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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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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.
I don't mind a cap, so long as you can buy more once you hit it for a reasonable price.
But in this case (which is not official, BTW), it sounds like they are going to change $15 for an extra 10GB! That is far too high. I mean, assuming you pay $50/month, the first 250GB are only $0.20 each... and it goes up to $1.50??? That's pretty peculiar. It also doesn't seem to reflect the cost of bandwidth. Giganews charges $14 for 25GB, for instance.
I fear that we will quickly approach the dreaded cell-phone bill in complexity here.
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As much as people hate Comcast, dialup isn't really an option these days. I just LOVE to wait 10 minutes for a page to load or a day or so to watch a 5 minute video.
How dare Comcast "consider" things?
First, this is what is known in the political world as a "trial balloon". Meaning, they are using a inside source to release the information to see it is builds traction without risk of embarrassment..
Secondly, don't think that 250 Gig per month is where they want to be. Meaning, they do not have even close the amount of bandwidth available to provide this level to their customers. What I am sure they are wanting to do, however, is to get buy in a 250G limit, and reduce that amount over time to something closer to 20G per month.
Isn't this a step in the right direction though? It would be nice to actually know the limits, so you can decide when and how you want to reach them. And 250GB is a reasonable limit for the price. That's roughly 100KB/s 24/7.
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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)
Take a look at your power or water bill sometime. They both charge graduated rates based on over usage.
Besides it's like your sibling comment points out 250GB is ~800Kbit/sec for 31 days.... that's 8+ divx movies^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H "linux iso's" per day every day for a month.
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.
This cap is to prevent internet from taking over television delivery (which is a huge cash cow for them). 720P under H264 compression is about 3GB per hour so this would prevent the average household (e.g. - 2 or 3 televisions running for a few hours per day) from dropping their $100/month cable tv subscription.
We need anti-trust countermeasures here.
Internet television delivery is powerful. Right now, only the extremely wealthy can control the horizontal and vertical. If you plug the internet into televisions and 20 million people decide to pay a penny each to watch "Leave Britney Alone!", then someone just made $200,000.
You'll get a lot of clever content under this model. And internet speeds are getting to the point where we can start thinking about HD content to a significant amount of people.
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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.
It's possible to download that amount of content perfectly legally. (posting as AC to protect the innocent). I personally have a subscription to www.videobox.com. For $10 per month I get access to 5 "adult" DVD's per day (legally). Most are around 1GB or more in size for the whole thing. While I certainly don't download EVERY one that is released each day, I certainly could if I wanted to.
And that's just for one site, and only very early in our "digital delivery" revolution we're going through. You can now rent movies off iTunes (even HD ones), or through your Xbox 360. I have an Apple TV that I use for these types of rentals. You can subscribe to TV shows the same way (I subscribe to "Escape to Chimp Eden" and "The Universe", so there's another 2GB or so per month right there).
I also have several video podcasts like Geekbreek.tv and WebbAlert that are each downloaded about 4 times per week that together add up to another GB or 2 of downloads per month.
Add in OS updates (or source downloads for my Gentoo box), music purchases and audio podcasts and the amount of bandwidth used per month inches up pretty fast. That said, I'm virtually positive I'm still well under 250GB per month, but I certainly CAN envision breaking that limit easily within the next few years.
Man, who needs that "high-def" streaming shit? Let's nip it in the bud right now by making it prohibitively expensive to get any better video than Youtube off the Intertubes. They should be watching our cable shows anyway, where they're slightly more captive of an audience.
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It's should be listed as "800Kb/s, burstable 7Mb/s" or simply "250GB/month"
Don't be short sighted.
I have no expectations of a dedicated 7Mb connection. I fully realize it will be shared and I'll be lucky to ever get a sustained connection at half that or even a quarter.
Yes I get good burst speeds and low latency, which are fine, but when someone pays $100+ a month for cable/internet I expect them to let me use it as much as I want. If that means downloading 15GB files every night so be it.
The point was more that I'm fairly certain I could use 250GB, but the limiting factor is how slow my actual connection is regardless of what I pay for. If they realistically know that I will see the same performance in a 3Mb, 5Mb, 7Mb line, then they shouldn't charge differently for them. If I pay for a separate level of connection I expect there to be some gain for it, even if that means my share of the overall pipe is 200k on average instead of 150k.