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Comcast To Cap Data Transfers At 250 GB In October
JagsLive writes with this story from PC Magazine: "Comcast has confirmed that all residential customers will be subject to a 250 gigabyte per month data limit starting October 1. 'This is the same system we have in place today,' Comcast wrote in an amendment to its acceptable use policy. 'The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted.' The cable provider insisted that 250 GB is "an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. ... As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage,' Comcast said Thursday. 'If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,' according to the AUP."
Looks like I got fios just in time
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
Time to find a new home for my Pr0n server. :(
Provided they tell you that up front. Not telling you and still capping your service is most charitably considered sleazy and is hopefully something they could get sued/prosecuted for.
And what about the screwing around with P2P traffic? Are they still going to do that and pretend that they aren't?
...should be enough for anybody.
I want my FIOS.
I want congress to SMACK THE TELCOS HARD. They have been collecting Billions of dollars in fees to provide Broadband and have delivered nothing.
I want the money paid back with interest NOW!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
And hell, if you're a little devious...those connections will run fine split into a MythTV box with an analog card, to get all of extended basic, and if you split that off into a HDHomerun...you can scan and get all the unencrypted QAM Digital and HD channels out there.
At least..so I hear. Anyway, that should more than compensate for a slightly higher monthly fee for internet service....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
That's still not much of a limit. 250GB/month is over 8GB/day. I don't think I downloaded that much even when I was on a college connection.
Visit the
thats about 1mbit average for the whole month
in comparison i have server clusters pushing ~1.5 gbit average in certain US datacenter @ 5$ / mbit / month outgoing
Much as I hate it, I'd rather spend the money on a Comcast Business connection than worry about whether or not I'm getting close to some artificial cap.
I FTP things in and out of my apartment all the damned time, including backup image files and the like, let alone dealing with torrents or streaming video. I'm sure I transfer more than 10GB a day.
Disgusting as it is, I don't have any other high speed alternative.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
5 Blu-Ray quality movies?
Is 250Gb at 10 Mb tak 416 hour? did I do that math right?
416.17 days non stop downloading at peak?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I believe the plan is, this is fine now so nobody gripes. Same as it ever was, I don't notice the cap so there's effectively no cap, right?
In 5 years, 250GB will be used up in a week. Now they're saving money, and charging you if you want any more. The thing is, that 250GB cap has been there forever. Same as it ever was, right?
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
I'm actually oddly happy about this. I was contacted in the past about going over the mysterious limit (I did about 400GB that month,) and since then I've been living in fear that I may go too high again and get my service cut for a year. Now that an actual known limit exists, I can easily monitor my usage accordingly via my WRT54GL flashed with Tomato.
A 250GB limit is more than fair, and as long as it is fully disclosed in advanced, I have no problem with it. Having secret, constantly changing limits with undefined penalties for violations is not acceptable for any contractually agreed upon service.
Finally, Comcast has done it "officially"...
Goodbye Comcast, here I come, FIOS.
slashdot rocks
This is perfectly reasonable if they're up front about it. I have a request... I would like a method to see what my consumption so far is so I can plan appropriately.
Here in the Antipodes we pay $80/month for 20G.
Uphill. Both ways. In the snow. And we like it.
http://www.telstraclear.co.nz/residential/inhome/internet/cable-broadband/plans.cfm
You can't download terabytes of pirated movies every day for free over someone else's lines? Oppression, I tell you. Oppression.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
2 dvd's every single day.
2 distros...2 movies...every day.
Truthfully...how many of you actually suck down 250GB per month?
If you watch all your 'tv' streaming or torrent, then maybe/almost/no way. But 250GB/month is actually quite a lot.
/and finally, someone is actually putting a number on 'unlimited'
Notice that it doesn't say anything about if the 'data limit' is uploaded data or downloaded. My guess is they'll make it combined.
Also, since there IS now a limit that can be tied with the monthly price, can we sue spammers/advertisers/etc for $.0000002 per kilobyte? I think its a very generous rate to give them, since cell phone companies like to charge $.10 per kilobyte.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Well, 250 GB per month averages to 771.6 kbps (Calculated as 250 billion bytes * 8 bits/byte / 30 days). Quite a bit less than the speeds they advertise.
On the other hand, a limit laid out in is much better than one you don't know about.
On the gripping hand, I guess Comcast just doesn't want your business if you use more than 250 GB per month?
If any good comes out of this, it is the fact that software as a service is no longer an effective option. It's too bad for online movie rentals though, that was actually a very good idea (except for the DRM part of it.)
President/CEO Pacy World http://www.pacyworld.com
Netcraft has confirmed that...
I guess that my cue to go home for the day.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
There's a big difference between 250GB and 250GB/month.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Now i'll have to spoof my neighbors Mac Address to DL my massive loads of porn!
And I'm sure Comcast will make an effort to hide that little bit of information in the fine print so you don't notice it.
Honestly, they can't call it unlimited anymore. Unlimited has a set definition. It's not open to interpretation. If you introduce caps, or limits, well, you're giving a different service.
It would be nice if Comcast actually did something surprising... like, you know, give a good service? That would be tits.
The beginning of the end for Comcast.
Sure 250GB is fine for people who surf the net and get email, but I have a question for you...
Why the @#$#@ do you spend $40-50 just to do minimal use? You could cover that with DSL for 1/2 the price.
FIOS.... 15Mb/15Mb no limits. About $60.
Those of you saying "not too bad" are ignoring the biggest trends on the internet are downloading video, both streaming and in bulk *from legitimate sources*. Honestly if you think that $40/month for light usage are just suckers. They're giving you basically very little for a lot of money. You probably think paying $100 for mobile phone service is "fair" too. You're a corporate dream.
Ads should not count towards the cap. That would be very very unfair. Caps are a bad idea, because 90% of the stuff we get is stuff we don't want.
President/CEO Pacy World http://www.pacyworld.com
Well, looks like all my porn for the next 6 months is getting downloaded in September.
It wouldn't ruin other peoples bandwith if they actually upgraded their infrastructure which they were given money for. If you don't have enough room for unlimited, don't sell unlimited
I agree with you, in general.
However, this move looks like a positive thing. Comcast always limited you, but it was always an arbitrary amount, which you wouldn't know till they banned you for a year. More recently, they pinned it down in terms of "songs", "videos", "pictures", "emails", etc.
This means you could conceivably sue Comcast if they raised a fuss and you were under your 250 gig limit.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Now all they have to do is not ADVERTISE it as "unlimited"
400gb? What are you downloading, the entire bible word by word in 1280x1024 bmp format?
problem is this is only the start; Next thing you know its down to 20GB monthly with an option to raise to 100 for the slight fee of $50. Now your monthly Internet access bill is $100.00. Screw these guys ...
Confucius say "Cable companies always follow their essential nature. Man who pay for cable internet cannot complain when cable shoved up his ass. "
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
250GB/month =
0.77Mb/s (megabits) * 24/7
(a bit less than half a T1 running an full capacity)
3.31 days At 7.0Mb/s and you're out.
Not bad for cheap McInternet service, I guess...
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
How can I possibly make it through a month at 250 G? I, um, have a condition, yeah, that's it, that requires I download unlimited amounts of data from the internet. This is cause an undue hardship. As if comcast has the RIGHT to take this from me. If my connection weren't actually my neighbors, I'd SUE THEIR ASSES pronto!
So what shall I do Slashdot? How can I get my umlimited back? Get a bigger Wifi antenna? I heard about that but what about bandwidth?
The should have done this long ago, put it in the contract, and saved themselves a lot of bad press.
Anyone know if this applies to Comcast Business customers, as well?
Not only do they have caps they also have FAP on top of that with there poor HD TV service.
You are better off with DSL and direct tv and no comcast VOD does not count as having 500 channels and direct tv VOD in that count as well.
This is perfectly reasonable if they're up front about it. I have a request... I would like a method to see what my consumption so far is so I can plan appropriately.
I have another request: Existing customers should not be forced over to this new policy until they either cancel or move. At least show the customers they pulled in via their advertising a little mercy.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
You may seem happy with it now, but when the 250GB goes down to 150gb, then 100, then 50, then 25, you won't be so happy. This is obviously just a step in that direction for Comcast. In Australia, you pay more for more download quota. I can only download 25GB a month, and I pay $60 for that. 250GB plans don't exist here.
ARP traffic should not count
Are we still going to be limited to 1 gig per month from usenet?
Technoli
So say you have Comcast's triple-play or some VOIP service that rides out of your house on your Comcast connection. You get cut off for one reason or another, such as exceeding this cap. Is your phone service dead, too? Better have a mobile phone if 911 needs to be called?
Are you referring to the Old Testament or the New Testament? Or both? In the Old Testament there are 593493 words so that equates to about 724 GB, and for the New Testament there are 181253 for about 221 GB so that equals about 945 GB so if he tried downloading the bible it would take him over two months. You may want to do some research. ;)
Absolutely. And I want to know where it's being measured from, and I want to be able to block incoming requests.
Read earlier in the thread about issues with unrequested incoming packets. If you get pounded at your IP address, does it get counted against you?
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
I cant believe there are some complaining about this. In South Africa we have a 3GB cap! You can purchase additional 1GB topups for around $10.
Get a compatible router and flash it with Tomato firmware. I doubt that Comcast will account for bandwidth use the same way that Tomato does, but at least it will give you a good idea when you're getting close.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I have another request: Existing customers should not be forced over to this new policy until they either cancel or move. At least show the customers they pulled in via their advertising a little mercy.
Tough call ... imaginary floating bandwidth cap, that might or might not be over 250 Gb/month at any given time, or a known quantity.
Comcast sucks, no doubt about it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I'm on Videotron in Canada, who's highest available cap for residential service is a combined upload/download of 100 GB/month. 10 Mbps connection for $64.90/month. They transitioned from true unlimited to 100 GB last year. So take your 250 GB and enjoy it, already!
Seriously though, you honestly can't expect more than 250 GB per month for residential service. Those of you arguing about Blu-ray transfers and GB of backup data, shut up. Get a goddamn commercial line if you're not an average consumer.
Complaining over a 250 GB cap is like complaining that you can't run a 20,000 machine data centre at home off the city's public electricity grid.
On the Comcast Network Management page, they note that:
Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 - 3 GB.
That puts the cap in a little more perspective, not that the 2+ TB/mo users will think it's reasonable.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
While I can monitor my own firewall using MRTG or other utilities, I'd like to see what Comcast says my usage is. Any idea if they're going to provide this, or just "warn" you when you get to 249.99999gb?
With 86,400 seconds in a day and if your Cable modem is capable of 5Mb/s downstream or 52.73 GB per DAY (rounded down to nearest hundredth) you would reach the full download cap in aprox 4.74 days.
This is NOT taking into account goofy tricks like "powerboost" or network congestion.
Don't watch too many HD movies off of your Apple TV or participate in high-bandwidth video conferencing!
Additionally, if you wanted to keep from going over the cap in a 30 day month and decided to rate limit your downstream bandwidth (assuming they don't add upstream totals to your total per month) then by my calculations the per second downstream limit you should use would be 1.27Mb/s which is taking 250GB and dividing it by the number of seconds per month and converting it to megabits.
