Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
Distributed proteome folding @ WorldCommunityGrid.org
Team Slashdot - Members:#1 Run Time:#1 Points:#1 Results:#1
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.
blah blah blah, milk this, milk that.
250GB ~= 800Kbit every second of every day for 31 days.
Some people need to step away from the computer and drop this knee jerking insanity.
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.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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
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.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
This is certainly improving their service considering the neighbor kids downloading habits affect my bandwidth. Way to kneejerk reaction though, there's not many people who legally use more than 250GB / month for personal use, and the ones that do should have to pay more.
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?
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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)!
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
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
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.
250GB ~= 800Kbit every second of every day for 31 days.
Some people need to step away from the computer and drop this knee jerking insanity. But I pay for 7Mbit, Waaah, waah waaah! I want my 2 TERABytes per month! And I can't afford to pay any more because i have to buy 5 hard drives every month just to store all crap I download!
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.
or put another way...
thats over 350 tv episodes bittorrented (assuming you share at least 1:1)
or
thats over $9,000,000 in fines to the MAFIAA (at their current discount rate of $30k per item)
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.
250GB is far too reasonable to be their actual cap.
They've already admitted to bumping people off the service entirely for downloading ~90GB/mo.
There's no way they'll let those guys back in and not even charge them overages.
This is Comcast we're talking about. I'm going to be skeptical of anything they say that even appears reasonable -- and I'm not going to waste any time entertaining such a notion so long as it's merely rumor.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
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.
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.
That's more than a dollar per Gigabyte usage for the cheapest plan. Between $6.00 and $1.37 per Gigabyte depending on your plan (without going over any bandwidth limits). All in all the $1.50 penalty for bandwidth over-usage falls into line with the regular plans they will be offering. One could assume that bandwidth usage includes both uploads and downloads, so for people who use something like bittorent a lot, you can divide by two (ceteris paribus) and get the average 'cost' of a download.
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.
Such a scheme where the additional bandwith costs more than the included bandwith is not uncommon. This can be explained in two ways: First, the included bandwith is priced below cost. Its just marketing: People choose the ISP/Carrier which offers the most bang for the buck, while on the other side the majority of users bandwith usage will not even come close to the marketed cap. This also explains why ISP/Carriers dislike people who actually use that much bandwith as advertised because it breaks their calculation. Second, such a scheme might force users who know that they will come close to the allowance (when the ISP/Carrier would lose money) and might excess it into a higher priced package (where the ISP/Carrier once again makes a profit) with more bandwith included just to be on the safe side.
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.
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.
I'm not a heavy user by any means. I don't go downloading all isos and everything. here's my usage. I started tracking around January 20th.
$ vnstat -m
eth0 / monthly
month rx | tx | total
Jan '08 26.70 GB | 34.97 GB | 61.67 GB
Feb '08 65.46 GB | 111.99 GB | 177.45 GB
Mar '08 52.28 GB | 139.67 GB | 191.95 GB
Apr '08 53.86 GB | 155.96 GB | 209.82 GB
May '08 13.99 GB | 47.73 GB | 61.72 GB
estimated 58.14 GB | 198.38 GB | 256.52 GB
You're joking right? On one hand you have Comcast spending millions on ad campaigns touting that "Our network is already ON fiber optics!" and "Who says Comcast is faster? Oh, right, the facts." and on the other hand they are bitching that their archaic network infrastructure can't handle p2p traffic.
Well which is it? Do you have a cutting edge ultra fast network, or do you have a bogged down shitty neighborhood shared backbone?
Pay us 120 bucks a month for your cable and we'll give you ultra compressed, grainy "HD" channels, spotty unlimited cable internet, and unlimited complaints about how you're breaking our network with your massive downloads!
This company is a sham, this bandwidth limit is a sham, and I hope they both sink like stones; rest assured that when I move next, I will move somewhere that has FIOS available.
thats over 350 tv episodes bittorrented (assuming you share at least 1:1)
or
thats over $9,000,000 in fines to the MAFIAA (at their current discount rate of $30k per item) Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to just buy a television set?
I'd like to point out that both water and power are heavily regulated, and as a result those rate schedules are hammered out over public meetings and subject to approval by a public body. Surely Comcast doesn't want to be in that position?
You are right that 250GB is a lot by today's standards, but HD movies are the future, and today's 1.4GB standard-def DiVX movie is tomorrow's 8GB high-def H264 movie.
Or, to stay in the legal realm, iTunes TODAY sends their HD movies out at 4Mbps... and they really look bad. X-Box sends them out at 6Mbps... and they are better but still pretty bad. Over-the-air HD is 19Mbps, though it has the old MPEG2 compression and none of the new goodness. 10Mbps is probably good enough for most people, but bear in mind that Blu-Ray is 40Mbps, and is capable of using the much newer, more efficient codecs.
In other words, 3 hours of TV a day at a decent HD rate would send you over the top. The "average American" spends 20 hours a week or so in front of the tube... that's roughly 80 hours a month at 10Mbps for a total of 351GB. And this is before any other usage is included.
So yeah, so long as they open up the limit in the future when streaming HD becomes more available, I won't care. I fully expect the internet to be the next "cable", a la FIOS.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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."
True. But for my electricity, water, and natural gas, the cost per unit drops as I use more.*
*I verified this with my online statements before posting
I would be fine if they let me have roleover limits, kinda like AT&T does on minutes. Shoot, its only 10 in the morning, and I have already transfered 2 gig of data today alone, and it was not copyrighted material but material for work. During busy months, I can easily do 10-20 gig a DAY, then there will be other days when I may not even transfer 50 meg. I do not want to be punished on a month when I have to transfer 300-350 gig when the month before I transfered under 50 gig.
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.
then leave... they broke your contract so move to another network provider... right? right?
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."
Take a look at your celphone bill, they charge about $1000/GB of data!
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
I know it's not uncommon, but it is very annoying. And the jump from $0.20 to $1.50 is pretty obscene. Even my cell phone plan only jumps from $0.125 to $0.35, and cell phones are considered to be terrible in that regard. Cell phones double or triple... Comcast is rumored to jump a whole order of magnitude!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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".
Yes, but I used Giganews to demonstrate the costs of another landline provider, albeit one not running individual wires to people's homes.
Wireless is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
800Kbs is far less than the 6Mbs that I pay for for 3 computers and a PS3 that use it simultaneously, two of which are on 24/7. The 6Mbs that is advertised that I pay for that it never, ever, reaches because of RST forgery and unnecessary "traffic shaping." Care to readjust that argument?
