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Comcast Floats a 250GB Monthly Bandwidth Limit
techmuse writes "Comcast is considering the imposition of bandwidth caps and reductions in network bandwidth to customers who, while paying for the use of a certain amount of bandwidth, dare to actually use it! Gizmodo has more on the subject." Reader Acererak points out that it would take some pretty heavy usage (by current standards) to hit the cap described. Bear in mind, too, that these reports are based on the word of an unnamed "insider," rather than an officially announced policy.
250GB ought to be enough for anybody.
God damn it people need to learn if you say unlimited on the ad it means fucking unlimited. If you don't want people using it you need to say so.
It's time people got together and sued these fuckers that do this crap.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
I'm fine with that as a limit if they also agree to stop tampering with the connections of anyone not in violation of it.
Note that Comcast has a monopoly on Internet access in many markets (for example, where they are the sole cable provider, and DSL is not offered.) For users in these markets, there will be no alternative provider to switch to.
250Gb isn't that bad at all. There are some ISP's in the UK that have limits of as little as 1Gb a month.
Although most do have limits higher than that, they're rarely more than about 30Gb a month, if even that.
The few that have no caps (like Virgin) tend to throttle the fuck out of your bandwidth at peak times.
It's all a joke, really. Luckily I live near an exchange with some decent ISP's that don't have monthly caps, but it's only a matter of time I suppose.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Frankly, I'll be glad if they name a cap instead of this nebulous one they may or may not have, and may or may not enforce. And 250GB is pretty good, uTorrent downloads near-constantly for me, and I think I'd have trouble hitting that. That's about 8GB a day.
I've heard you get an angry phone call above 100gb and have kept track of my usage via NetLimiter to stay in or around that number, looks like its time to get seeding!
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This is actually an improvement over their current model of "We have a cap, but we won't tell you what it is".
Like a previous poster said, though, if they promise unlimited, they have to deliver unlimited. They should indeed be sued for not doing so.
Here's how to get started on fixing our cable woes: Go to your city's website and find info on the municipal cable board. They likely meet monthly or bimonthly, and their meetings will be open to the public. Get there early and make sure someone on the board knows that you have something to say. Hopefully, there will be a local Comcast (or, in my case, Charter) representative there. During the meeting, the board will open up for public comment. At this point, make generalized claims about how Comcast is purposefully hindering innovation which is bad for the city (anecdotal evidence will likely not work here unless it supports a generalized claim... the cable board is not there to hear your personal story). Assert that maintaining a franchising agreement with Comcast is beneficial only to Comcast and that residents of your city are being unfairly price-gouged.
Now, here's the tricky part: Keep going to the meetings, asserting the same thing. Heck, try to get a group to go. Make sure the board knows that Comcast is pissing off a bunch of really smart people. This works even better if this happens in multiple cities.... the folks at the cable HQs will get these odd reports of citizens showing up at tons of municipalities and complaining.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
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.
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!
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.
One of the scary things about this is that it will make new, high bandwidth, applications of the Internet infeasible. If you had been asked what was a reasonable amount of data to download 3 or 4 years ago, you would probably give a much lower value than you do today. Why? You would not have been using many of the services that you do now, because they simply did not exist. Modern services are much more video and audio intensive. Ads take much more bandwidth than they used to. We are seeing a transition of services traditionally provided by the cable companies, such as streaming of television programs, moving to the Internet. Calls on Skype now support high quality video. Software distributed over the Internet (for example, the latest version of your favorite Linux distribution) can easily run close to a gigabyte per instance. You can imagine that new applications will follow soon that we haven't imagined yet. Comcast is attempting to do the following:
1) Eliminate unprofitable users. These are users who do more than just check their e-mail and surf the web. These are the ones who actually *use* their connections Rather than investing in infrastructure, Comcast simply wants to get rid of anyone that it doesn't make money on.
2) Eliminate competition with its own cable offerings. If you can watch the latest news from CNN or TV shows from NBC streamed *from* CNN or NBC, then you don't need to pay $60 / month for cable TV. This is a major threat to Comcast, and they are trying to make it infeasible.
3) Gain consumer acceptance of limits, then lower them later. The cable companies have a history of raising prices 5-10% per year (much greater than inflation). They can do to this because they have monopoly power in many markets. You can expect Comcast to behave in a similar manner with data. Want to fight back? Do you have many alternative providers? If not, you are stuck.
I don't mind a cap, so long as you can buy more once you hit it for a reasonable price.
But in this case (which is not official, BTW), it sounds like they are going to change $15 for an extra 10GB! That is far too high. I mean, assuming you pay $50/month, the first 250GB are only $0.20 each... and it goes up to $1.50??? That's pretty peculiar. It also doesn't seem to reflect the cost of bandwidth. Giganews charges $14 for 25GB, for instance.
I fear that we will quickly approach the dreaded cell-phone bill in complexity here.
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.
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!
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've gotten calls two different months, the first because I used over half a terabyte one month, the other because I was in the top 10% of bandwidth users for that month. Both times they wouldn't give me a clear answer on what the cap is, and threatened that another violation would get my cable suspended for a year. Screw 250 gigs a month, I can't live with those limits in my household of torrent users. Why haven't I switched already? Comcast has a monopoly at my apartment complex and I'm moving to a WOW supported house.
Jonah HEX
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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!
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)
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.
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.
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.
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."
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."
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.
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.
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."
"'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.
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).
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.
It's should be listed as "800Kb/s, burstable 7Mb/s" or simply "250GB/month"
Don't be short sighted.
I have no expectations of a dedicated 7Mb connection. I fully realize it will be shared and I'll be lucky to ever get a sustained connection at half that or even a quarter.
Yes I get good burst speeds and low latency, which are fine, but when someone pays $100+ a month for cable/internet I expect them to let me use it as much as I want. If that means downloading 15GB files every night so be it.
The point was more that I'm fairly certain I could use 250GB, but the limiting factor is how slow my actual connection is regardless of what I pay for. If they realistically know that I will see the same performance in a 3Mb, 5Mb, 7Mb line, then they shouldn't charge differently for them. If I pay for a separate level of connection I expect there to be some gain for it, even if that means my share of the overall pipe is 200k on average instead of 150k.