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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."
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.........
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
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
Good luck with that.... http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/25/blue_dogs/index.html
One more reason to install AdBlock+
ha, them Verizon bastards won't be far behind on capping their crap, remember they were ones that backed comcrap in their bt killing efforts.
All those examples put together won't come anywhere near 250 GB.
I think you mean "Boiling a Frog".
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. ;)
You forget....
They also collected billions in TAX DOLLARS to fund the build out of their infrastructure.
I say the Feds audit every one of them hard.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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?
Likely they'll cut your speed down until the end of the month. That's what most (if not all now) ISPs do in Australia. So you can still email and surf most stuff, just no youtubing or radio streaming.
OK, let's go through the math step by step, since people seem to suck at it:
250 gigabytes is, approximately, 250,000 * 8 megabits, or 2,000,000. Divide that by 10 megabits per second, and you get 200,000 seconds. Divide that by 3600, and you get 55 hours. Divide that by 25, and you'll find that it's a little under 2 and a half days of downloading.
Which isn't very long at all, really.
Of course, if, back in the real world, you get more like one megabit most of the time, you'll nearly make it through the month.
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?
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!
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.
Comcast hasn't used the word "unlimited" in ages. They don't have to, almost no one thinks in terms of "how much can I download," they just look at the speed numbers.
Instead they just refer to their service as something vague like "always-on, high speed Internet access."
Which is still a complete lie, based on how often my connection goes down. Sure, my modem is always-on, but whatever's at the other end sure doesn't seem to be.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
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?
No, Comcast's VOIP service is out-of-band from regular IP. Skype and others, yep. Funny how that works out to Comcast's benefit, eh?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I know your kidding but man I'd kill for a cap like that. Up here in western Canada most people have a 30-60Gig cap. Of course if you're with Shaw for ten extra bucks a month they'll double the up/down and raise the cap to 100 gigs but still, 250 gigs for entry level...
Now mind you a lot more people use torrents and the like up here. In fact both the major internet providers seam to incourage the practice.
Telus says things like: "Download huge files" "Play games and downlaod your favourite music quickly" Shaw does the same: "Ideal for those who send a lot of email, download large files such as music or TV episodes," and "Download music in seconds and full-length movies in less than 10 minutes."
Wait until you start downloading Blu-Ray from content delivery services.
Blu-Ray is an optical disc format.
It says nothing about the codec used to encode the video.
Many early Blu-Ray discs were nothing more than high bitrate MPEG-2.
Now everyone uses VC-1 (Microsoft) or H.264 (MPEG-4) because they are vastly more efficient.
I think what you meant to say was "Wait until you start downloading high definition video from content delivery services."
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Not much. Let's say you stream 128 kbps audio around the clock for 31 days. That works out to 37 gig per month, or 14.5% of the cap.
Still, your concern is exactly what comcast fears - people worrying about it because they don't really know, and not liking that nagging feeling, and going elsewhere even though they don't use that much.
128 / 8 / 2**20 * 3600 * 24 * 31 = kbps -> kBps -> GBps -> GB/hour -> GB/day -> GB->month = 40.869 GB/month
And every time Australians complain about internet, someone from New Zealand pops in to complain about how much worse we have it here.
I pay $90 a month for 10Gb connection. And it's terrible, I actually got told by support staff "Yes, we oversold our network and it's going to be crap til we upgrade it in the next few months"
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
Famous *apocryphal* Gatesism.
A single 720p DVD5 x264 is at 4.7GB. 4.7GB by 31 days is 145.7 GB. Not following.
Same in Canada. All the ISPs cap at 60GB or so.
Incorrect.
Sask Tel offers high speed DSL service with no cap whatsoever.
Really.
I've had it here for the past 7 years or so (ever since it became available in my town.)
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
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.
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.
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
2 full length movies per day basically...
Or about 0.5 HD movies per day, or around 0.2 if you torrent.
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
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.
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.
Assuming $50/month and a 250GB cap, that's a minumum usage rate of $0.20/GB if you use all 250GB every month. The $/GB goes up higher the less you use the network.
Think of it as metered usage with a $50 cap on the bill and a data limit that you didn't agree to.
To me that's worth some additional Comcast bashing.
I suspect this boils down to the cable co's chaffing at paying the monopoly telco's for their network access and they're trying to find ways to pass more of those costs down to you, the customer. (Without you, the customer, taking your business elsewhere as a result.)
When you consider how much dark fiber (particularly, see Butters' Law) is in the ground as well as Comcast's claims (p. 24, citation 83) that last-mile bandwidth cost is not the issue, the whole bandwidth situation for consumers here in the US is absurd.
-Matt
I'll go out on a limb and assume this is a serious question.
Netflix, for one.