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
I don't think thats unreasonable depending on what you're doing.
I have a 7Mb Comcast connection and I expect to get to be able to use it.
I have my connection shared out between myself, my room mate, and a collection of devices. We both work from home a decent amount during any given month (I am on call and he works on projects after hours if there is a crunch), plus we both game on our PC's, I have a Linux box I use for ventrilo, and sharing photos with friends, etc. I also have my Xbox, Wii and Tivo running off my network.
For a game beta I'm in I know I've pulled at least 10-20GB alone in the last month. With streaming video and music downloads, etc I could probably hit that cap fairly easily.
All of this is exactly why I pay through the ass to comcast in the first place for the 7Mb connection. And now they tell me I can't do what I pay to do? F-that. I've been waiting for FiOS for month, since it won't be at my place any time soon it looks like it might be time to go back to DSL.
Then again all this would be contingent on actually getting even 800Kb transfer rates when I pay for 7Mb. I'm lucky sometimes if I can pull 200Mb over their service. Though my overnight rates to tend to be higher than 1 Mb. Guessing its tied to shared lines on their network.
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.
Now, that 250GB sounds fair if you're talking 1 computer, but what happens when MythTV gets their hulu.com plugin figured out and I stick a mythbox at every TV in my house? That is going to shift dollars away from comcast and towards hulu.
They're trying to future-proof their model. The limit sets a dangerous precendent. When fiber optic becomes that standard they can start selling people 20,30,40,50 whatever Mbps service, but since they have already established that 250GB limit as standard operating procedure, good luck actually usuing it.
Its a strategic move.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
250GB a month is 101.15 KB a second. (in a 30 day month - which is Comcast's billing period). Every second of every minute of every day.
If you are following their terms of service (i.e. not running servers, not pirating, etc.) then you're probably not going to touch this (you have to sleep sometime). I remember getting a letter from them when I did about 15GB in a week saying that I was 'degrading service' and they would 'take action' if it continued. (distrowatch.org makes me feel like a kid in a candy store sometimes). I could pull at twice that rate and still not hit that limit.
Hell, I doubt I could do 100KB/s sustained for an entire month if I tried. The only time my Bittorrent Client ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Bandwith Monitoring Utility ever hit over 100KB/s I was grabbing the Hardy Heron iso on release day and had around 1000 seeds and over 4000 peers. Http downloads for me have never pulled down at better than 80KB/s.
PERL:
All of the power of Voodoo with most of the understandibility!
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.
I don't see why they dont have different bandwith plans like cell phone companies have different monthly minute plans. They could probably lower their prices for those who don't use much bandwidth at all and charge a premium if you want to download 8 movies a day. I think this is fairly reasonable. For those on a tight budget, they could offer overage protection by shutting you off if you go over your plan's limit instead of paying premium overage charges.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Yeah, that's the problem. Same here: Shaw gives me 80 GB I think, then either cuts me off for the month or charges some exorbitant rate. They have a bandwidth meter on their website but you have to do a bunch of things, including calling in (and holding for an hour) to get it activated.
Someone needs to slap these companies. I understand you can't sell unlimited bandwidth. No problem. But quit with the hidden "caps," throttling, etc. Sell metered transfer and be open about it. Sell it in 10 GB blocks with a 250 GB minimum if you want, but drop the silly variable pricing. I don't have to pay more for water after I've used a certain amount. Or electricity. Or any other metered commodity (except cell phone air time -- another industry in need of some slapping).
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.
If there is any truth to the rumor I would guess it would be 250 Gbits/month.
Streaming HD TV is on the horizon, though. iTunes is already doing 4Mbps, X-Box does 6Mbps, and my personal opinion is that the sweet spot for quality vs. size is around 10Mbps. Since the average American watches 3 hours of TV per day, it is easy to see how that bandwidth could go away quickly.
:)
On the other hand, if Comcast forces you to buy their cable plan by limiting your access to the competition via internet... well, then, there's a conspiracy theory just waiting to be harvested
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
That's the spirit! Now... how are you going to do that?
ics
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.
Indeed - Verizon does this with their DSL. My mother-in-law has $14/month 768k/128k service and is happy as a clam.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If you have a commercial connection that offers 6mbps, SLA'd, that's different, but you don't, because you wouldn't be a target of this if you were.
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.
Is downloading that much on comcast even fucking possible?
I mean, they've already admitted to limiting torrent bandwidths, I doubt I'd be able to even come close to half that with downloads running 24/7 from legitimate sources.
So this sounds somewhat fishy to me.
But Fuck Comcast, nonetheless.
Come read my stupid blagablog. Rants and Giggles
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.
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."
The standard charge from Verizon and AT&T for text messages is $0.15 for each incoming and outgoing message. At one point a while back I estimated that cost being approximately $30 per MB of data exchanged. For intents and purposes, the cellular network providers should be lynch'd and killed for DARING to charge so much for a protocol that taxes so little of their network.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
It doesn't matter if the numbers are reasonable or not. The fact is, they going to be honest and transparent about their ToS. The throttling debacle was a controversy because no such limits were ever stipulated. By mandating such caps, they are making a measurable, quantitative mark rather than capriciously cutting service at their leisure.
If you don't think these rates are reasonable, go with whatever the competing ISP in your area is. That's capitalism at work. All that matters here is whether or not the customers are getting what they knowingly pay for.
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."
Yes, making the cap known and providing warning emails when you hit, for example, 75%, 90%, and 95% of the limit would be a welcome change from their current tactic of keeping everything secret until you cross the invisible line in the ether and they shut your line off. 250 GB of traffic a month seems reasonable to me. Of course, as someone who has opted for their "Speed Tier" I can only assume that will be 500 GB for me.
The only thing I really think they should try to Absolutely Get Right is that if I cross the limit while I'm at work or I'm asleep, there should be a *zero* probability that I will rack up more than $5-$7 of overage charges before I turn off whatever is saturating the line. Whether this is accomplished by setting reasonable overage rates, throughput reductions, or a combination, I don't really care. But if it only takes 8 hours to rack up, say, $20 in overage charges, they'll be lucky to collect that from me even once as I flee out the door to Bellsouth.
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."
I'm not sure you're reading that right.
I'm not metered on water (yet), but I know my natural gas and electricity rates go up once I cross the limits.
If you think about that, it doesn't make sense: If they charge you less power, then you could just sell it to all your neighbors and you'd all come out ahead since you wouldn't have to pay the base higher rate (well, just one time).