Somebody correct my math if I'm wrong...it's late and I'm tired!
So....if I want to get the most out of my modem. I should write some software (or somebody should) for my router/firewall that monitors total bandwidth and calculates my rate limit based upon how much I've used and how much time is left in the month. Then I could use my computer to my hearts desire for whatever and not worry about the cap by letting my firewall dynamically control my bandwidth throughput.
Note to ISPs:
Whoever offers the largest cap with the lowest overage rates (or even better no cap at all) at the highest speeds gets my $50/month. Oh, and if you're a provider also offering cable TV you'll get that money too.
In my area TWC and ATT are fighting for customers as an ISP and cable provider. First to impose caps loses on both counts.
Ok, first and foremost, unlimited internet is a thing of the past, that much I am NOT surprised, I already knew this was coming let's face it, it cost money to move data around. So, with that, well, hey, I understand and recognize this for what it is. I've been one of those who truly has taken advantage of "unlimited" internet in my time, so, not gonna cry here.
But, what I don't understand is this "excessive" use thing. If you give a limit of 250gb per month per customer, then that's the limit. And it's up to the user to use his/her quota or not. Shouldn't be any warnings if you are close to it or hell even surpassing it!
But, instead of ticking off customers with warnings, just charge extra when you go over the your limit. Makes sense to me. They do the same with minutes on cell phones, so, really, it's not a very novel concept to begin with.
Or, if they really want to be "bandwidth" conscientious, then, they should reward users who don't use their quota, who keep it low, maybe, they can do an average over time, like every six months, and evaluate the bandwidth use per customer, and those who have met a certain "low" criteria, could get something back as a reward, like a rebate, or coupon or some form of promotion, who cares!
The last thing an ISP should do however, is irate their customers and be big brothers on them. So call your customers when they don't pay their bills, just don't tick `em off when they go over their limits! Just charge `em!
you are complaining about 250Gb?!? jeez, In Aus I have to pay $120/month (~$100US) for 25gb onpeak, 40gb offpeak ( that's 65gb/month for those of you who suck at math). I WISH I was in a position to bitch about 250gb/month.
Here we go... here come the Australians who inevitably pop into internet usage cap threads with their "In Australia we pay $500 a day for 10 mb up and down transfer... you should be happy with the restrictions your ISP is placing on you."
Dammit Australia, just because you have crap internet, the rest of the world shouldn't have to accept it!
I can think of slightly more interesting things to do with my time :)
People in the US don't know how easy they have it. I'm living in New Zealand, and I'm paying 90$ NZD for a 1Mb connection and a 20GB cap.
I would give an arm and a leg to have a 250GB cap for the sort of prices Comcast customers pay. Thats more data than 99% of people could use in a month if they tried.
Welcome to a tiny taste of the rest of the world, America. Can you stomach it?
How much did Australian businesses get for building out broad band but didn't? US businesses were given billions of taxpayer dollars to build out broadband but only a few have built any at all. Verison is slowly building out FiOS, fiber to a neighborhood splitter, but not many other businesses are building out broadband. They cried they needed public money to build out broadband but did nothing with the money given to them other than pad their profits.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I play a LOT of Counter-Strike Source, Call of Duty 4, and many other PC games online... so... will this be an issue for me?
In addition to actually playing the games online, which uses a huge amount of data, I frequently have to download large mods, or extra content, from game servers using custom content....
I'm getting tired of some fucking moron capitalist telling me what I can and can't do on SERVICE I PAY FOR. Especially the Internet. There is NO PRACTICAL REASON for this, so I refuse to cut back on my data usage. If they call, I'll tell 'em to fuck off because I'm going to Verizon.
It's Comcasts own damn fault things can slow down due to one bandwidth "hog". They designed their system in a way that this happens.
The bandwith cap is most likely based on a sum of total bits in/out of your cable modem.
Which means:
1. If you don't isolate your LAN with a router, LAN-side-only traffic will count towards the limit.
2. Packets dropped, blocked, or generated by Comcast will count towards your cap limit.
3. If I launch a DDOS at your IP I can cap your connection in a matter of hours.
But I have this funny feeling that they will count all traffic sent into their network TO your IP or out of network FROM your IP towards your cap-- regardless of whether they originate with your modem (or are received at the modem).
So for example during a p2p session, you will get counted for the packet the remote user sent that you never got, AND the packet they forged and sent to you, AS WELL AS the packet they sent back to the outside party. It's a pretty slick 3 for 1 deal.
Conveniently, your actual traffic will suddenly become 'unauditable'.
have fun with that
what the hell are you complaining about -_-
here in belgium the "unlimited" internet is 20GB/month at 45 euro/month, for 60 euro/month i think you can get 60GB/month...
and they're also always advertising it as unlimited -_-.
250GB/month seems a very reasonable amount of traffic, you could easily do it for a single month, but if you can keep up that rate for an entire year, i can't but wonder what the heck you're downloading, you'd have to run out of stuff to download pretty quickly!
I can't stand comcast's terms of service ... luckily there is still an alternative in the Boston area
That statement actually relates well to a very insightful point made at the end of the article:
You are lucky to have some genuine competition in the form of FIOS. If I could, I would switch to that in a heartbeat, even if I had to pay a relatively large installation fee (probably up to 200 dollars). Unfortunately, just about everywhere I go I'm locked down to one provider. In the tiny town of Jackson, OH, I am restricted to Time Warner Cable (another company working on a cap), and before I was transferred here I lived in Minneapolis, subject to Comcast. I suppose I could potentially get DSL, but that is so much slower than cable it almost doesn't count as competition in the broadband market, and satellite is so latency heavy it doesn't count either. That leaves cable standing alone, unless you are lucky enough to have true broadband competition through FIOS.
In my opinion, cable providers are starting to stifle innovation and competition the same way large cell phone providers do. They see one company screwing the customers with a cap, and figure, "Hey, I can do that too! Now I can keep more money for profits instead of network upgrades." And with no competition to force changes on them, that's the way things will stay. Both cell phone companies and cable companies are able to stay the way they are because of huge barriers to entry... you can't lay another set of cable lines in every town, and it's prohibitively expensive to try to set up another nationwide cellular network. In instances like these, the government does need to step in to regulate the monopolies/oligopolies. My water company doesn't put a cap on how much I use because the government regulates that monopoly (granted, I do pay more the more I use, but if the cable companies went to that model without government intervention, it would probably be priced like the cell phone companies price text messages: 10 cents a kilobyte or something ridiculous. That's why I'm currently opposed to anything other than a flat rate from them).
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Fucking Comcastic!
And so it begins, the incremental destruction of the communications infrastructure by fascists.
People that say, "this is reasonable" don't get it. Not everything is pirated movies. But everything is getting more expensive.
So basically a Comcast user (And I am not one) can transfer 19 each, 1 hour MiniDV movies @ 13 Gigs each. Forget maintaining them on a website, there's no more data available after that.
That's not even talking HD. That's SD. You might not want to be a video editor working with bands or an independent news journalist working abroad.
Because when I signed a contract with them, it said NOTHING in regards to usage limits. To the contrary, we decided to go with Comcast specifically because it was advertised as "Unlimited".
Are they rewriting my contract without notice? The contract says that they will notify me in writing of any changes, and thus far, have not.
In light of the news about Comcast, I'm going to start a new ISP today, called FOCnet Today!, to serve customer needs better through an improved billing model. FOC stands for Our Customers (the F is silent).
We will guarantee up to 100 exabit-per-second service. You will, of course, be operating at 110 baud, but we said we guarantee UP TO 100 exabit-per-second service.
The billing model is as follows: For the first kilobyte of communication in each month: 1 cent per bit of framing data transmitted or received, 2 cents per bit of payload data transmitted or received, 5 cents per bit of encrypted data, video data, or VOIP data transmitted or received, 10 cents for every retransmitted bit, even for retransmissions caused by our DNWPI (Deliberate Network Wiring Problems Inducer) system. For all additional kilobytes, the above prices are doubled.
We promise to better serve you by maintaining a record of every single network communication you make and immediately complying with all disclosure requests from any third party, especially coming from foreign nations.
FOCnet Today! Because you deserve better.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Since they are trying to copy the phone/minutes model. If you are going to cap my Internet, why not give me unlimited WAN (Comcast network). Same idea, it shouldn't cost them more since it stays on 'their network' and would give incentive for people to use the same provider. Granted, this is assuming the average user is doing lots of p2p. Plus many people don't have a choice anyway, they have to go with the local provider. Even if you have no say or knowledge of everyone else's provider, my Comcast to Comcast transfers should not count against my total. Give me something.
I signed on when it was unlimited anything. Tomorrow I have a on air radio show about computers as does every week, and comcast is going to be specially featured. Beware comcast.
The key problem with this is that Comcast's subscribers most likely won't know how much bandwidth they have used.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Cox tells you what the limit is (40GB/mo on my plan), but doesn't give you a meter. I don't want to be "contacted about excessive use", I want a meter like the gas gauge on my car. Fortunately, I use a linux router with vnstat so I can keep tabs, but how many home users are able to provide their own meter?
My dad uses Wild Blue, and they provide a nice web page with a meter to check your usage. Their cap is a continuous time average over 30 days, so you don't have to wait until the end of the month for it to reset - the average bandwidth starts going down again after he finishes his Ubuntu download, and is ready for another in a few days with worrying about hitting the limit.
That's the last straw. Now running a server threatens my monthly NOT-broadband quota. Why do I have Comcast, why am I paying these idiots to screw me?
Words truely can't describe how pissed I am.
High enough to appease the slashdot crowd who only superficially look at technical matters.
Low enough to stop 'net video from replacing their overpriced cash cow TV service.
Most cable and DSL providers in Belgium offer 15-20GByte/month and then charge extra per additional GByte if you're willing to pay. If not, they put you on a 56k connection.
And all of that costs a whopping 35EUR/month.
So trust me, 250GByte/month is more than most people get !
No idea what Belgian providers are thinking : they increase the speed (20Mbit/sec on cable and 17Mbit/sec on VDSL2), but the limits don't go up at the same rate !
It's still beyond me why they can't manage to offer a sliding scale...
First 100 GB... You get at the full bandwidth.
For each additional 50 GB, it drops by 25% of whatever it was last.
First 100GB = 100%
100-150GB = 75%
150-200GB = 56%
200-250GB = 42%
250-300GB = 32%
300-350GB = 24%
350-400GB = 18%
400-450GB = 13%
450-500GB = 10%
Now you've got a system where no one ever finds their connection suddenly shut off on them for the remainder of the month.
Instead, it just keeps getting slower and slower to the point where much over 250 GB is going to have slowed so much they'd really have a hard time going much further anyway... and those 5GB movie downloads they used to get within an hour now need to run all night, if not all day and all night, and so are no longer appealing anyway.
Though, to be fair... Funny how it's only those companies that make money by charging for the delivery of TV and movies that seem to have issues with users using the kind of bandwidth needed to get TV and movies without them.
