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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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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."
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.