Mine too... that's the way it works with pretty much everything. The more you buy, the cheaper it is. Why is bandwidth not the same? And it's even worse than figures given, since the monthly rate includes standing costs, the amount going on bandwidth is only part of it.
I think charging for the amount of data that you download/upload per month is going to be the future, much like utilities charge per unit of utility used. However, much like shipping prices when no one is making much money due to gas prices, no one wants to be the first to do it.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
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
I don't agree with that either, especially since we get bombarded with spam/ads/DoS that are beyond our control. . its either unlimited or ill go elsewhere.
And 250GB really isn't that much.it just sounds like a lot so people will be fooledinto accepted it. ( then next year ts 200.. then 150.. then we are back to metered service like the old days )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What if more channels at a lower quality is what the consumer wants? I'm skeptical the typical viewer cares about quality above the minimum threshold of a poorly encoded dvd.
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.
Lets start a non-profit campaign to raise money for cheese to go with their whine.
That is grounds for a pretty hefty lawsuit.
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.
So don't use texting and block incoming text messages. This is hardly the first thing that consumers have paid a rediculous markup for. Have you ever considered what it costs a restaurant to fill a fountain drink, and why most sit down restaurants have free refills?
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
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
You, kind sir, are a gentleman of my own heart.
It is no wonder why I do have texts blocked and only order water or beer at restaurants (beer also has like a 300-500% markup, but it is more enjoyable than the 2000-3000% markup of fountain drinks). Meanwhile, the cost of water is actually marked down infinity%. :)
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
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.
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
You get over the limit pretty fast when you work in video edition. :)
Also listening to Internet radios and watching TV over internet uses tons of bandwidth...
But true that for US standards it's a lot. Mainly when you compare the crappy internet access you get there to the 100Mbps/50Mbps (with VoIP and TVoIP for less than 30 euros) you get in France and other places in Europe.
And it will not change soon the US falls behind due to lack of real legislation for ISPs. The US ISPs are just slowing down the US internet economy. But it's good for us then
The road to hell is paved with good intentions...
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.
I'm almost afraid to ask, but what would the upload cap be?
You don't pay for a 6Mb pipe. You probably wouldn't want to pay for a 6Mb pipe, either.
A real 6Mb connection is a fraction DS3 with a SLA. Ballpark, you're talking about $3k a month for that kind of service, and that's assuming you live in a major metro area where the loop won't be exorbitant.
That is how much always-on, exclusively-yours bandwidth actually costs. So when you only pay $40 a month, it ought to be a sign that what you're going to get is a whole lot less.
In the case of Comcast, they are actually pretty up-front these days about speeds. (Bandwidth caps, not so much, but as TFA alludes to, they seem to be working on it.) That "6 megabits" is a burst speed. I don't like Comcast and as a result keep a pretty close eye on them, and they've never advertised it as anything but. If you---or anyone else---thought that you were actually buying a 6Mb constant (~2TB/mo. transfer) connection for $40/mo, you're laughably mistaken. Bandwidth just ain't that cheap.
Has Comcast engaged in some shady advertising in the past? Sure. Back when they called their service "unlimited" internet, they could rightly be taken to task for cutting people off. But they don't advertise that anymore and haven't in years. It's popular around here to sling mud at Comcast, and while there are lots of valid reasons for criticizing them, it's about time customers started wising up and started reading the fine (or not-so-fine) print about what they're signing up for. I have very little sympathy for anyone who takes asterisk-laden advertising copy on faith without question.
While it certainly sucks that residential broadband providers like Comcast oversubscribe their backbone capacity, most people wouldn't like the alternative: it would quickly price HSI out of reach of virtually all consumers.
Comcast is without a doubt pretty evil, and it's a crying shame that we don't have any real competition in most broadband markets, but people whining that they don't get fractional-DS3 service from their cable modem is tiring. In other news, my Volkswagen doesn't go as fast as a Ferrari.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Everything HD is anti-consumer and even anti-producer given the prohibitively high costs of production in HD. It's amazing, it's like they didn't learn a thing from the past, they just keeping doing it the same way they've done it for 50 years using technology to speed up parts of the process as opposed to eliminating steps entirely.
NAB is the epitome of this, it's a huge cluster because there are hundreds of ways to do everything and they are all the same with just a slightly different look to them. Very few take advantage of what modern databases have to offer in organization, metatagging, and cataloging. It's astounding and is no wonder why it costs so much to make a movie or produce a TV show.
HD is all about the content distributors, they weren't making enough money in the past so they push for HD everywhere, on disc and over the air it was all crippled. Going digital for broadcast made sense but we didn't need to go HD at the same time or more importantly, we didn't need to add broadcast flags and encryption. Those exist purely for anti-consumer purposes.
On a positive note, the videos my company is going to start distributing soon will be DRM free in easy to use common formats. Transcoding is trivially easy these days afterall. Thank heavens for the OSS community on that front.
It's amazing the amount of money the big stations spend on cataloging their video when it can all be stored in a database so easy, then referenced and metatagged at will. Then transcription can be associated as well. I have no idea why file based storage took so long to become mainstream.
Why should they have to pay more if they are already paying for "unlimited"?
It always pains me to order beer at a restaurant. Not only am I paying out the arse for it, I have to be lucky for them to have something other than piss water. I'll just take clean water thank you.
But aside from that, it amazes me how people complain about the rising costs of everything, but never seem to notice fountain drinks.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
> If you think about that, it doesn't make sense: If they charge you less power, then you could just sell it to all your neighbors and you'd all come out ahead since you wouldn't have to pay the base higher rate (well, just one time).
You're right it doesn't; I think in areas where the rates do drop like that, it's a result of agreements between the power company and very high-consuming industrial customers. Basically they're getting a "bulk rate", even though there's no reason why they should -- it's not like electricity gets delivered in a dump truck. I suspect politics is involved at some point.
(I suppose maybe industrial customers who are buying high-voltage 3-phase power incur lower line losses, so maybe that justifies a certain discount, but nothing like what I've seen them actually get.)
But I've always thought the same thing when I've lived in an area where the electricity rates went down for large users: why don't neighborhoods get together and buy the power "in bulk" at the industrial rate? I wonder if apartment buildings do that.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
Really? You pay for a 6mbps connection to Comcast? Or do you pay for a connection to Comcast, which is advertised as "UP TO 6mbps"
What's the difference? If I buy a soda and the restaurant says there's "UP TO 3 REFILLS", does that allow them to cut me off at two? Or am I entitled to three, but should restrain myself to two, because they don't really mean it?