I downloads lots of crap. But I think I will have hard time hitting the cap - even if I go on torrent spree
But yet you're still here on Slahdot with the rest of us.
Here in the chicagoland area, we have an ISP called wideopenwest http://www1.wowway.com/ that uses the same lines as Comcast to provide service. Not only has my connection been outstanding (600KB/sec assigned limit... actual is 814 :D )but I just got off the phone with them and they have no intentions of imposing any bandwidth limit on their customers.(Not to mention no stupid Sandvine crap either) I hope this helps some of you guys, I know they are available in alot of areas.
quick edit: And no I don't work for them, just a satisfied customer... something you don't get alot of nowadays.
Yeah right!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
(250 gigabytes) / (2,629,743.83 seconds in a month) = 99.6842343 KBps
I know that if my ISP tried to charge me $50 a month for 100KBps, and I didn't have a competing ISP to turn to, I'd take it.
And then I'd try to rip them off any way I possibly could. Like download as much media as possible at every home and office I could get to, and go around picking up full DVDs for dumping into my HDs back home.
--
make install -not war
Id otherwise be working :(
You can't do that! That would be infringing on their freedom of speech.
Why...that's just like being satisfied that gasoline has gone down to $3.60/gallon from $4.20+. You think you're getting a bargain until you remember the days of ~$1/gallon.
I find it very disheartening to see all the comments here that are ok with bandwidth caps.
you have paid any where from 50 to 85 a month for a service that gives you access to pretty much anything you need.
and now that the service is going to be limited you are going to pay the same amount of money for less service? and accept it ?
as much as i want to be pissed at comcast and time warner for bandwidth caps.
i realized that the real blame lies with the consumer who accepts these limitations placed upon them . and are willing to pay the same amount for lesser service .
what the consumer should be doing is screaming bloody murder and threatening every action that they can take legally to ensure they get the same service they always had.
because there is no such thing as a bandwidth shortage (forgive me for emphasizing this THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A BANDWIDTH SHORTAGE)
when you start getting low
you just add more infrastructure and lo and behold there is more bandwidth.
a company like comcast who has over 13 million broadband subscribers paying around 55 a month. thats 800,000,000 ++ dollars a month.
a portion of that should be invested into fatter faster pipes.
end of rational thought time for RANT
but no here we have consumers saying .. oh thats plenty thank you for giving me less for the same amount of money i give you.
thank you for limiting my service .
and you know what let me bend over for you mr comcast and time warner so you can rape me some more because it is obvious that i am a submissive lil bitch that likes to be fu**** hard by your money grubbing fists .
and i accept that because im a pansy consumer who accepts this bull shit and cant wait till you start charging per megabyte.
actually im not disheartened
im thoroughly disgusted.
Music the Paint dancefloor the canvas your body the brush
In NZ, caps are anything from 1gb to 80gb (expensive!). You guys will be fine.
In Monopolised New Zealand, internet caps YOU!!
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
I use at least 250GB just watching hulu. Thankfully Cox not only doesn't seem to mind, but they just doubled my bandwidth without increasing the price.
Over here in Aussieland, most (99.999999%) can only dream of limits anywhere near that! *sad sigh*
Maybe Comcast will start giving away "FREE 20GB DATA TRANSFER, 30-DAY 100% FREE TRIAL" CDs in every Wal-Mart in the country?
You're paying a little over $50/month for connections that most of us dreamt of ten years ago, and you're whining about a hard limit of 250gb before /you get a phone call/? Do you know how much you have to pay for 250gb of transfer from a reasonably well known colocation provider?
I'm just happy there's a hard limit in place, so I can keep an eye on RRD. Even with working from home and torrenting like mad, I don't come even close to that limit.
- oZ
// i am here.
Them stopping the advertisement of "unlimited" is all that will happen. I'll let you know when I can afford a SLA.
Bullcrap............If they are going to cap me then I don't want to be forced to download advertisements that I don't want.
250GB / 30 days in the average month = 8.3...GB per day.
8.3 / (24 hours * 60 minutes/hr * 60 seconds/minute) = a constant download rate of 0.0028935185 GB/sec, or, 2.83 KB/sec for an entire 30-day span, or (according to my possibly err-prone calculations) 22.63 kB/sec.
Unless there's a bunch of botnets on Comcast downloading pornography every single second of every single day, I don't see that as doing anything but hurting customers of Comcast.
Generous? At first glance, but then again, that 250GB is inclusive of, afaik, ALL traffic on an IP address. Have fun, small, home networks!
Hell, my wife could generate that much traffic in VoIP alone! (Yes, she's one of those people for which 5000 cellular minutes per month is nowhere near enough!)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Remember when the internet was sold by how many hours you were logged in?
It seems to me that Comcast is looking at the long tail guys and thinking we have 5% of our users consuming 90% of out bandwidth. (Or some such thing).
This sort of thing always happens when you sell something as "all you can eat for a dollar". Works fine when Aunt Minnie and the Canasta Club got to lunch, but not so good when the Ohio State offensive line shows up.
Also Comcast is being hit with the prospect of having to compete with FIOS. To do so means that either have to invest lots in physical plant to achieve the same service levels as FIOS, (which is what Cablevision seems to be doing) or cut prices.
So they think think cutting prices makes a lot of sense - most people don't need FIOS service levels. Most people will be happier with the lower price. But to cut prices they need to get rid of the long tail customers.
I know! Let's put a use limit in place. This will piss off the long tail guys and they will move to FIOS. BRILLIANT we have just unloaded our unprofitable customers to our competition! What could be sweeter!
PROFIT!!!
If you read your TOS, there's almost certainly a clause that says they may alter the agreement at any time and - if you're lucky - they will give you a period during which you may either accept the new terms or terminate your service without penalty.
If you don't like it, go somewhere else. Of course, for most of the US, that's akin to the Agent's line in Matrix. Where are you going to go, anyway?
What it really comes down to is getting rid of the heavy users to free up the lines for the occasional users (like me). Of course, I hated Adelphia (which became Comcast) so much I canceled my service and live on 768k DSL. I get more reliable service that costs 1/3 as much and has never been slower than my peak (91kB/s, typ) regardless of time of day in return for the slower rate. Of course, I pay for 3Mbit at work, so I download big stuff there mostly, but it's still cheaper and more reliable than Comcast.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
250GB in a 30 day month is 8.3GB a day, 355MB/hour, ~6MB a minute, 101KB/sec.
Or, 809kbps. On a connection which is advertised as being at least 6mbit/sec.
It's also the beginning of the end- they'll use this to justify limits per week next. Then per day. They already have a hidden cap on uploads; they advertise a 768kbit upload limit, but if you upload at more than 384kbit/sec (the old limit) for more than about 4-5 minutes, your connection gets massively crippled, not just until you slow back down to 384kbit/sec, but until your upload drops *dramatically*. They call this "powerboost", but it's really "ripoff technique" to let them advertise one speed, but actually have another.
You know what still gets my goat? That comcast has for more than a decade had an incredibly hostile AUP that banned any form of mailing list or discussion group hosting, yet you people only started screaming about your "rights" and network neutrality when they brought the hammer down on your precious porn and TV episodes.
Please help metamoderate.
Let's say someone plays, oh, I don't know ... one of the MMO's just about every day.
No - let's say they just leave it on all month. How much bandwidth would that typically use?
How, I wonder, are normal folks going to know how much they're using? As a geek, between the squid in the closet, and cacti, I can figure out how much bandwidth we're using. But normal folks? Not a chance!
If you don't have enough room for unlimited, don't sell unlimited
... which is why they're not selling unlimited anymore. Good for them.
As bandwidth increases, "unlimited" becomes less and less possible. If they were offering you 1mbps they'd give you true unlimited monthly transfer.
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Data transfer caps must be disclosed, but i don't think that's enough. They should also not be allowed to ban users for exceeding this data transfer cap, and should provide users the option of either a) suspending service until the next billing cycle or b) paying for any transfers over the monthly cap. That way they cannot use transfer caps as a bullying tactic against high-bandwidth users.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
It would seem that the turtles chose wisely!
Remember "online services" of yesteryear? GeNie, The Source, CompuServe? TEXnet? QuantumLink?
They were charging crazy rates(like $10, etc) per HOUR of usage? PER HOUR people. And that was on dialup. And there were premium fees for certain this or that. We have things better than we ever did before.
I'm okay with that. I'm only using the 'net when I'm at home, so it's all good.
"Disgusting as it is, I don't have any other high speed alternative."
A semi loaded with terabyte hard drives.
In the 50's the US built the interstate highway system that is fully effective 60 years later.
It is time for the Federal Government to build a FIOS broadband system to everyhouse and business in the US!!! It could be done for a month, or two, of the money we are squandering on George Bush's friends in Iraq and Saudia Arabia.
No download limits and no built-in direction to specific providers of videos and information.
Instead of voting for Ralph Nader, I'd even vote for O'Bama, or even McCain, if we were to build the infrastructure necessary for the 21st Century.
But I'm pretty sure I be voting for Nader again because the politicians are all in the corporations pocket.
So sad.
A couple years ago, I decided to start watching TV on my computer instead of the TV, for no real reason besides liking my chair in the PC room better. So I started really hammering my connection with some torrents (piracy haters, note that I was still paying my full cable TV bill, so in essence I was downloading what they'd already been sending me). My Internet and television provider was Cox Communications in the San Diego area.
I made sure to keep my torrents only running at night out of respect for neighbors on the same cable network. One morning, though, I woke up to see all my torrents dead. I went to see if google was up and was redirected to a page instructing me to call the Cox security division. I did and, after a good while on hold, was told that I'd exceeded my data cap.
Which, being as we were in the middle of a month, was news to me. Confused, I hung up and continued more or less like I was, trying to keep the overall load down a bit with transfer caps in Azureus. A week later it happened again, exactly as before. This time, though, I demanded more of an explanation from the CSR. What I was told amazed me.
Now, I'm not a network engineer, but I'd always assumed that the ISP could keep a pretty good watch on every connection at once. Maybe that's more infeasible than I'd thought on a cable network, but still, the rep claimed that wasn't the case. They COULD get a general idea of who was producing "too much traffic," though, and order a "watch" for that account be forwarded to the security division. Who would then, in turn, watch and record the exact amount of data coming out of that account for a period of time.
Where it gets even stranger - and more frustrating - is that this "period of time" is totally up to them. One of my infractions was a 24 hour watch, the other around 48, and supposedly they could be up to a week or less than a day depending on how many watches they had going. They would then divide the monthly cap (a very difficult-to-find number buried in legal boilerplate deep in an old PDF on their website and actually quoted differently in two other different places) by the time they recorded and shut it down if it went over. So, say, if you got 30Gb in a 30-day month and they did a 24-hour watch, they would shut down your account if it went over 1Gb! Which to my mind makes their advertised bandwidth a complete fabrication: if you downloaded at full speed all month, you'd be several orders of magnitude over the limit. And if they're allowed to shrink the "watch" size as small as they want (nothing they said indicated that a 24-hour watch was the smallest) then you can't be confident EVER using the full speed.
