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."

Comments

Which is absolutely fine

[Reality Master 201]

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?

Re:Which is absolutely fine

[Spy der Mann]

I agree... about time they finally told us what their REAL bandwidth limit is.

Now the next step is throttling connections when they reach 80% of that limit, so that they won't exceed it (Reach 80% of that 20%, and they'll throttle it even more, and so on). Then you can pay an extra amount of money for a larger bandwidth cap, like 500GB or 1TB per month.

Ta-da! Everybody happy.

Re:Which is absolutely fine

[Free the Cowards]

Ta-da! Everybody happy.

You must be new here!

I'm pretty sure that there is a significant minority (majority?) on this site which absolutely will not be happy in any capacity until their internet connection is faster than their LAN, has no cap whatsoever, and is free.

Okay folks

[LWATCDR]

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!

Re:Okay folks

[jlarocco]

I want congress to SMACK THE TELCOS HARD.

Sigh. What you *should* want is for your local government to stop giving your ISP an unfair advantage. Then other ISPs could start providing service if they wanted to. I don't know where you live, but the reason your broadband options suck is almost certainly the fault of your local government, and not some evil plot by the ISPs. Your local government being stupid isn't a problem for Congress. But hey, maybe you're right and there's really nothing the Internet Service Providers want more than to *not* sell you internet access.

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!

What? They're obviously delivering the internet service you agreed to buy, otherwise you wouldn't be posting on Slashdot right now, amirite?

Oh, and by the way, once you give your money to a company in exchange for goods or services, it's not your money anymore. You don't get a say in what that money gets spent on, it belongs to the company you gave it to. Just like your employer doesn't get to tell you what you can spend your money on after they pay you.

How does this bullshit get modded "Insightful"?

Re:Okay folks

[Chandon Seldon]

There are two indecent issues here.

First, you are absolutely correct that a local-government granted monopoly is probably one of the major sources of any individual's current ISP selection woes.

But there's also a second issue, as described here. It's hard to describe the issue in a way that doesn't sound radically biased, but the simple fact of the matter is that the telecom companies committed to deploying massive fiber networks and managed to squirm out of it (mostly thorough regulator-capture).

So this isn't just a local government failure. It's also a massive federal government failure, from which there is perfectly good reason for US residents to feel cheated out of decent speed data infrastructure.

Boiling a Lobster

[19thNervousBreakdown]

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?

About Time

[Orphaze]

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.

Reasonable. Now, a request... measurement.

[Chairboy]

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.

"Unlimited" Internet

[Kneo24]

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.

Re:about time

[AceofSpades19]

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

Re:Still practically unlimited for most

[gruntled]

Hmm. Would this include upload as well? I'm thinking that if you happened to have a number of highly desirable files in your P2P folder, other people grabbing a copy of your content might kick you up. Might this actually be the objective of such "reasonable" caps, to make people think twice before hosting such content?

Re:250 GB

[arth1]

For now. It will probably suck in the future.

It sucks already. If you watch one HD movie a day, you'll exceed the quota.
Of course, Comcast wants you to watch HD movies through their expensive pay-per-view service instead of downloading them...

And what of VOIP?

[E-Lad]

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?

Here come the "In Australia..." posts

[QCompson]

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!

Re:Here come the "In Australia..." posts

[lennier]

"Dammit Australia, just because you have crap internet, the rest of the world shouldn't have to accept it!"

There's a little thing called 'living within your means' which used to be considered a virtue. That's why we laugh at people who have ten times as much stuff as us and yet feel more hard done by. Grow some restraint. It'll be good for you.

Also, if you guys have ten times as much bandwidth as us, you'll make websites loaded down with useless Flash and vidcasts which are ten times bigger, you'll write operating systems which are blithely unaware that Internet is not a free commodity for some of us and have no concept of restricting transmissions to the necessary, and we'll get locked out of the Web by all your bloat.

So it's in our interest for broadband speeds charging regimes to be roughly the same all around the world - otherwise we end up the wrong side of the data gap.

And it's not crap, it's metered. You don't get free all-you-can-eat electricity or petrol or food each month - why should Internet capacity be different?