I don't have any problem with Comcast implementing a cap. It makes perfect sense. It just needs to be advertised that way, right up front.
"'m not a heavy user by any means"
-- Said a crack addict once.
Seriously, if you are using MORE than 1GB a day, you are a heavy user. And you, are definitely a heavy user considering you have some sort of servers running (bittorrent?). After all, there is no way you can rack up tx>rx unless you are running something like that.
Secondly, you are using 7GB a day. If that usage is over 7 hours a day, then your are using 300kB/s of bandwidth at every single second of those 7 hours!!
Finally, if you are truly not a heavy user, then your box is riddled with spam bots or similar malware.
30GB/month is moderate usage (including watch 2 hours of youtube a day). 0-2GB/mo is low usage.
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! --
> Even my cell phone plan only jumps from $0.125 to $0.35
Your cell phone does that today.
I don't know how long you've had a cellphone, but time was (back in the mid 90s, on AMPS), they'd kick over to rates that were over a dollar a minute if you went over your "plan".*
Today's cellphone plans are Ralph Nader's wet dream compared to what they were like back when they were run by the Baby Bells. That's what competition -- even the admittedly limited competition in cellphone coverage -- does to a market.
As long as there's only a couple of options for broadband, expect them to continue screwing the customer as hard as they possibly can, just like the early days of cellphones.
* My experience was with Bell Atlantic Mobile, later Bell Atlantic NYNEX Mobile, the Baby Bell incumbent carrier in Southern New England. I think when I first got a phone, non-plan minutes were about $1.25. I distinctly remember when they went down under $1/min. You really did not want to go over your plan...and the phones back then didn't really give you a good indication of how much you'd used. Fun times.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I am personally highly skeptical and cynical about the "more channels" issues. "57 channels and nothing on" I experienced in my youth. I don't want redundancy nor do I think the average consumer wants even more channels at lower quality and higher prices. Watching re-runs (or making money off of the draconian copy-right laws via commercials and watermarks) is not an option for me. I'd rather have an antenna (Flinstones style... bah, I'm aging myself) and get good quality local TV channels for 'free' rather than pay the owners of these regulated resources money to watch low quality (content and resolution-wise) television. Yep this is a 'bitch' for me. I don't think most consumers who really thought about it would disagree with me. But most consumers aren't educated, and most consumers (I would think) are in the (traditional) 18 to 35 age range (something I recently passed... boohoo, I cry real non-robotic tears) so perhaps they are getting 'educated' (or conditioned) to believe that low quality is good quality (or at least good-enough-for-me quality). I hope not, but children these days have little respect (for quality). I'm skeptical the typical viewer cares about quality above the minimum threshold of a poorly encoded dvd. Fair enough, but if a person buys an HD capable TV then I would think that the consumer wants HD quality TV. In the near future of course, the consumer will not have a choice.
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....
Personally that's the approach that I think they should be pursuing, not hard caps. I don't do a lot on my up-to-10Mbps connection, but when I do I want it to be fast. I'd rather not have the economics screwed up because a bunch of freedom fighters are saturating the shared pipe 24 hours a day (and no, the cable companies can't just suck it up. My business is currently paying just under $600 a month for a 5Mbps SLAd synchronous connection, with a monthly cap no less. To think that $40 a month gets you unlimited 10Mbps is just asinine).
You are not paying remotely the cost for a unlimited 7Mbps connection. You are paying to basically share a connection. Don't act all surprised -- we've had this same boring debate on Slashdot about two dozen times over the past 10 years (the 98 in my username is because I signed up in 1998). "I WANT MY UNLIMITED INTERNET!" the petulant cries ring out.
Or maybe the sender can't saturate your pipe. On the real dedicated side of things, 7Mbps is quite expensive, much less enough to saturate lots of simultaneous 7Mbps users.
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.
The problem is that this starts opening the door to the "slippery slope" of them charging more and more for overages, and setting the caps lower and lower. It's a cheap, easy way to make more profit for the shareholders in the short-term, which is all anyone cares about any more. Just turn some numbers down, and watch the overage fees come pouring in.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I'm sorry, but in my mind you are certainly a heavy user. Perhaps not to you, but if you average out internet use, the monthly bandwidth usage per account will probably be below 10GB. You cannot download 256GB/month and claim to not be a heavy user - as the great grandparent said, that means you're pulling 800kbit/s constantly. What do you download?
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.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
And of course, then we'd hack that and get unlimited internet
I agree that 250GB isn't much now that HD streaming video seems like it might take off.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
No he didn't start tracking until the 20th of January so that month's number is low. And it's not the end of the month yet so May's number is low.
If you consider 11 days in January = 61.67 GB that's ~5.6 GB per day. So if that was an accurate of per day bandwidth the entire month it would be about 174 GB for the month, much closer to his February number. We can do the same thing with May and find 7.715 GB per day and a projected 239.165 GB for this month.
Overall if you were to plot the numbers it shows a steady increase in usage from January to now. So if anything you should have left out the "and got her back in May" part because that would imply he's slowly sinking deeper into the world of the internet after February.
So, if I go on a linux try-fest, and download the latest Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix, et. al CDs, then I am a heavy user? 1GB 2 CDs. I've probably downloaded these same images a number of times and then blown them away. I lose the CDs since I don't label them and it's cheaper to grab another copy than to look. p.s. I did this just yesterday for a system migration, New Debian for a server; new Ubunut for a Mythtv machine, new Knoppix to work out some integration bugs.
Using the Freedom of Speech while I still have it.
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?
I'm fairly certain I'm reading it right =) Let me explain why it's cheaper to offer more of something at lower rates. It's similar to Sam's Club/Costco, as well as huge purchasers of anything. You buy in bulk, you save due to large-scale efficiencies. With regards to my utility, once I've paid for my first X kwH, they've recouped their costs with regards to delivering that power to me. The next block of khW (or gallons of water, or therms, pick your resource) doesn't need to have the initial cost of delivery built in, so the utility can continue to make their margin off of the additional resource sale.
Sure, pal, sure. First they get their foot in the door with a 250GiB monthly limit. Then they'll tighten that down to a smaller figure, claiming they're doing it to "further improve network performance for a better overall customer experience". Before you know it, everyone will be paying over-use fees every month because they dared to download a couple movies from Amazon Unbox. STFU.
No one at comcast is paying for unlimited. You are paying for a pipe that can burst up to 6mbps or whatever rate.