Too many of these warnings (either 3 or 5 being the magic number based on the CSR I was talking to) and they'd shut down your cable and blacklist you forever. In an area with no other Internet options outside of dialup, they basically were telling me I might have to MOVE if I did it one more time. And no, there was no way to see how much data I'd used up so far that month, but they were "working on it."
I wish I could tell you that I angrily canceled my account and moved on. But no, I wasn't ready to move, and I wasn't ready to go to dialup. So I just stopped downloading anything over 1Gb, ever, and confining my high-tier, expensive 'net account to web surfing and games. And oh, yeah, I watched TV on the TV on my shitty couch like a good little boy. These fuckers continue to get my monthly checks to this very day. Aren't monopolies grand?
hmm, just checked my dd-wrt router stats.. July 2008 incoming: 120,236 Megabytes outgoing: 104,120 Megabytes Guess I am safe for now :)
One idea, which I read on a message board, would be to throttle the download speeds based how much someone has downloaded in the month so far. So the more you download, the slower your connection gets.
Now, can someone explain to me what someone is doing downloading so much? Even with streaming video, or downloading ISO updates, I cannot imagine a person, or family, using up so much bandwidth just in 30 days. (Now, I haven't factored in video chat.)
Only 250 gb a month?!?!
Oh wow, how will you ever cope.
8.3GB = 8300 MB/day, or 66400 megabits per day. Divide by (24*60*60), about 770 kilobits/second. Or am I too sleep-deprived to do math?
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
The 1980's called, wants its metered billing back so Compuserve can use it again. With no practical alternative(read: no competitors in that price range able to come close to the pre-metered service) to it in a lot of places, that's what it's become.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I agree that having a limit is fair, as long as it is disclosed. This previously nondescript limit of Comcast's was one of the major reasons I chose iProvo (now Broadweave) for my ISP. iProvo told me "We have a X GB/month limit but since we have no way for our users to monitor their usage we will not be enforcing it." I don't remember what the limit was... but it hasn't mattered ;)
250G is a huge amount of data.
Why would anyone need more than 64 KB of memory?
And what's wrong with SAAS anyway?
I want to own not rent. I also want to be able to use it anywhere I can take my laptop. What I don't want is to have to be always connected to use software. Personal computers were created so people could run software locally and not be connected to a timeshare mainframe.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
This is downright dirty bullshit. 250 GB? I download alot of shit, and 250 GB will not suffice. It doesn't matter the amount, it could be 10 tb for all I care, it's the fact that they put a cap on it. Sure, now it's 250 for the normal price. But let's see 5 years in the future. They up the price by twenty bucks and knock it down by 50 gigsl. 10 years, knock it down by 150 and jack up the price by 80. Before you know it you won't be able to download a movie without paying 200 bucks for internet.
Fucking bullshit. Go to hell comcast. You're damn lucky you can't switch ISP's in my area you dirty dirty bastards.
Just require an exact speed, exact cost, unmetered competitor be available in the area. Condition being that they are not there just to be a regulation placeholder, but to exist as an actual service that cannot be acquired for 30 years minimum.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Why install more software when you can use a Hosts file to block ads? Not only that but if you're a prude and want to block porn as well, or any other url, a Hosts file will do it.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
...is followed by the loud sound of an informed populace moving to a less draconian provider, or to business class plans.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You should be able to afford better Internet. With something like that, I'd get business class cable or the like. $150 per month should get you something like 10mb/1mb with no cap. Divided by 9 people that is $17/month/person, not bad at all. If you have that many people, you can't really expect a consumer grade connection to keep up. You either need a better connection or be willing to put up with more limits per person. Same deal as, say housing. You want 9 people in a house? Ok you either need a bigger house, which will cost more, or you need to put up with having less space per person (like sharing bedrooms) than a smaller household.
I don't feel a lot of sympathy for people who want to have heavy usage but won't pay higher prices. I personally have a business class line, though I only live with 2 other people. It is pricey, however it is worth it in my opinion. Very fast, and they don't care how much I use.
I don't know how much I use, but I am a heavy user. I guess I shall have to wait and see. I seriously don't like this idea. It's more or less how insurance companies won't insure the very sick. And is just a side effect of for profit system, instead of system for public good. Internet should be a public commodity that could not be denied. I guess in this case I do have an alternative as well, I could get fios, but it could potentially not save me any money.
You should see his bill for printer ink!
We're working on it.
Are they still advertising their service as "Unlimited"?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
In my apartment in Shanghai I have a 5mbit symmetrical connection that is all-you-can-eat (i.e. unlimited traffic up and down per month). This costs me RMB 150 per month or about US$22.
Granted, there is no customer service whatsoever and when it falls over, I have to wait for the ISP (CNC) to realise and remedy.
In Beijing I pay the same but it is only a 2mbit symmetrical service, and also uncapped.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
Damn verizon for no fios in my area.
Well, really I want FIOS, but that'll never happen here.
Don't get me wrong, I hate caps as much as everyone here. But compared to Time Warner in Beaumont, TX, this is freaking great! You don't realize how much it would SUCK to live here and have to deal with their higher prices, 40GB caps, and overage fees per GB downloaded. I'm currently skirting my way around it with a grandfathered account, but I'm afraid if I ever make a change to my account then the hammer will come down on me and things will change bigtime. Until they implement it for real, and then everyone is fubar.
If Comcast is honest about things and truly follows the spirit of the FCC order, then they will stop screwing with P2P. They will do that or face even more serious consequences. I read the FCC ruling, they mean business. Besides, the way I see it, this is just Comcast's way of "coming clean". We all know that this 250GB cap was ALREADY in place and they were ALREADY harassing users for going over this invisible limit. Now, the limit is plainly stated. At this point, knowing my traffic would not be interfered with, I could live with a 250GB cap. 40GB, I cannot live with. That's like having a cell phone with only 100 anytime minutes. I'd hit the limit every single month even if it didn't "feel" like I was using it a lot. And overage fees for internet usage are unheard of (at least in north america). We can't let this become just like the damn cell phone industry - we need to fight back in any way we can!
Oh, and as far as servers go, most home ISPs have a "no servers clause" but it is not really enforced. I think this is just meant to keep people from running a business. My little SSH/SFTP/Media streaming servers for personal use should be OK. I've never had any problems on other ISPs. If Comcast told me to shut those down, I'd have a big problem with that.
No kidding, maybe I'm getting old, but I don't need to download music or movies, yep must be getting old.
Get up!
First, I want an easy way to check my usage on a daily basis against the cap.
Second, I want to know if you are counting downloads, uploads, or both.
Thirdly, I want rollover for bandwidth I didn't use last month but paid for, so that I can use it this month.
Without that, your cap is a crock for what you initially promised me you'd provide.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Young people in particular are idiots for voting for any politician who promises to give them something.
Believe it, or not, you will grow up to pay for it. Nothing is free.
If you have a contract with them, then they shouldn't be able to apply their cap to you until the contract runs out. If you don't have a contract, you have absolutely no right to expect them to give you the same service next month as they gave you this month.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
At 4 Mb/s, 250Gb is 138 hours of HDTV per month. That's for the HDTV version of Vudu. NetFlix Roku also needs 4 MB/s. Apple TV needs 5 Mb/s in its best mode. Note that if you actually used one of those boxes that much, you'd be paying over $500 per month in video rental charges. (It's much like the iPod; filling up a large iPod with music from Apple's store would cost tens of thousands of dollars.)
One implication of all these set-top box movie devices is that there's going to be much more pressure on DSL and cable ISPs to deliver at least 4Mb/s sustained.
240 hours at 300k/sec will put you just under the 250GB limit.
Who goes 10 days at 300k/sec?
I sure don't, but it's just one more line to draw in our path.
Is Comcast going to give me a way to monitor my usage? My cell phone company allows me to call a number and see how many minutes/texts I have left.
If anyone knows of such software (or maybe a firefox plugin) I'd be interested.
Nah, just the MS-OOXML spec.
The source for your TV channels isn't a peering connection with the internet.
That's the difference.
I think Comcast is just being greedy though - nothing more complicated than that. Baby steps toward metered usage.
-Matt
Comcast with QAM would be great, if it were really supported. But with my service, Comcast randomly drops channels like Bravo and Discovery channel from the set of open QAM signals for months at a time. If you try to call customer support, they say that you shouldn't be able to watch anything digital without a box from them...
Cable QAM is a great idea, but in practice drives you to Pirate Bay. Which in the end is easier to use and produces higher quality than a digital tuner anyway, for most things.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here's the funny thing about how a free society is supposed to work: What he's downloading is none of your damn business!
Comcast is interesting. Many providers seek to establish peering relationships with other large networks to swap traffic. The approach is usually "free" as in, aside from the transport and equipment costs, the per-Mbps costs are waived. This is benficial to both network operators - better end user experience and lowered costs are usually the result.
I work for a large content provider. A very high amount of bandwidth we send out is destined to Comcast's network. Typically, you'd expect setting up a peering relationship that SAVES THEM MONEY as well as your own company would be easy. Comcast, instead, has taken the approach of trying to charge us and other networks to gain access to the end users via peering, e.g. the very people they are capping at 250GB/month of download. In our case, the financials make it more cost effective to tell them to screw off.
Comcast aside, based on present per-Mbps rates for high capacity networks, the cost per GB transferred per month is approximately $0.04.
Yes, that is 4 CENTS! Per GIGABYTE!
I seriously doubt they're passing anything near that cost along for those that burst over the 250GB limit.
Sure, there are upstream capacities to manage, and their billing and capacity planning people should be figuring that out and working it into the price.
Fact is, we have another greedy service provider gouging its customers.
Good job, Comcast.
Now, if I could only get around these guys!
OK, that's it. I'm shopping for a new place right now, and I'll pick one with a satellite view so I can get my entertainment via a dish. I'll just have to use DSL until someone starts residential use of all that fiber they've been spitting under the town for a decade.
So with Comcast it'll take me 4 months to fill up my new 1 TB HDD w/ por^H^H^H legally aquired wholesome entertainmnet? Bullocks!
I have another reply below, but its buried. Fact is, large capacity internet links bring bandwidth costs in at less than $0.04/GB/Month.
Also, comcast is trying to charge peer networks to serve traffic to its end users. So, they're charging you, and they're charging me (content network).
Nice job.
Cell phone companies bill you for every call.
Landlines have had flat rate unlimited local and long distance plans for years.
I looked all over Comcast's website and no where -- not one place -- is their Internet service advertised as "unlimited".
In fact, there are numerous links on several pages that take you to their terms and conditions where Comcast has a full section (Section III) entitled "Network Management and Limitations on Bandwidth Consumption". I'll grant you it doesn't say specifically "250GB" anywhere in there, but that's a lot different than the falsehood of claiming "they advertise that it is unlimited!" when they don't.