If you really want absolutely unlimited Internet with a charging regime completely uncoupled from usage, that means you want to socialise the cost of communications infrastructure. Fine, that's a valid political position and it's got some merit to it, but in that case you guys should already have free healthcare and be advocating for a Universal Basic Income.

Re:So much for unlimited internet

[lysergic.acid]

yea, that's why my kitchen and bathroom faucets stop working if i use more than 250 gallons of water a month...

it's not hard to calculate how much bandwidth the average user requires each month and then take that amount * the number of subscribers you have, and make sure that your capabilities can match that level of traffic. of course, this doesn't work if you oversell and _advertise your service as "unlimited"_.

Re:250 GB

[Jafafa Hots]

You're thinking like what you are - a slashdot reader. Meaning, a single greasy male living in someone's basement.

Try a household with two parents and four teenage daughters like my sister's. A single HD movie worth of data in a day would mean that at least two people are at sleepovers.

Well, am I grandfathered?

[Anachragnome]

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.

No, it's not absolutely fine.

[SuperBanana]

If I did my math right, it's a 7.5:1 disparity between advertised data rates and the buried-in-legal-print limit.

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.

Re:No, it's not absolutely fine.

[hellwig]

Does Comcast pay for internet traffic by the gigabyte? No. Comcast, like everyone else, buys dedicated bandwidth from the major providers. What has happened here is that Comcast has severely over-sold their portion of the data lines. Their systems simply can't put up with people using the full bandwidth of their previously unlimited plans.

What doesn't make sense is how a company that pays by bandwidth hopes to alleviate its problem by controlling traffic. I may only download 1 movie a month, but if I do it during the same hour as every other house in my neighborhood, Comcast still doesn't have the bandwidth. Comcast is using the excuse of low-bandwidth to restrict traffic, purely for profit. They won't upgrade their network to provide more bandwidth, but they'll try to charge people more to use it (I am making the obvious assumption that they will soon offer 250+ GB plans for a premium price).

Comcasts approach to controlling bandwidth issues would be like a local government saying too many people drive too fast on the roads during rush-hour, so they decided to raise the tax on gasoline. That won't slow people down, it just means they can afford less gas, and run out 75% of the way to their destination. Those who can continue to pay the price of gas will continue to drive their Corvettes, while the rest of us take the city bus to the local library to check our email after our children downloaded too many freakin movies off our netflix account.

Re:250 GB

[dgatwood]

It sucks already. If you watch one HD movie a day, you'll exceed the quota.

Indeed, I suspect that's why they're doing this now. Call me cynical, but my gut says this isn't about bandwidth at all.

Services like Amazon Unbox and the iTunes Store are reducing their non-Internet (cable TV) offerings to mere commodities. By making TV shows available for immediate purchase instead of having to wait a year for them to come out on DVD, many people are realizing they really don't need cable TV. Worse for Comcast, many find that they would pay less per month to buy a season pass for the shows and own the recordings instead of only being allowed to time shift them for a limited period of time.

Add to that the impact that online movie download services (Unbox, iTS, NetFlix, etc.) have on pay per view movies, and you'll quickly understand that this has virtually nothing to do with their bandwidth costs or preserving quality of service for other users and everything to do with anticompetitive price fixing and consumer lock-in....

Make no mistake, if bandwidth were the culprit, the would be charging based on how much traffic came in from off-network sites, not for all traffic across the board. They would be in favor of P2P and would be encouraging services like Unbox and iTS to use P2P designs to maximize the efficiency of customer delivery. Instead, they're deliberately creating barriers to scare people away from obtaining TV and movie content from anyone but them.

Here's hoping the next administration lets the antitrust lawsuits fly against Comcast and their ilk.

Re:So much for unlimited internet

[penix1]

For a basic level of residential service, 250 gigs per month isn't that bad... 2 full length movies per day basically... I bet their top 1% of users dont use half of that on average..

And what about that user that wants to see 3-5 movies a day? You see, they sold the service as "unlimited" then introduced limits. So maybe they should remove the bold red 150 point "UNLIMITED" from their advertisements. It's all about truth in advertising. If you have a limit, it isn't unlimited.