It's just now there is a policy that tells you what their limit is, and how much you pay for going over it...
So you aren't paying for "unlimited"...They are now being upfront and saying, you are paying for 6mbps up to 250GB per month. If you go over 250gb then here is what it costs you.
First people were complaining that there was some mysterious cap that they would kill your service is you exceeded it...Now people are complaining that they are being upfront about what the cap is...Despite the fact that the bandwidth cap is about 10 times MORE than necessary for even a "moderate" user.
I'm sorry, but if you are downloading 3 hours of HDTV every day then you don't qualify as a "regular" or "moderate" user...You are a power user, and if you have bigger bandwidth needs, then you should pay for it.
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.
Monthly Customer Charge 8.85
First 20 Therms 20 @ $0.1473 2.95
21 - 50 Therms 30 @ $0.0579 1.74
Over 50 Therms 28.07 @ $0.0519 1.46
Except they're not paying for unlimited, they're paying for 250GB. I think that was made pretty clear not only in the article, but in the headline also.
Why? So they can pay more and you still get degraded service because you share the pop with them?
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.
Do people seriously think that watching HD video over the web is going to take off? If I wanted to watch HD content which is more likely, I sit down in front of my computer and go to huluhd.com or I turn on the television?
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.
The "reduce infrastructure upgrade costs" seems to be the motivation for what Comcast is considering - and is effectively a two tier system with a lot of cheap bandwidth for most users and much more expensive bandwidth for high usage users. It would be refreshing to actually have well articulated rules and limits and it will encourage people like myself (and at least one person upthread) to actually look around on their local drives to see if they had already downloaded the Linux distribution before downloading it again.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Indeed. Although they *should* advertise the quota, since it's a piece of information people might use to decide between providers.
that $20/month 6MBPS sounds like a good deal compared to your current $40/month 1MBPS, but that's not all the information available, is it.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
Both my power and water rates have *lower* rates for the "over"usage compared to the rates for the initial consumption (I can see this being different in areas with water shortages, but around here there's plenty of water, and the local utility likes you to use more to boost their revenues). The price per cubic foot is less the more cubic feet I use. With the electricity, any power I use over a certain amount is sold to me at a discount (I never cross the line, though). It's like that so people who use electric heating in their home pay a lower rate for their power.
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.
A real 6Mb connection is a fraction DS3 with a SLA. Ballpark, you're talking about $3k a month for that kind of service, and that's assuming you live in a major metro area where the loop won't be exorbitant. For a DS3-based service, you may very well be correct (possibly because of the way stuff is tariffed?). But...
My office just switched over from bonded DS1's with Broadwing (went down frequently) to a 15 Mbps Ethernet service offered by Time Warner. We "inspected" the equipment and it's Ethernet over GFP[*] over OC-12 (we believe configured as UPSR). $1200/mo. I believe that is several hundred less than the 2xDS1 that we had.
Marc
[*] GFP = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_Framing_Procedure
-- PGP keyID: 0x4C95994D
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.
if thats the cap, and its so high that you shouldnt be able to hit it then why make a big deal out of posting it. The other catch is that they generally dont event tend to be up to provide that rate for 31 days... the "contract / eula / agreements" for most of the cable companies expressly state that they make no claim or warranty of service quality and level which is more what seems to bug me. Before they go out and publish a cap I want them to publish a warrantied min. If you want to charge me extra for using too much you have to provide me the means to be Refunded when you don't provide me enough. Thats my gripe with it.
they of course dont like this because it somewhat prevents them from the paradise they are in now. they dont have or have to have the capacity they allegedly sell to consumer. They profit from lots of people who underuse their connections. It seems to me that somehow this is broken. If I am paying for a service then there needs to be a metric by which I can determine if said service is provided. They go out of the way to at least try to deny the existence of such a thing in the user agreements. This really isnt unique to comcast; if you think about it any of them could be doing it without telling you because they don't really seem to have to.
reminds me of something when i was younger. i was in the car with my father who went to the drive through atm at our bank. He was making a deposit or withdrawal (cant remember and it doesnt matter). I don't remember why or how it came up but for some reason the teller communicated to us that "there is a maximum amount of money" that could be withdrawn/deposited via the drive up atm. if you go over the limit you have to go inside to a real teller. Naturally my father asked, "whats the limit?" Her reply of course: "I'm sorry I'm not allowed to divulge that information, but don't worry you are well under it." The only way we would know we were over it apparently is when we try and they tell us you are over please come in, let me undo the in progress transaction and I hope you didnt (did) waste too much time in line for the drive up...
naturally we moved our safe deposit box, and accounts to another bank within a week or so.. and have been with the same bank (give or take name changes from mergers/buyouts) ever since. the bank we left was bought and then closed within a year. too bad that won't happen with a cable/isp these days. time warner / comcast seem to be able to do whatever they please
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
Running lines between data centers is cheap, relatively. Your home isn't a data center, however, and does not have the economy of scale. The "last mile" is the expensive part.
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.
When I want to watch HD content (or any TV content) I go to my computer. I'm already paying out the wazoo for Comcast broadband, so why should I give them more money for cable TV, when I can watch them online, on my schedule, at no added cost?
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...)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You are a late poster and you obviously haven't read my previous posts. It's important so I will restate it: That's more than a dollar per Gigabyte usage for the cheapest plan. Between $6.00 and $1.37 per Gigabyte depending on your plan (without going over any bandwidth limits). All in all the $1.50 penalty for bandwidth over-usage falls into line with the regular plans they will be offering. One could assume that bandwidth usage includes both uploads and downloads, so for people who use something like bittorent a lot, you can divide by two (ceteris paribus) and get the average 'cost' of a download. - Ref: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=546978&cid=23338068
It's should be listed as "800Kb/s, burstable 7Mb/s" or simply "250GB/month"
Don't be short sighted.
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.
I remember when it was said that if you were downloading more that a Megabyte a day you were a heavy user. Probably one of those bandwidth hogs that is transferring bmp files. Lol I mean who freaking sends bmp files, what losers. Get a clue and use Jpeg or Gif. The problem with a cap is that you may see it as being more than you would ever need, but progress does not care for where a bar is set or how inconceivable of a cap it is. Todays heavy users are tomorrow's casual web surfers. And when the cap is set now you will have to fight to have it raised in the future. Let me tell you, don't count on Comcast being generous and lifting the caps for you in 10-20 years. As more and more casual users start to consume more and more bandwidth Comcast is going to see their revenues grow in proportion. Do you honestly think they will just give away the money?