The
1981: "Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM!" -Allegedly Bill Gates
2008: "Nobody will ever need more than 250GB monthly traffic." -Comcast Corporation
When was the last time you saw Comcast advertising "unlimited" Internet access? Seriously. Maybe as little as 5 years ago, but I'd guess that they stopped doing it longer ago than that. For example, I couldn't find the word on their webpage from 2003: http://web.archive.org/web/20030207135808/comcast.com/Products/Internet_Details.html?LinkID=21 In fact, on my brief reading of the archived pages, I didn't see the word "unlimited" anywhere, going as far back as 1999.
Of course, they may have been using the word in TV and print ads. I don't have an archive for that.
Regardless, I haven't seen a broadband provider use that word in the US in a very long time, with the sole exception of cellular providers, who use 5GB and "unlimited" interchangeably when referring to their data plans.
...you can choose your news & entertainment on the Internet with the cap hovering over you. Or you can be rewarded with 'extra' access to the Internet for the same price - as long as you allow Comcast to force feed their preferred "news" and entertainment to you.
People who accept the force-feeding get more service.
...and how big is it compressed, .7z format, Ultra compression level, LZMA, 64MB dictionary size, 273 word size, 256 MB solid block size (or else just solid)?
A 1797.97 MB (1.7558 GB, 1885312250 bytes) collection of 120 dirs and 356 files compresses to 22.51 MB (0.022 GB, 23605057 bytes)....
If you're going to download all uncompressed data, that's your choice. At that same ratio of compression, it'd be 0.0115630405 GB compressed, which is 11.84 MB, or 12124.73 KB.... very doable.
To
I just got off the phone with Comcast and pointed them to this story, and the lady that answered was shocked and said her department hadn't heard of this.
Hopefully it's not true, but I sincerely doubt that. I did let her know though that if it is true, I'll be taking my business elsewhere because when I signed up for it, it was "unlimited".
with adsl every person can have a 24mbps connection, to themselves which doesn't matter how much anyone else is using it nearby.
Check again. ADSL is a contended service, just like cable. It's just the ratios happen to be lower. I used to chat to a guy in Canada and his contention ratio was about 20:1. Here in the UK 20:1 is for business connections and residential gets 50:1 - AFAIK BT hardly ever lets it get to 50:1 and even then they jiggle people around so you don't end up with a load of heavy users on a single circuit but they do advertise contention ratios.
Nick
I actually got a call from Comcast about 2 weeks ago due to "suspicious activity." It turns I was within the top tenth of the top 1% of bandwidth users, which translated into about .6-1 terabyte.
Comcast is serious business. They will take away your internets. ;_;
I was wondering how this will change internet gaming?
How many hours worth of online games (WoW and Combat Arms) before reaching the quota?
250 Gigabytes/month
2000 Gigabits/month
66.66666667 Gigabits/day
2.777777778 Gigabits/hour
2844.444444 Megabits/hour
0.790123457 Megabits/second
809.0864198 Kilobits/second
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Here's the funny thing about this technical discussion: what he's downloading is relevant to the discussion, you dog fucking dumbshit.
As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage,' Comcast said Thursday. 'If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,' according to the AUP."
Ask them to curb??? BS, I got one of those so called phone calls after being a customer for nearly two years straight. Never used much over 20 gigs a month the entire time until one month I had a bunch of big files to move from work to home. 400+ gigs in one month and get the NASTIEST phone call from an ISP I've ever gotten. This wasn't a "Hi sir, we noticed you used a lot of bandwidth one month out of many". It was more of a threat that if I ever tried it again I'd be terminated instantly. After being berated and scolded for five minutes I finally got off the phone with the promise to "daddy" I'd never do it again. I've since switched to business class Comcast (money wasn't an issue). I was already paying them for $150 a month cable too on top of my internet that I was apparently no longer allowed to use. I switched to biz internet and drop my TV all together. Saved money and now I make sure I find something to fill up at least 400 gigs of downloads every month. Downloading the same linux distro over and over is fun. Amazing thing is I was told I was in trouble for "effecting other subscribers". Doesn't seem to be such a problem now. Strange.
They don't keep lowering the cap. 250gb this month, 200 next month, 150 the next.. Eventually they'll pull the bullshit the cell phone providers do and they'll charge per gigabyte or you pay an extra $5 a month and you get 100 gigs free, or pay $10 extra and get 250 gigs, or you can pay an extra $25 and get unlimited.. See, back in the day before text messaging was popular, I used to do text messaging for free, then the cell phone providers realized how much money they could make by charging for it.. Now at&t charges around 15 or 20 cents for every incoming and outgoing text message unless you pay extra for some bs text messaging plan. I'm all for them specifying a cap, assuming they stay honest and aren't planning on using it as a ploy to get eventually get more money on additions to a base plan
I've noticed that my Netflix "watch instantly" simply does not work properly from 4 pm to about 10pm every day. Netflix says it appears to be comcast that is throttling things.
a good netflix connection needs about 2.5 to 3Mb/sec. So if I watch 4 hours of netflix a night then I need 43 Gigibits of data, or roughly 5.4 Gigibytes. times 30 days is only 162 Gigabytes.
So a 250GB cap does not seem way out of line for even substantial usage.
What I want is for COmcast to actually deliver untrhottled bandwidth during prime time. The cap I'm fine with.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Of course, I do live in Sweden and I've got 100/100 full duplex in my wall..
(250 gigabyte) / (1 month) = 797.473874 kilobit per second
You would have to cap uTorrent to 512kbit and then just do very moderate surfing to survive the cap ;)
That's just silly.
I bought my service while they were advertising UNLIMITED INTERNET USAGE.
Yeah, this sucks for brand new users, but it's just going to take them back to the good ol' days of False And Deceptive Advertising lawsuits.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
I have inside information on it:
The top 1% is around 400 GB per month; however, the actual number does not exist because they just go after customers who are in the top 1% nationwide (its by month.) If everybody jumped up in use, then only the top 1% of that would get nailed. It depends on what others use if you get into the top 1%; since there are always people going really high they never have to worry about lack of use.
What this indicates to me is that Comcast is seeing an average rise above 250 per month or a trend towards that much use for more than 1% (I don't know if the 1% is by state or what; only that a single dept handles the customers for it.)
So what we really have here is a bandwidth problem Comcast is avoiding thru caps. They can not handle anymore customers breaching the 250 threshold and the 1% harassment does not slow demand enough to match their lethargic growth.
This policy will stand for an extended period of time; simply to slow the transition of IPTV. So you can get a movie per day--- americans watch more than a few hours of TV per day (sadly.) Oh, comcast KNOWS what you watch on their digital boxes and they have cameras on experimental boxes which have not been deployed (and may never be-- but I know they have been working on it; yes, they have had audio for sometime and I do not know the extent of listening boxes deployed. The excuse is marketing information gathering; privacy is a big issue and is the main reason you don't have cameras in beta already on every box awaiting new applications for them.)
I've done it-- they really just bug the top 1% and now because too many people are going to higher levels they decided a cap that keeps them able to handle the gradual increase in use from everybody.
400GB isn't easy, but if you rsync backup stuff that changes a lot during the month plus do some p2p and get a few linux dvds or something. You can reach these levels legitimately but I've only done it once. (I do suspect a neighbor kid on my wifi which is open... but I know I can do easily 200GB in a busy month with rsync etc.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Caps are good news for hard copy media.
Instead of looking for an NZB or torrent for some shows, I'm sure people will turn to renting and ripping.
Caps are going to kill online distribution systems like Steam or Gametap.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Let's check the numbers. 250 Gig/month means about 8 Gig/day. Divide that by a generous 86,400 seconds in a day, or round up to 100,000 seconds, and that's a constant download speed of roughly 80 Kbytes/second, every second of every day. That is quite a lot for a residential service, and it requires quite a lot of upstream infrastructure to support. It's unlikely to work well with normal web proxies, because the most likely use is Bittorrent.
So it's completely economically reasonable to want to set a generous cap, and go after the worst residential home users and say to them "this is excessive". I'm certain their contract permits this kind of cap in the small print. Like someone at a smorgasboard who wants to bring home a shopping bag of leftovers, going over that for a residential contract is pretty ridiculous, unless you're running a big download site from your home. And if you're doing that, you should pay commercial rates.
"So they think think cutting prices makes a lot of sense"
Do you seriously think Comcast is going to lower prices to compete with FIOS? Seriously?
They're still charging people the same amount as before, but now they're adding a cap. Comcast has no intention of lowering prices. Ever. That would be stupid. If I was the CEO of Comcast and one of my employees said the way to make the business grow was to cut my main source of revenue, I'd fire them before they got the sentence out. They might create a new tier of service with higher limits, but that won't happen right away. That would be too obvious.
As to moving high-usage customers to FIOS, Verizon probably doesn't care; their physical plant has so much capacity compared to Comcast they can handle significantly more usage than that of Comcast. And if you don't think that's a big deal, it will be in 5 years as data consumption grows. What happens as people want to download high-def movies? If anything, this limit is highlighting the difference in capacity between Verizon and Comcast. Don't you think Verizon will have a field day with this?
This is a short-term win for Comcast, but it does not bode well for them for the longer term.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Actually, I'm an atheist, and thus was grabbing a 3600 DPI scanned copy of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.
Really, it is simple coincidence that the month in question was also right around the time 720p x264 rips started showing up on Usenet...
250 Gig is a lot... That's not the point. It's the precedent. Today it's a lot. Tomorrow it will be 200GB. Then 100GB Then they'll offer basic service at 50GB and everything else will be considered premium. This is just the first step in limiting unlimited service.
This cap is Comcast starting a 5 year year plan. Of course they're not going to set a limit today that we can complain about. They'll go after the top 1% and when they're taken care of they'll go after the next top 10%...
Remember when ATMs were free? Because they saved the bank money?
-[d]-
i dumped cable for dsl in my area and its alot better. the cable hear wanted abought twice as much money for the speed i have.
You can drop the cable box...just do a myth project...
Seriously, the HDHomerun is a GREAT item
I just entered my zip code at the link you gave. All I'd get are the "lifeline" channels: C-SPAN, plus home shopping, plus what I'd already get over the air. The rest appear to be encrypted, not clear QAM.
400gb? What are you downloading, the entire bible word by word in 1280x1024 bmp format?
400 GB is the same size as sixteen 1-layer Blu-ray Discs. Perhaps someone rented a few high-definition movies.
in the model already. can a customer ever have excessive use of a businesses product? no. it contradicts the idea of free trade.
comcast obviously doesnt think they have a customer base.
Good people go to bed earlier.
My originally *unlimited* service here in Canada was capped at 20Gb down about 6 years ago and 10Gb up. I have to be careful downloading and playing online games as both count towards my totals! 250Gb down sounds like a dream.....
i'm thinking of a Weird Al song right now, what's its name?... oh yes "Eat It" ah yes this thread reminds me of that song
You get amazing transfer rates (50 megs a sec actual) and you'd be absolutely amazed at the variety of stuff you'll find. All it takes is a portable PC and lot's of harddrive space. No caps and no RIAA sniffing around at what you are doing.
Here's the craziest part of it all, you might, gasp, accidently develope a social life too and meet one of those all mythical creatures known as a "girl".
I wanted to do the math and see if anyone will fit to these 250GB/month caps.
