually manufactures the congestion itself by overselling available bandwidth in "up to" maximums of burst use but then sharply curtails the total GB available rather than providing a sufficient buffer of network capacity to avoid congestion.
Placing an upper 250GB limit on total use coupled with a bandwidth maximum gets Comcast off the hot seat of violating net neutrality by providing an implied assurance that 250GB is actually available to any customer on a neutral basis.
Comcast would be obligated to provide sufficient network bandwidth to meet this cap during peak periods, or degrade service with the new agnostic tool for managing peak congestion, both potentially neutral in application.
A 4Mbs connection run at maximum 24/7 would produce well over 1,000 GBs/month, where 250GB/mo represents a resale ratio of dedicated bandwidth to retail use of 1:4 for uncongested service based on 25% maximum occupancy of the retail bandwidth slots at any given time. Comcast is gambling that this is the "sweet spot" for pulling in the most subscribers after adjusting for the lost high users, who will be forced to a higher service grade.
However, this may be a stalling tactic to ward off net neutrality by regulation or legislation, as opponents of net neutrality like the RIAA, MPAA and Hulu prepare to cut deals in the back room with broadband providers like Comcast for "fast lane" packages that look like the forced bundling and packaging of cable tv content, pushing what content remains remains into the slow "bus lane". When this happens, users can say goodbye to net neutrality and the competition it enables among content producers and consumers.
Change that 250GB to 80GB, decrease the available speed, increase the price, and you've now got what Australia has!
Enjoy!
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I'm rather fascinated at everyone's response to a 250GB cap 7mbit plan for $40 a month.
Firstly if that plan were available to me I'd swap in a heat beat. Instead I'm stuck with one of the best plans around where I live, that is 40GB cap on 24mbit for $70 a month. Its another $40/month to go to the 80GB cap. If you guys hate Comcast's new plan I'm keen to hear what you have to say about my feelings on the matter.
I'll admit the $15 per 10GB excess is awful, I only get dropped to 64kbit which these days fails to load many large pages at all. Its a bit more expensive that I'd like but its not dreadful.
That said I'm on one of the more tech savvy ISPs. With the most popular ISP Bigpong, the Comcasts of Australia, the plans are truly something to behold. For those that want fast connections (30mbit, the next step up from 1500kbps) the base plan is $70 a month for a 600MB, yes MB, limit. Enough for almost 3 minutes of full speed consumption. If you want something more reasonable like 25GB then it costs $110/month. Remember you will be charged 15c/MB for excess consumption which forces people to move to their more expensive plans, yes there are more expensive plans that that. Not to mention the 1500kbit and 256kbit plans are only marginally cheaper than the 30mbit plans, I can't imagine much worse that 256kbit, 200MB/month $30/month.
Haha you guys are complaining about a 250gb limit? Come down to Australia where the biggest telco charges you $60pm for a 256/64 service with only 12gb of usage (combined upload AND download). On some of their "non capped" plans, if you exceed your limit you get charged $150 / GB. Yes thats right. One hundred and fifty dollars per gigabyte.
I have a "more expensive plan". They're clearly throttling certain types of traffic at a level way below 800kbit. Other types of traffic can approach the advertised limits. In the end I think I prefer the PTP circuit I used to have -- lower theoretical bandwidth, but no "traffic shaping".
You get 250GB of data transfer? Seriosly, wtf?
*Note: $150 value comes from story of Comcasts's attempt to rival FiOS
Those that are in favour of unmetered, unlimited use of residential services are sadly a little "hard of thinking".
Scenario 1
ISP has finite upstream bandwidth (this is a given).
This wholesale bandwidth is resold (marked-up) and oversold (contended) for residential services.
That's how you get '7mb' connections that don't cost 1000's of $$
If this limited resource is sold as 'unlimited', and it is treated as such by customers, the economics start to move against the ISP.
They need to limit and degrade the service in order to turn a profit.
THE INCENTIVE IS FOR THE COMPANY TO PROVIDE A LOWER QUALITY SERVICE
Scenario 2
A basic usage amount is included free inside the package. This could be 10GB, 30GB, 100GB or whatever covers 90%+ of their customer base.
Customers wishing to use more, at full speed, pay for additional usage. Some markup over wholesale rates.
In this scenario, the incentive is to encourage the customer to use more, not less bandwidth.
They get to purchase more network for their users.
Low-usage users are not impacted by bandwdith hogs.
Makes more sense, right?
In parts of Europe and Asia you can get a better residential connection than your typical college has in the U.S. For a fraction of the cost that a residential customer in the U.S. pays to Comcast. Even in countries with a lower population density.
Crappy net access in the U.S. has little to do with paying for infrastructure and a whole lot to do with executive complacency and greed.
I see a lot of whining about how 250GB/mo is "still better" than $SOME_OTHER_PLACE. This is the same idiocy that politicians use to raise taxes, saying that "hey, the taxes are still lower in the US than in $SOME_OTHER_PLACE."
It's just an endless cycle.. it doesn't help that people, in general, are only getting dumber...
The old someone-has-it-worse-off-than-you-so-be-grateful argument only serves those who want to keep that status quo for their own benefit. The measuring stick should be what comparable countries are doing. If people living in Seoul can get over 50 Mbs connections for less than $50 per month, there's no reason why people living in San Francisco or Sidney shouldn't be able to do the same. If people living in rural Sweden or Norway can get 20+ Mbps connections for less $$$ than Comcast charges in the U.S., there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to do the same in Nebraska or Western Australia.
The problem isn't the technology, it's executive complacency and greed. That you have it worse than I do doesn't mean I'm lucky, it just means that you have to put up with more bullshit.
DVDs are either 4.7 or 8.something GB, but aren't popularly shared/stored that way. They're re-compressed down to ~700MB or ~1.4GB. What makes you think people are/will be sharing direct Blu-Ray rips? I figure 30GB of HD will end up being around 3 to 6GB in size once re-compressed, and perhaps even less.
Source. Please point me to where you have heard "about Apple trying to kill off Netflix"
Their plan is mostly clear, and it doesn't seem to include trying to directly eliminate Netflix, at least not by methods we've seen them kill off other things such as the Creative, Dell, Sony, MS, and whoever else's MP3 players, each one having been touted in the press as 'The iPod Killer'. Apple uses H.264 to bring HD video sizes down to manageable numbers. Their stuff prevails when the masses decide it's what they want, and other products/services prevail when the masses decide the same. It's not a conspiracy.
250 GB per month is equivalent to 96 KB/s*.
While it may be hard to download this much data (and otherwise archive it), it's fairly easy to keep seeding (i.e. uploading) on BitTorrent/eMule/etc. at this rate for months on end. Unlike downloading, it requires minimal management - choose your files to share, and then neglect your P2P program!
* Kilobytes per second. Not kilobits.