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.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
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.
if you have to ask, then you will never understand the answer.
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?
You must wait a little bit before using this resource; please try again later.
I think you misunderstood.
I said 'too reasonable' solely as pertains to the likelihood of 250GB being the real number. Clearly they're free to put whatever cap they want on the service.
But a rumor that they'll outright allow people to download almost three times as much as the 'superusers' it recently banned for 'abusing the network' is laughable.
If they do put a cap in writing, that will be good. If it happens. But if you meet someone who honestly thinks it might be 250GB/mo, you should pitch her some real estate opportunities.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Indeed. 250GB seems on a high end for them.
Maybe they're talking 'bits' instead of 'bytes'. ie: 250Gigabits seems to be approaching the upper limit of what they'd likely consider reasonable usage.
Likely some manager said ``the upper limit should be 50% more than what a 56kbps modem would do in a month'' or something nebulous like that... which actually comes out to ~250-ish Gigabits.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Turn that pity-me boat around, boy.
You are right. A 2GB cap seemed reasonable 10 years ago.
It didn't *stay* at 2GB, now did it, sparky?
You're assumption presumes that the current 250GB limit will not rise based on a limit of a decade ago that *did* rise.
Can you see the flawed logic there, or do you really need it spelled out for ya?
Learn to read the small print.
I agree that 250GB isn't much now that HD streaming video seems like it might take off. Or, that is why they are doing it now, get us used to paying extra for when we really start needing the bandwidth..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
Take a look at your power or water bill sometime. They both charge graduated rates based on over usage.
I'm not going to weigh in one way or the other on whether this cap is evil or not, however comparing bandwidth to water or power is kind of silly. Water and power are metered because they are produced and have a fixed production cost. Water is a thing, if I use three gallons of water, it's three gallons someone else cannot use. I buy water by the gallon from the water company just as I buy food or orange juice (or, amusingly enough, water) from the grocery store. It just happens to come through pipes and require a bit less driving on my part. Electricity is not a physical thing, but it has a direct per kilowatt production cost. Depending on where you are, it costs the power company X amount of coal, water, nuclear material, whatever to make that power and force it down the lines to your house. You are buying one unit of power for X dollars.
Bandwidth isn't produced, its value is more along the lines of a service. You pay someone to ship your packages between X and Y, you pay someone to ship your packet between X and Y. Like UPS, Comcast has some costs associated with shipping your stuff on their lines, but also like UPS they are able to aggregate those cost much more easily than an actual producer by using economies of scale. It would cost a LOT to connect your personal house to the Internet, but it cost a lot less on a person by person basis to connect your neighborhood, less still for your town. Similarly, it would cost a fortune to ship your package, all by itself, to China, but that cost is aggregated with all the other people doing the same thing.
This is not to say that Comcast could not, or even should not, meter Internet service (I think they'd be foolish, but I'm not going to go into a whole separate argument here on that), rather it is to say that if they do it will not be the same as power and water. Comcast has spent their infrastructure money, and upgrades and maintenance are not the same as production costs. The power company makes money off of you with the formula:
(("Cost of one Kilowatt" - "Cost to Produce one Kilowatt") * "Number of Kilowatts Used") - "Cost of Maintenance and Overhead"
Comcast would look like:
("Cost of one Gigabyte" * "Number of Gigabytes Used") - "Cost of Maintenance and Overhead"
Which seems a lot less fair.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Interestingly enough, in New Zealand (which was among the leading broadband nations in the early days of broadband deployment) most consumers till have a 3 gig limit (@ $39.95).
You can pay more (59$ for a 10 gig limit). Over that and you will pay a lot and will get overage charges ($149.95 for 50 gig with Excess Usage 2c/ MB)
So quit whining. You guys have it good.
https://www.telecom.co.nz/broadband/select/1,10627,205728-204466,00.html
In other news, top Youtube videos dropped from 200,000 views a day to 20,000 views.
Would this finally mean we get nice gui utilities showing you how much bandwidth you've used during the month, and how close you are to the cap so you know when you're close to getting cut off? Maybe take it one step further and generalize this to have networking join cpu and disk I/O in being first-class citizens when it comes to resource scheduling?
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.
My God, it's Full of Source!
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.
It's a common tactic. Advertise a product, get favorable reviews, then start cutting corners to make the product cheaper and increase your margins. In this case, it's "Sell 'unlimited' Internet. Drop the term 'unlimited.' Cap bandwidth/charge overages." And with HD: "Sell HD as higher quality. Drop quality slowly so that people don't notice a lot. Profit."
Sure, here. Buy ours. It's cryptographically tethered to the cable service and it comes for free with the cable when you commit to 2 years of service. OH WAIT WHAT'S THAT YOU WANT TO BE ABLE TO CONTROL THE VOLUME? LET ME SIGN YOU UP FOR THE PREMIUM REMOTE CONTROL PLAN WHICH IS A STEAL AT ONLY 5 CENTS PER BUTTONPRESS.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
I can see (by merely observing your excessive use of CAPS) why you call yourself spazdor :)
Like I said, volume control costs extra. ;)
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
I'd ask AC for a cite, but that's like asking my dog to say "thank you" when I feed her.
What our friend Anonymous seems to forget is that a) a "large data centre" is far from home, and b) data centre pricing goes up rather sharply when you want to add equipment to the mix. It goes up again when you decide to turn it on, which consumes power and cooling and waste heat all at the same time.
No longer do datacentres care about bandwidth (when you've got two dozen providers laying fibre to your doorstep it ceases to be a priority); Kilowatt Hours per Foot is the new math.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
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.
Wow. Here in NZ we STILL pay over $1 a minute for calls. About $1.50 usually.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
So what your saying is... your a single guy living by himself and only takes into account situations where ONLY one computer is used in the home.
Either your a looser or a spin doctor... I am going with looser.
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!
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
> I'm skeptical the typical viewer cares about quality above the minimum threshold of a poorly encoded dvd.
Typical viewers? Maybe, maybe not. Now ask somebody with a huge TV in a small living room, and they'll tell you that it ABSOLUTELY matters. If you're sitting 8 feet or less away from a 56+ inch TV, anything less than DVD picture quality looks like a moving wall of quivering LEGO blocks. HD video, however, looks great at that distance, and you can enjoy the same immersive ambiance you get from good seats at a movie theater.