Suppose I have a 2 megabit plan and want to have the best bang for my buck.
* I let my three kids playing World of Warcraft at comfortable 20 kilobytes per second, they take turns and sometimes play simultaneously, each one plays 8 hours a day = (((20) * 60 * 60 * 24 * 31)/1024/1024) = 51 gigabytes per month.
Now, I have an internet radio turned on 24/7 in my lounge room at 128kbps = (((128/8) * 60 * 60 * 24 * 31)/1024/1024) = 40 gigabytes per month.
Also, I am seeding a torrent of fresh ubuntu, capped at 100 kilobytes per second = (((150) * 60 * 60 * 24 * 31)/1024/1024) = 383 gigabytes per month.
Let's say I also browse web, I check nytimes.com every ten minutes during work hours and at home for updates. The page size is 322 kilobytes and it's reloaded every time from scratch = (((320/10) * 60 * 10 * 31)/1024/1024) = 0.5 gigabytes.
But wait, my wife and my kids visit youtube often, total average 100 videos a day, every video has an average bitrate of 350kbps, and lasts about 4 minutes = (((((350 / 8) * 60 * 4) * 100) / 1024 / 1024) * 31) = 31 gigabyte per month.
Let's sum it up:
-----
51gb/month - WOW
40gb/month - Internet Radio
383gb/month - ubuntu
0.5gb/month - nytimes with cache disabled
31gb/month - youtube
-----
In order to fit into 250gb/month I have to cut ubuntu. Essentially I have to cut p2p no matter what I was seeding -- I have no choice.
So, this proves that they DID NOT change their strategy and still forcing customers to limit P2P to fit into these 250gb/month.
You do have a choice to limit your p2p bandwidth to 50 kilobytes per second, though -- you'll fit into 250gb/month quota. BUT this means that you can choose 1megabit plan because you have to cap your bandwidth usage and you're wasting your money for 2megabit plan.
That sounds like a reason to start class action lawsuit, if I were in US.
Eugene 'HMage' Bujak
If it's from a torrent, the OP will be seeding too. Let's not get confused by quotas and "download". A responsible torrent user will seed to at least 1:1. That 400GB is now down to 200GB. Comcast's 250GB is 125GB in the torrent world. I personally seed public domain torrents for olde movies. They're pretty crap by today's standards, but fun when you're in the mood. Unfortunately there aren't many of us doing it, when we stop due to caps like this, you can kiss goodbye to this kind of community sharing.
08:13:50 up 133 days, 11:30, 5 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
RX bytes:105620848566 (98.3 GiB) TX bytes:24404986554 (22.7 GiB)
98GB in 4 months... I think I'll be allright...
I believe that's the point. That's why they're not selling unlimited anymore. Also, it's hard to hold any company's definition of unlimited a few years ago to today's standards. Everyone should understand system's have tolerances, unlimited NEVER truly means unlimited.
I mainly use the connection to work via VPN and have usual surfing habits.
I don't download movies or participate in online games.
There are several ISO downloads scattered throughout the totals.
These totals are from the machine I work with daily. The other 3 machines combined have Never used more than 2 GiB in a month.
As you can see, this is just under 300GiB for a year.
From the article: "S. Derek Turner, research director of Free Press, said in a statement. 'If Comcast has oversold their network to the point of creating congestion problems, then well-disclosed caps for Internet use are a better short-term solution than Comcast's current practice of illegally blocking Internet traffic.'" The only problem this isn't going to be a short-term solution until Comcast can beef up its infrastructure to meet its advertisements. It is going to just be a standard business practice for them. Not just for them, there will be many copycats as well, and we won't get the benefit of an alarming news article to warn us; it will be hidden deep in a 20 page legalese document.
I feel a lawsuit coming on! I (unfortunately) use Comcast. And when I signed up, I signed up for UNLIMITED ACCESS!! I have to live up to the terms of agreement, and so does Comcast! They go back on it, then I will be cancelling my service, demanding a refund, and filing a class action lawsuit. It's time to take back the internet.
How much usage per month would 1hr of YouTube per night generate? Anyone have an estimate?
Comcast Video on Demand and VOIP will not be part of the cap (they use a slightly different protocol). Keep an eye out to see if Comcast allows other types of data to not count towards the cap.
For example if Comcast were to partner with Rhapsody they could say that their data would not could towards the cap. That would put other music download services at a disadvantage.
Or, for example if Comcast were to partner with Microsoft so that XBOX DLC did not count towards the cap but Sony DLC would count. That could influence you to buy and XBOX over a PS3.
I think it is through exceptions to their cap, via partnerships, that Comcast and other ISPs see as their way towards Access Tiering.
So you're getting capped @ 250GB now? Do you guys even use that much a month? Try living with a 3GB cap :D
They should not be let off the hook for not disclosing their overage charge structure (they had previously hinted it would be $15/10GB). The should also not be let off the hook for apparently failing to provide a mechanism for people to check their usage mid-month.
The significance of this statement is not the magnitude of the data transfer. It is the fact that they are making a policy that limits data transfer. That sets the stage for further limitations. This will change the dynamics of the current disagreement that they are having with the FCC. It is very smart to put the data limit high enough that people don't initially balk.
This should stop these idiot kids down the street from me from slowing down the internet so badly that my speedtest shows 1024 DOWN when they're at their peak of exchanging illegal programs and music and whatever else they're "sharing". They need to go out and get a job.
Hmmmm, worth tracking.
Linux user downloading ISOs, including some "let's try this" distros, and updates for multiple machines, use stream like cable radio, watch some YouTube, but I still have to wonder whether I'd go over 250. Not crazy about monitoring in principle but if they are for real in coding that variable into the monitoring software it might be the limit where I wouldn't complain in practice.
Unfortunately, it's a moving target. Won't it be great when every page has hi-def Flash ads?
Someone should sue them. No wonder why we are behind in every aspect of technology!!
They're not selling unlimited! They're listening to YOU, AceofSpades! Isn't that amazing?!
See the deception? Think of all the HD (and non-HD) television channels that they are broadcasting on the wire, 24/7 regardless of whether anyone is watching them. How many GB per hour does just one channel of broadcast video use? Add it all up for a month and 250GB is insignificant.
Their actual policy will be to limit transfer of data not purchased from Comcast to 250GB per month. The total data limit is much, much higher.
(To be fair, the data purchased from Comcast is effectively multicast, so there are some legitimate efficiency issues here.)
The only way to get straight talk from an ISP about actual data limits, is if the ISP is not also a seller of higher-level services. It miffs me that all the high speed internet hookups in my area just happen to also dabble in other services (which could just as easily be done over IP). They appear to offer affordable IP service, but really only if you buy it as a bundle with other [superfluous] services, such as TV or voice, and when you do that, the total bill is an arm and a leg anyway.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I wonder what effect this would have on users of cloud computing?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Does that mean they are going out of business soon?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
We are so far behind the power curve in broadband compared to Asia, why are we the first ones to do this? If this is such a good idea compared to upgrading networks for fast data rates, why didn't the Japs or Koreans do this first? I lived in Korea for a year, last year and d/u load speeds were wicked fast.
Is this limit download only, or is streaming count as well? How much data is really transferred back and forth for those hooked on MMOs? Is the 250GB limit down AND up? Could a person who plays (say 5 hours a day weekdays, 10 hours weekends) hit this limit by just playing the game they like?
250GB sounds like a lot until you really look at it. For desktop (even laptops now) the disk drive is bigger then 250GB to start off with. Most home desktops come with a 400GB-500GB hard drive. If they would have said 1TB that would have been better. Most regular people can hit 250GB (if streaming U-tube videos counts it is really easy to hit) but 1TB a month is out of reach for most regular people.
Those that have the P2P going can hit 1TB quickly. Those are the people that this rule is being made for. 250GB can be hit quickly if the person watches a lot of videos online (unless streaming doesn't count in the 250GB number).
Fortunately I made the switch (to Qwest) a little over a month ago. The installation was extremely painful, but now that it's done, it works great. I have about 1.5x the upstream which helps torrents greatly.
In addition, I can now see what the actual symptoms of Comcast's anti-torrent behavior is. When seeding via Comcast, I'd have fewer and fewer connections until after a few hours, I'd have none. With Qwest, this doesn't happen. Instead, I periodically (from a week to a day) get a new IP. This is better for me as my client seems to handle this better since it's easier to detect.
I would've gone with Verizon but there seems be some agreement between Verizon and Qwest to not serve the same areas. I suppose it's not surprising as Verizon is now handling Qwest's wireless services in my area.
Also remember that comcast (and everyone else) got the government to force everyone to switch to all digital. They claimed that the analog signals were eating up too much bandwidth. All digital would be easier to transmit since it was smaller.
I think greed was the main reason. All digital they can charge for each piece (channel, movie, stream, etc) and control easier.
Plus I like to use the things I buy until they break. Yes my TV is old, the picture on it is still perfect. I hate to have to toss it so I can watch the same thing I am watching now next year. I could get the converter and keep my TV. One week the converter is free, the next week we got to pay for it (by me anyway). I have yet to see any drop in price for this (now only) digital service. So come next year, we will have to pay more to watch the same things we watch now. Maybe more if I don't go out and spend $1000 (or more) on a new TV.
Everyone needs to let Comcast know that this is NOT ACCEPTABLE. If we just sit around and do nothing all ISP will institute CAPS and within no time at all the CAPS will get increasingly smaller and smaller (or not larger as average traffic goes up).
Do not sit and let this go by unnoticed. The best way to give Comcast a black eye on this is tell everyone you know / meet about this outrage.
Most of the "common" internet users do not know this is going on... Explain it to them, and explain why this is bad for everyone...
Screw them.
So what are my alternatives considering they are a f-ing monopoly? They were NOT my provider choice, they bought out everyone else in the area, one by one.
Where is the FCC? Aren't they supposed to be protecting s consumers against nonsense like this?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If you don't have a contract, you have absolutely no right to expect them to give you the same service next month as they gave you this month.
The operative word in my previous post being 'request'. Heh.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
So as my incoming spam increases by the day, i now get penalized for things out of my control.
Nice going, bastards.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"Bullshit. It's called "arbitrary limits set by a provider that doesn't want to upgrade their network capacity"."
Since when has physics been "arbitrary"? Thy can upgrade, but people like you don't want to pay, let alone the NIMBY factor we saw in the last broadband story here.
The cable companies want the caps so they can discourage people from getting viewable content elsewhere. They don't want you downloading tv / movies from Netflix or Itunes or Amazon or anywhere else. They want you to watch shows through their set top box. Cables companies sell local and regional ads for shows that they carry. They are using the data bandwidth issue as a false argument to slow the adoption of alternate content distribution methods than their own.
You were waiting all day for an opening to brag about your WRT54GL being flashed! Weren't you tomato boy!
You totally missed the point that you were told the connection was unlimited, but really its not. You were lied to, but "oddly" enough you seem ok with it.