A lot of people who think HD isn't a big deal have been influenced by the real-world behavior of natively 1080i60 TVs. There's a good reason why 720p60 doesn't look much better than 480p60 on a 1080i60 set... the TV almost always resamples it from 1280x720 to 1280x540, then shows each line twice. You end up with more horizontal detail, but only slightly more vertical detail than 480i60. By the same token, "real" 1080i60 doesn't look all that impressive on a 1080i60 set compared to 480p60, either, because slightly less than half of its vertical resolution has to be averaged away to keep the screen from flickering like a 1980s radar weather map on crack. Compare 480i60 to 480p60, 720p60, and 1080p24/30/60 on a natively 1080p60 set, and you WILL see dramatic improvements with each step up... though natively-interlaced 1080i60 content (ie, not from 24fps film) will almost ALWAYS look like crap on a natively 1080p60 TV, because affordable motion-vector adaptive deinterlacing just doesn't exist at 1920x1080 yet... and thanks to HDCP, today's homebrew crowd can't repurpose an old PC into a ghetto-fabulous deinterlacer and enjoy almost the same quality "legitimate" customers pay $10-20k to enjoy with dedicated video processors.
So what? We all know we don't download steady all month long, let alone at only 100KB/sec especially if our burst is 6 or 7mbps. I use DUMeter to see what my usage is just for curiousity sake. I've had it installed since mid-January. Since then I've gone over 250GB one time and that was in March. That month I downloaded about 20 dvd movies I guess. I'm not sure what all was downloaded now but I know some of it was movies but it also included newsgroup headers (which can be gigabytes over a month's time) and emule running idle (with downloaders' bandwidth set to the lowest setting on my end) can chew up a gigabyte per day by itself. I could live with 250GB a month being the cap because my next highest month is only 148GB. However if I'm close to my cap I would want to be emailed say 50 GB prior to the cap so I can slow my usage down so as to not get caught with an extra $10 or so overage charge.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Wow. Can you tell me where you are so I won't go there? :)
I'm quite happy to order beer in a restaurant. Sure, I pay extra for it, but I'd hardly say I'm paying "out the arse" by any stretch. Someone else is responsible for cleaning up after me, my beer comes cold to the table and quite often it's served by an attractive young thing. Said beer accompanies good food (I don't frequent bad restaurants, naturally. ;), good friends and a good time.
But aside from that, it amazes me how people complain about the rising costs of everything, but never seem to notice fountain drinks.Or furniture, or stereo equipment (electronics), or or or ...
I personally don't drink pop (soda, soft drinks, whatever) unless it's mixed with Crown Royal so the horrendous markup doesn't affect me in the least.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Indeed. I've noticed this in China, though it's a little bit inconsistent.
Almost all the TVs you can buy now are HD-capable to some degree, but try getting some HD DVDs...none. I don't think there's any HD TV either (not 100% sure about that).
The (fake) DVDs seem to be going the other way. You can get DVD-9s (ie 9GB disks), but they are usually either for longer content that doesn't fit well on the smaller disks, or they cram them full of multiple highly compressed films.
I recently bought a pack of war movies. Three DVD9 disks for a total of 4RMB (USD 0.50) containing about 20 different movies. Quality was what I'm sure many would call completely crap, but they're still quite watchable - good enough.
It also reminds me of my ReplayTV (when I lived in the US - it's still working, so I'm told) - we always opted for higher compression/lower resolution in order to up the capacity of our storage. I think this is the normal choice rather than storing fewer shows at higher quality.
Max.
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.
Between Work, Wife, family, Xbox live, Joost, Gaming, News, Weather, other multi-media and me telecommuting full time i easily plow through 250gb a month.
its not that hard to do.
640k should be enough for everyone
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Change that 250GB to 80GB, decrease the available speed, increase the price, and you've now got what Australia has!
Enjoy!
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
We put a cheapish computer together just to hook up to the television, so we're doing both - sitting in front of the computer AND turning on the television. My sister and her husband are nearly technophobes, but with two kids running their schedule they've asked me to help them set up the same way. I can certainly see HD over the web taking off, although with the bandwidth issues you point out it's not going to kill off scheduled broadcast for a while.
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.
Would you rather they didn't announce their caps and resumed acting as self-appointed copyright cops, throttling everything to a crawl and disconnecting users for going over their mystery cap? Want decent service without hidden limits? Things are starting to look up. Want an SLA and more bandwidth than God? Pay for it.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Seriously, if you are using MORE than 1GB a day, you are a heavy user. And you, are definitely a heavy user considering you have some sort of servers running (bittorrent?). After all, there is no way you can rack up tx>rx unless you are running something like that.
That was probably true 5-10 years ago. But now that video clip (Youtube, Google, Joost) sites are popular on the web with regular users, it's definitely no longer true. Plus Netflix, Apple TV, downloading patches, etc. Or uploading photos to photo sharing sites. It all adds up real quick when you're connecting to the net for hours at a time.
A heavy user today is more likely to be over 5GB per day. A medium user who likes lots of video uses 1-2GB per day.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Or, to stay in the legal realm, iTunes TODAY sends their HD movies out at 4Mbps... and they really look bad. X-Box sends them out at 6Mbps... and they are better but still pretty bad. Over-the-air HD is 19Mbps, though it has the old MPEG2 compression and none of the new goodness. 10Mbps is probably good enough for most people, but bear in mind that Blu-Ray is 40Mbps, and is capable of using the much newer, more efficient codecs.
A lot of it depends on the video source. For 720p, that is clean, not a lot of background movement, and is mostly talking heads... you can push a MPEG4 codec down to a bit under 2Mbps and not see issues. Maybe even down to 1.25Mbps.
For busier footage (such as FRAPS caps of action games - WoW, Oblivion, FEAR, etc) or for grainy footage, you'll need a MPEG4 bitrate in the 3-4Mbps range to avoid blockiness. The farther you go below 3Mbps with 720p, the more likely that a fast camera pan will show distortion and artifacts. I went with 3Mbps as my "standard" because it gave me very good results 99% of the time.
I wish they had waited a year or two longer before settling on MPEG2. They could have gone with MPEG4 at 5Mbps, resulting in a crisp and clear 1080i/720p picture without using up all that bandwidth that MPEG2 eats up.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I would be fine if they let me have roleover limits, kinda like AT&T does on minutes. Shoot, its only 10 in the morning, and I have already transfered 2 gig of data today alone, and it was not copyrighted material but material for work. During busy months, I can easily do 10-20 gig a DAY, then there will be other days when I may not even transfer 50 meg. I do not want to be punished on a month when I have to transfer 300-350 gig when the month before I transfered under 50 gig.
Stop being a cheapskate and pay for a business class cable connection.
Back when I was a Verizon DSL customer (1.5Mbps down, 384Kbps up), I paid for the business service. They *never* hassled me about bandwidth usage, even when I'd max out the DSL line for days at a time. I was a customer there for about 7 years.
So far Cablevision in NY hasn't hassled me either. And I've pulled down a few dozen GB in a single day, a few times per month. But again, I pay the extra $50/mo for business level service.
Things are starting to look up where?
Has comcast ever increased its speeds to a competitive level lately? Have they done anything out of the ordinary to show good business ethics?
We already have SLAs, everyone has one in the way that they agree to comcast's services. It's just not a whole lot is guaranteed.
Do we deserve a helluva lot more than we're getting, and are we getting scammed in that aspect? completely.
Still, even the part about an explicit cap is just the words of an 'unnamed insider'. As such, I'm scraping a bucket full of hot air to respond with "They might be honest sometime in the near future...possibly."
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
You don't see articles about ASUS considering a polka-dotted laptop or Apple considering a diamond-studded Ipod.
The fact is, what Comcast decides is what millions of us are stuck with, if we want broadband. There is no alternative. That is the issue.
If nobody is competing, then we are all failing. Of course everyone wants to get rich as is and not step forward, but why would that exclude comcast?
Also, verizon as crappy as some of the things they've done are, have increased their speeds. FIOS 50/10 (I don't remember the exact number it might be 30/10) is not a bad deal, in places we can actually get it.
I don't think things will even start moving towards "not getting worse" until we see some real change, I digress. Especially for comcast since a majority of its customers have no other reasonable options as stated. This is like "pay for a BMW to get a kia or pay for a kia to get a bicycle". Not exactly in the same level...and if comcast waits until verizon creeps up on them, that would just be a very explicit example of horrible business sense. Waiting for your competition to crush you instead of building up better service so that they can't....this is what makes investors run away and why people are so critical of comcast, because everyone has been screaming and hollering for improvements for years. Responding when you have to by dragging your feet doesn't wipe away the "you've been doin jack shit for years" view.
You get 250GB of data transfer? Seriosly, wtf?
*Note: $150 value comes from story of Comcasts's attempt to rival FiOS
My old city (19711) did this (buy in bulk).
We payed half what I pay not in Philadelphia, AND the city was able to profit some, leading to essentially non-existent taxes (in Philly I pay a large wage tax, and 1% sales tax).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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?
Interesting. That's a pretty darn good price for a 15Mb pipe; I'll have to look into that and see if it's available in our area ... right now we're using DS1 service from Cavtel with a DSL backup and it's not particularly reliable.
It's been a long time since I've looked into it, but I think the majority of the cost for T-carrier service is the loop fee, and less so the port. It strikes me as odd that a fiber-based service would be cheaper than T, since T just uses two copper loops, which I always assumed the phone company had a lot of, but maybe that's not correct. Maybe the OC-based service is cheaper because they'd like to move people in that direction and off of copper?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The content industry has people paying for $hit. Comca$t pa$$e$ the$e co$t$ along to you. The bill increases yearly, and the content gets worse and more infested with annoying commercials.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
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.
Ok. So, I did the following yesterday,
* downloaded Vista with SP1 iso (MSDN subscription)
* watched 2 hours of video (youtube quality)
* resynced my GIT tree of Linux
* uploaded new versions of my apps for customers
* played a few hours of eve online (mostly AFK hauling though - I only have so much time in the day!)
How much bandwidth did I use?? 3.6GB
Yes, 3600MB. And that includes the 3GB diskimage of Vista that I don't exactly download all the time. So, if I didn't download Vista, that would result in 500MB a day. And that includes 2 *hours* of video that look almost as good as regular analog TV!
How do you get 1-2GB per day without downloaded DVD rips and/or ISO images, I have no idea. Youtube video is about 150MB an hour.
I stand by my assertion that heavy users use more than 1GB of bandwidth a day. Regular users that have a life use less.
BTW: As per the original reply, the bandwidth used was about 3500MB received and 70MB upload.
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.
The only reason I can afford my 25 Mbps synchronous FiOS connection is because the vast majority of consumer connections are 99.9% idle, so Verizon can flat price accordingly.
Currently 90% of consumers continue to subsidize the 10% of ultraleechers in our monthly plan.
SO, to say no to usage-based tiering and caps is to say yes to paying for leecher's usage.
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.
The flaw with this logic is that you should get what you pay for. So if you have a 7MB connection, then logically you should be able to download the exact amount of data that a 7MB connection would provide if you used it for 24/7/365. I mean just because you have a ferrari doesn't mean you HAVE to drive 300km/h, but it BETTER mean you can if you bought the car under that impression. So lets stick to the 'impression' vs. the reality since the reality is all 'telco/cable' based ISP's oversell their features to be competitive, but once you're a customer then it doesn't matter. Real ISP's are far more upfront, but then you pay more for it also.
The reality is that most providers are 'presuming' you won't use it all (and heck they'll complain if you do).
As for passing the charges to leechers, well most leechers I know are more than willing to pay for bandwidth, heck they probably have more than one internet access provider. Really having cable AND DSL isn't that expensive, not much of an improvement but does give you closer to 100% uptime for a very reasonable cost.
Bittorrent was created to solve the leeching problem, except it means ISP's have to consider improving UPLOAD speeds, and this they are totally against doing since it will reflect highly in overall service performance. It would also (with some providers) mean increasing the down rates too. So they don't really want to address the real issue.
Jeruvy
Some people, like me, have their computer connected to their HDTV. So the answer to your question is yes.
Spelled Please :)
Well, Time Warner doesn't have much copper... a year or two ago, they ran fiber down many of the major roads in the area.
An unbelievable amount of labor went into getting the fiber from the street into the building.
We are two buildings away from a major intersection. They did some trenching very close to that intersection to run the fiber over to a telephone pole (and for possibly other reasons). Then strung the fiber (heavily cladded/protected the whole time mind you - not the yellow cladding that you are used to seeing) across about five telephone poles (over a driveway), then back down to the ground. From there, they go under a parking lot to the corner of the building, up the outside of the building (in conduit). Many days of work from multiple people.
We're at the entrance to a business park. What I don't know is what they'll do if other companies in the business park get fiber as well (if it will come to our building, or also go all the way back to the intersection).
Marc
-- PGP keyID: 0x4C95994D