I get that, I just don't understand why you'd make such a request. Without a contract, they have every right to make changes to their services at any time. Large companies never do things to be "nice". The purpose of the contract from the customer's point of view is exactly to protect against this sort of sudden change in service. If you don't have one, tough kittens.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Imagine going to an "All you can eat" buffet. It's great! Lots of stuff to choose from. You are just eating away. Then you see some cheesecake, but when you start to take it back to your table, the waiter slaps the plate from your hand and says "YOU'RE DONE! NO MORE FOR YOU!".
Don't lie to me and tell me I'm getting unlimited internet access, lock me into a 2 year contract and then tell me you are going to limit my unlimited internet and there is nothing I can do about it. That's BULL!!!
783,137 words * 3.75 MB/word = 2.9 TB (24 bit) .98 TB (256 color) .640 MB/word = .50 TB (16 color) .160 MB/word = .13 TB (monochrome)
783,137 words * 1.25 MB/word =
783,137 words *
783,137 words *
my life is so boring...
bastards.
I also live in Twin Cities metro area (Minneapolis/Saint Paul, MN), and think you should give DSL another look.
I was an early adopter of Qwest DSL in the mid-1990s, and used it for years. Sometime in the last 5 years I decided to switch to the highest speed residential Comcast cable line I could get. In late 2007 I started getting really upset with my Comcast cable line. Their overzealous network management was negatively impacting legitimate data transfers, including uploads, downloads, and use of Lotus Notes. Since I often work from my home office, this was a big issue for me. My Comcast line was also having hiccuping while streaming On Demand video from Netflix.
In October 2007 I *upgraded* from Comcast cable to the fastest residential DSL service I could get at home. My new DSL (which included a new modem) is *much* faster than my original 90s DSL service. Further, although it doesn't advertise higher speeds than Comcast cable, in practice I find it works much better. Large downloads and uploads are transferred with consistent speeds, and I never have any issues with Netflix On Demand.
BTW, the latest standard, ADSL2+, can deliver up to 24Mb speeds, and there's research going on to push DSL speeds over 100Mbps.
So check out DSL again.
One more thing: To make an analogy to the audio world, it occured to me last year that the advertised speeds for Comcast Cable lines are similar to the advertising for Bevada Power Boosters in the 1980s. They would advertise a huge amount of power (500 Watts Max!) for really cheap ($29.95). Well, they could theoretically push out that much power for a split second at extremely high distortion levels... but they just weren't very usable.
Anybody have an idea what games like WOW, TF2, COD4 etc. consume in bandwidth while playing on an average server, say 15 peers?
SoSider here, and I pay $45 for Cable Internet at 10Mbps/300Kbps, and an additional $12 for basic cable. Basic Cable has just had 4 channels dropped from the analog lineup, but we still pay the same price. Cable Internet goes to $65/month if I drop the Basic Cable. If that cap is real, I'm cutting it pretty close at about 72Kbps sustained for the month. DSL is a freaking joke here in this city if it is under 1Mbps. That's not broadband, that's a poor excuse for the crappiest of Internet. Alternatives to Comcast Internet? None. FIOS isn't available, and I can't subscribe to the competing cable company which serves the nice folks across the freaking street! Did I mention that DSL is a bad joke? Maybe I should contact the Pittsburgh Wireless Community about this. Oh wait...
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
this means as programmer you can not use concast they ever hear that tools are now in gigabytes (oracle 800gb) which means you need to get part one this month, next part next month and so and so Well what you can do (Europe there I going back :)
I don't get how comcast can get away with offerring "unlimited" internet at speeds "up to 16 Mbps" and then cap @ 250 GB/month. 250 GB/month works out to a rate of 809 kbps, or .79 Mbps, a mere 1/20th of the advertised rate. .79 Mbps during that period. They should be forced to change their advertising to say "speeds up to .79 Mbps". Class action suit anyone?
Where is the Federal Trade Comission whe you need them. It seems absurd to let Comcast get away with offering speeds of 16 Mbps, sold on a monthly basis, while essentially terminating service for any customer that averages over
While 250 GB in a month seems sufficient for most users most of the time, I could easily see a time in the not so distant future where you might want to have a video feed (or several) running all the time (much as some people leave their TV on all the time) -- easily consumming 1 or 2 Mbps.
I get that, I just don't understand why you'd make such a request. Without a contract, they have every right to make changes to their services at any time.
For the simple reason that they still require customers to survive. They spent years advertising unlimited service, then suddenly it changes. That breeds distrust. They're well within their right to do that, you're right about that. I don't have Comcast now, but when I move and need to reconnect my internet service, they're going to have to live with the fact that I may utterly avoid them now. Not because I use that much bandwidth, but because it's not like I can easily uproot my internet connection and get a new one. I don't want to use a service that has a track record of spontaneously changing the terms of service so dramatically.
So, basically, I'm making a request that they be decent. They don't have to, just like I don't have to use them as a service. It's up to them if they want to re-earn my trust.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
250 GB/month works out to be 8Kbits/sec average, so you'd better not be using Comcast to monitor a remote webcam, or listen continuously to streaming internet radio 24/7, etc.
imho, this is really about blocking a new competitor: IP tv. H.264 video at 1.5 Mbits/sec works out to about 660MBytes/hour. better make sure you turn your TV off when you're not watching.
JumpTV just merged with NeuLion (IP tv set top box maker), Apple and others are moving fast to deliver TV via the Internet. i'm starting to see Comcast "premium" content (comes only with the additional $50/month package) in IP tv packages for half that... this is just the beginning.
Consider this a pre-emptive move from Comcast...
Except that they currently aren't advertising "unlimited", and as far as I know they have not done so for quite a while.
Not to mention, 250GB/month is functionally equivalent to "unlimited" for 99% of their customers. The wants to either get rid of or force to change.
As for a "dramatic" change in the terms of service, I don't buy it. They've gone from "you can use all you want as long as you don't hurt the network so much that other users are affected" to "here's a hard limit you can live by". That limit is far beyond what most people could possibly use. If you are using more than 250GB/month, then maybe a cheap home-grade connection is not for you.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
This is a bait and switch routine no matter how you look at it. I won't use the 250gb every month and I certainly won't be happen on those months where I might hit the cap.
The bottom line is that they didn't tell me I'd be capped or interfered with when I ordered their package nearly 5 years ago. I was told it was to be an unlimited service and now it is not, that's fraud.
They have chosen to take the same route as the companies getting big tax breaks. Instead of using that to develop better products they used it to offshore their workers and to pocket the huge profits. Same for this company. Comcast has taken the money and pocketed it instead of making the investment into upgrades that can eliminate this stuff. This is a win-win for them and a loose-loose for us the customer. If they succeed at capping it and then in the next 10 years they implement better bandwidth they won't lower their price, they'll keep it high and charge us more to get the higher bandwidth.
The bottom line is that this is bad management at comcast that is only after lining their pockets instead of actually creating a business that others want or that other companies can compete with.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Except that they currently aren't advertising "unlimited", and as far as I know they have not done so for quite a while.
Lots of people adopted cable modems back when unlimited was the standard marketing term. Then, they suddenly stop talking about it. True, they don't say unlimited anymore, but they don't say limited either. It's, at best, in the fine print. So far, they're the first to behave that way, at least in the general public sense. It matters.
Not to mention, 250GB/month is functionally equivalent to "unlimited" for 99% of their customers.
No, it's not. It's an altering of the deal. You cannot say that anybody will never that cap. They could discover new streaming content. They could have a friend come by and f' it up. Comcast could change the limit. Anything could happen. This possibility was not considered when the service was started up. Worse, people were lured into thinking they'd never run into a problem with it.
That limit is far beyond what most people could possibly use. If you are using more than 250GB/month, then maybe a cheap home-grade connection is not for you.
They should provide what they advertise. If they can't, they should be up front with their customers and do what they can to ease the transition. Stupid rationale like "That outta be enough for everybody" is not an answer.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
There are ways to validate their claims. For example, my Linksys router is running the Tomato firmware, which provides a full-featured bandwidth monitor. I can get usage reports by hour, day, week, and month, as well as in real-time. It separates my usage into upstream and downstream, and gives me a combined total (which is the number that Comcast is concerned about). Now, a setup like this may be a little beyond your average websurfer, but then not many of them are likely to hit the 250 GB cap, anyway.
So now, if they call me again (and they have already done so once) I can verify their reports of my usage. I may not be able to convince the person on the phone, and they may still decide to cut my service, but at least I'll know I was right and have a record to use against them.
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
They are providing what they advertise! They stopped saying "unlimited" years ago, you admit this yourself. It should come as absolutely no shock whatsoever that, years after they stop advertising "unlimited", they now stop providing it.
I'll say it again: you have no contract. Everything is subject to change at any time. If you go to the grocery store and suddenly the price of your favorite bread has doubled, you have no real grounds for complaint. Likewise here.
Change is the only constant in life. If you signed up with Comcast service years ago expecting to receive exactly the same service at exactly the same price until the end of time, that misconception is your fault, not theirs.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
This is a terrible idea and solution these telecom monopolies have come up with..Atleast for the consumer. Many of us sign up for these services under the impression that the bandwith cap was to be our limiter of how much information we could get access to. Putting all the completely ignored contractual agreements aside from these providers its a simple attempt at control of one of the most liberating technologies in history.
Unlimited access to just about any information.
This will not only have behaviorial modifications to most users but also the tech indistry as a whole. How long do you think it will take before 250GB a month is the bottle neck with all these upcoming and yet to be invented technologies that will interconnect our homes, appliances and gadgets. look how far we have come in such a short time since dialup in terms of technology and bandwith needs. Immersive High definition media and games. You think HTML is going to be the standard for future content. Why have a bunch of text when we can have interactive fully graphical environments at your fingertips. How about the number of PC's in our houses and digital media recorders. The backbone bandwith is already a bottleneck to technical innovations. Throw on a cap to stiffel usage will only exacerbate these limitations.
Plus I do not need anymore stress in my life. I like the raw freedom I get from doing and seeing whatever content or connectivity I want with the internet and cannot imagine why anyone would ever not mind adding another layer of responsibility pushed to the consumer for the name of profit in companies we do not even like. Better watch those kids, roomates, neighbors (hijackers), family members, number of PC's, number of and content of DVR's in the house, sharing of media legit or not. The list can go on and on. And do not think because you only use 50GB a month now that it will never be increasing. Or I guess you could find out the hard way 6 months down the road and that new unlimited High def movie device you just got costing you $699.00 and $20 dollars a month fee is going to also cost you another 40$ a month because your ISP says you exceeded your download cap and they can conveniately offer you the 350Gb package.
These based upon limits set before much of these innovations were available and you only used 50Gb a month before?! A limit your ISP is surely not going to increase without a major hit to margins. If only you had not given up this freedom 6 months ago now all the ISP are doing it and you decide not to buy in some of these new products and or visit some of these websites\games because its just to costly. As will many Americans. Who controls your freedom now?
I am willing to pay for the Internet bandwith even though fundamentally I believe it should be free to everyone but this new layer of control if just a terrible idea that is going to hurt everyone.
They are providing what they advertise! They stopped saying "unlimited" years ago, you admit this yourself. It should come as absolutely no shock whatsoever that, years after they stop advertising "unlimited", they now stop providing it.
Welp, you listened to one bit that I said, now listen to the other: They didn't say they weren't unlimited anymore, either. That's a big-fat-important detail right there.
I'll say it again: you have no contract. Everything is subject to change at any time. If you go to the grocery store and suddenly the price of your favorite bread has doubled, you have no real grounds for complaint. Likewise here.
That'd be a great rebuttal, if I had said they had a legal obligation to do so. This conversation has gotten circular. I'm talking about how they need to maintain their trust with their customers. That's it. Please pay attention to this because you've already missed it twice.
Change is the only constant in life. If you signed up with Comcast service years ago expecting to receive exactly the same service at exactly the same price until the end of time, that misconception is your fault, not theirs.
Communication by ommission is not communication. Their failure to communicate most certainly is their fault.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the formula I used.
250,000,000,000*12/365.2422/24/60/60/1024
That will allow for 92 Kilobytes per second if used 24x7. Going by Comcrap's high transfer rate of 700 Kilobytes per second, it would only take 4 days to reach that cap. Download at full speed for 4 hours per day, Comcrap will consider the user to be a "Heavy user". With powerboost, divide the time in half. Comcrap can keep their so-called "high speed" and I will stick with an uncapped 3Mbps DSL connection.
Rollover GB? Yea, yea, I know that's kinda farfetched, but one can dream.....
If Comcast is going to cap transfer at 250 GB/mo, I ask only one thing:
- My hosting provider limits me to 20 GB per month, and I can use CPanel to see how much I've used that month.
- Verizon limits me to 450 peak, off-network minutes and 50 off-network SMS messages per month. I can request a free SMS message at any time to see what I've used so far--even log on at Verizon's website to check on this.
Give me a simple interface I can Web into to see how much I've used, and I'll be fine. I doubt I get anywhere close to 250 GB/mo...
AT&T is rolling out their U-Verse here. There's only two big problems, no static ip addresses plans, and they are pushing their TV service to the point that they won't let you get just internet service. I even asked their commercial side and they don't offer static ip addresses.
I think it is fiber to those new neighborhood nodes, and then DSL from there. The call center people I've talked to say it is fiber to the house, and my house was shown as wired up already. Given the lack of cable puller cut marks in the grass, I tend to not believe the call center people.
"Failure to communicate"? What a bunch of bullshit. How do you think everybody found out about their grand October plan in advance? Oh right, because Comcast announced it.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
"Failure to communicate"? What a bunch of bullshit. How do you think everybody found out about their grand October plan in advance? Oh right, because Comcast announced it.
The limits were in place before they announced it. That's why there's been a lot of drama orbitting Comcast in the last year or two.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
They were in place even back when they advertised "unlimited". Every consumer-level broadband service I've ever heard of has had unofficial, unpublished limits that would result in a warning or in cancellation of service. This is just one further reason why nobody should be in the least bit surprised about Comcast's move. They're opening up, they're communicating their terms of service much more clearly, and they're making their limits official and explicit instead of letting you trip over them in the dark. And yet somehow you want to complain about them being uncommunicative!
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Every consumer-level broadband service I've ever heard of has had unofficial, unpublished limits that would result in a warning or in cancellation of service. This is just one further reason why nobody should be in the least bit surprised about Comcast's move.
Uh.. okay. They're uncommunicative, but that's okay because we know there's some undefined limit and so the burden's on us... Right.
They're opening up, they're communicating their terms of service much more clearly, and they're making their limits official and explicit instead of letting you trip over them in the dark. And yet somehow you want to complain about them being uncommunicative!
That's not what I complained about. Actually I didn't even really complain about anything, I made a request. If you're still confused, go back and reread.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I think the big content providers (Microsoft with xbox live, sony with the PSN, Apple with Itunes, etc.) should get together and see what lobbying, legal and/or FCC actions they can take as such limits can significatly impede their business. People will not be as willing to purchace and download HD content from them if they're worrying about every meg.
If they make it more costly or near impossible to actually transfer anything it will effectively kill p2p.
As a nice side effect ( nice to the government, not us citizens ) it will also kill off privacy protecting projects like freenet.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I was contacted about excessive usage about nine months ago. Until recently, it was done by a completely separate office that the normal Comcast customer service people knew very little about. If you do a google on comcast excessive usage, you will find more than a few horror stories from people who had been banned with little to no information or avenue of recourse provided by Comcast.
Anyway, to answer some of the questions:
(1) Uploads do in fact count. So, for those of you who use peer-to-peer software, it will be the equivalent of 125 gigs/month if you maintain a share ratio of 1. That means you can download about 4 gigs on average per day via p2p if you do absolutely nothing else on the internet. That's about 3 good quality movies at 1.3 gigs or one movie at high definitions before you get banned, which really isn't all that much. And remember those numbers assumes you do absolutely nothing else on the internet that uses significant bandwidth. In reality, it will be far less.
- Anything that goes through your cable modem will count. That means XBox/PS3 demo downloads, console network gaming, all non-comcast telephony like Skype, all non-comcast video streaming including those that you get from certain TiVo boxes, etc. all count.
- Any software meter programs that you can download will not cover anything that does not go through the computer it's running on, which means it could be quite inaccurate if you use multiple computers or things like xbox/ps3 or TiVo video streaming. The only way to get around Comcast not providing accurate information is to have some sort of meter on your cable modem router. Do such programs exist?
- When I spoke with their excessive usage folks about it nine months ago, he was very explicit that there was absolutely no avenue for appeal. If you look at some of the horror stories about people who've been banned for excessive usage, you'll see that it's just as draconian as it sounds.
The only positive thing I can say about this policy is that at least they're finally acknowledging it publicly.
Given how critical internet access is in this day and age, it's absolutely unacceptable that a company that has a monopoly in certain areas can ban people for a year. In my opinion, this policy shows that they're greedy and couldn't care less about their customers. If it truly were about maintaining quality of service for all Comcast subscribers, why not do something more intelligent like cutting off service for the rest of the month when they hit the limit, or instituting some sort of throttle on those people in the following month or adding disincentives like charges for going over the limit? Many bandwidth-challenged ISPs in other countries do exactly that. If they can come up with techniques to spoof file sharing packets, they can certainly come up with relatively simple technology like the ones I described. I'll tell you why they don't. They WANT to ban and get rid of people who use a lot of bandwidth so they can sell it via services with a higher margin of profit/bandwidth like VoIP. In other words, they're greedy and couldn't care less about their customers.
Just makes another thing for people to fight over, and a good way for Comcast to screw their customers when technology catches up with that number.
I'd have thought there's a reasonable chance those hours also reflect peak usage hours.
Perhaps if they combined their "cap" with an "off-peak" allowance then all those people transferring bittorrent files while you're trying to stream something might instead be inclined to schedule it overnight.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
This is very very baaad. All our bots are now going to be wrong to them.
I monitor the amount of traffic with vnstat on my Linux Router for quite some time. :-)
Luckily, my provider does not have such a 250GB Limit, as in Jun '08 I pumped 253,7 GB of Data across my DSL Uplink
1) Comcast has business accounts that have unlimited access.
2) Comcast sells their own voice over IP phone traffic.
3) All television channels are shifting from analog to digital next year.
By limiting the average user to a daily total of 8 gig of data (I'm sure that's combined up and down load limits).
They can cut out people who are using their own voip telephone, limit the usage of netflix online.
I'm expecting this is stage one to forcing people to pay them the extra for phone service, and to shut down the possible competition of any streamed video. This is any streamed video both legal and underground.
Of course the point is to maximize profits and reduce expenses.
Here in New Zealand I'm stuck with 10GB International and 50GB National. And that plan is one of the better ones :)
Speed is 3GBit down /2GBit up
I remember back in the days when i had to pay 73.2 USD for 1GB... Then pay an additional 9.15 USD for an additional one.
This cap will not solve any problems they have with the capacity of their network. The pipes will be clogged when all those people are watching movies and it does not matter if it's 4.7GB or 20GB. If they cannot provide enough bandwidth at certain times at day it does not matter if people are downloading 10 GB file or 1.5GB file at that moment they are still clogging your pipes. Nobody will change their Internet usage times because of the cap so the congestion will remain.
I use Telus at 3mbs and I have never noticed any slow down even with 2 computers connected to the connection.
Oh, I'm sure eventually, you will need more than 250G/month. Right now, you certainly don't need it for movies. And if you do, you should pay more for it than the average user.
As it is, I don't download movies or otherwise download megabytes never mind gigabytes. I watch all my movies on my TV and my TV is not hooked up to any computer I own. I legally buy all my movies, first VHS and now DVDs. But that totally ignores the service I was sold. I was sold unlimited access, I signed a contract to that, the only limit was that I could not run a website through my access. But now they want to change the terms of the contract.
You never "own" software anyway. And just because you want that doesn't mean it's the best choice for 99% of users. My mother, in fact, has SAAS: I update her computer and software every few weeks.
Sure I do, if I write software for myself it's mine.
I also want to be able to use it anywhere I can take my laptop.
Gears.
Gears? Gear cogs I know, otherwise I don't know what you mean. When I go hiking I want to be able to take my laptop so I can do a couple of things. First I want to be able to make adjustments to my photos, then I want to take notes. While I can take notes with pen and paper, I can't edit my photos without a computer, or darkroom.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
"ask" them to "curb their usage"? More like cut your internet off without an email or phone call, leave you stuck with a clueless tech support for 2 hours, before making you beg on a non-toll-free line to restore your service and wait 3 days?
With unlimited service being capped at 250 GB, that leaves an inconsistency.
Namely unlimited means even infinite use is acceptable.
To avoid this, infinity has now been redefined to be equal to 268435456000.
This eliminates any legal problems with the unlimited service from Comcast.
It also significantly helps with the national debt, as nothing can exceed infinity. It isn't so bad now, and we can spend and spend and spend and never worry about it getting bigger, because, by definition, it can't! We can afford to go to war with Iran (and Syria, and Canada and Mexico and New Mexico, ...), and give unlimited Federally funded Internet to everyone in the country, and make people on both sides of the political fence happy.
Also, division by zero is now allowed, 1/0 = 268435456000. Oh happy day!!!
There will be a new IEEE floating point specification coming out soon based on this new mathematical fact.
We have 111 years of accepted precedent when it comes to redefining mathematical fact, Indiana made PI equal to 3 back in 1897.
Let us all rejoice!
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Will all the probing activity (about 15 Kbps according to DDWRT) count against the total? Are we talking TCP or IP packets or ethernet frames?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I talked to a representative last night and asked what exactly happens when you go over you limit. He mentioned that there will be several warnings (the number is yet to be determined) and if you don't comply that they will shut down your service for 12 months as a penalty. Honest to god. 12 months. When I pointed out how ridiculous that was, he agreed and said that the final rules and regulations are still be hashed out. I also brought up the subject of buying more bandwidth, which at the moment, is apparently not even being talked about. This is a huge problem for me, because I go over the cap every month AND Comcast is the ONLY cable provider in Center City Philadelphia.