Re:And a meter would be nice

[electrostatic]

Yes indeed that would be helpful. I watch Netflix videos every night with the Roku box (like it a lot). There's no way I know of to measure my total Netflix usage. It's probably much greater than my Internet use. Comcast is my ISP and this is from the FAQ.

How does Comcast help its customers track their usage so they can avoid exceeding the limit?

There are many online tools customers can download and use to measure their consumption. Customers can find such tools by simply doing a Web search - for example, a search for "bandwidth meter" will provide some options. Customers using multiple PCs should just be aware that they will need to measure and combine their total monthly usage in order to identify the data usage for their entire account.

Does not help!

In order to enforce their 250GB limit they first have to measure it. It would seem very simple for Comcast to display the current measurement on my account page.

I can't think of any reason they would want to hide it -- except to hide the fact that most customers are using only a few percent of what they are paying for.

Re:Very insightful point made in article

[Hadlock]

200ms = "relatively"?!?! No offense, but WTF are you playing, WoW or something?
 
I'll admit I mostly play FPSes (TF2, CS:S), but as near as I can tell, anything over 80 is noticeable, 100 is pushing it, and anything above 120 noticeably affects gameplay. 200ms is almost unplayable and literally halfway to dialup pings. Once you factor in display (5+ms) mouse (5ms) and whatever internal delay on your system, it adds up quickly.
 
When was your ping issue resolved? Mostly I call it a myth because when the Cable vs. DSL war first emerged in 2000-2001 they had to come up with some sort of downside to cable. Even 8 years ago it was "in some cases cable may..." Eight years have passed and people still spout that shit off the same way they spout off how the Corvair was "unsafe at any speed" even though GM had resolved the issue with roll bars before Nader's film made it to theaters. I suspect cable companies solved the problem with capacity long before broadband made its way to the general population.

Re:Very insightful point made in article

[mccabem]

Dude, that is the weakest (and some of the oldest) telco FUD in the broadband universe. It ought to be on Snopes if it's not already.

If your cable company connection slows down like you say, it's over usage or inadequate bandwidth being provided just like any other network. aka bad network management practice on behalf of the network operator.

It works the same way with DSL and your neighborhood (aka everyone within ~16,000ft/~3mi radius) DSLAM. No different at all. If the administering company doesn't maintain adequate upstream bandwidth for all concurrent users, you go slow when everyone gets online.

If you're suggesting that cable companies run craptastic networks (even more craptastic than the monopoly telco's I mean) that's one thing....but it's not related to the technology.

For what it's worth, I climbed on the cable internet bandwagon back in 1997 and have had cable internet service in multiple cities - usually in multiple areas of the city - and I've (knock on wood) never seen a slowdown ever. Not saying nobody has experienced this, just making the point that it's far from everyone who experiences the slowdowns you have. Sorry for your luck.

-Matt

Re:So much for unlimited internet

[Enigma2175]

yea, that's why my kitchen and bathroom faucets stop working if i use more than 250 gallons of water a month...

I don't know how it works where you live, but in my city I pay more if I use more water. In fact, I pay much more per gallon the more I use. If you want Comcast to adopt water billing, it will be $50 for the first 250 GB, then $75 for the next 150, then $125 for the next 100.

Re:So much for unlimited internet

[TooMuchToDo]

How about we look at how much bandwidth they could let people use if they didn't push 500 channels of bullshit onto people, and instead let people pull what they wanted only when they wanted over On Demand.

The idea of television as a broadcast medium is dead (as is always-running channels). Soon, you'll pick what and when to watch a la Tivo/Hulu/Netflix Watch It Now, etc.

Re:Cable TV != Cable Internet

[TooMuchToDo]

I think it's time people start investigating coop/municipal fiber solutions, similar to UTOPIA in Utah. Why let Comcast control the spigot when it can be done cheaper and with a higher level of service?

Re:So much for unlimited internet

[Digital End]

250gb isn't that bad guys, will only piss off like 5 people, not me, screw'em

200gb isn't that bad guys, will only piss off like 10 people, not me, screw'em

150gb isn't that bad guys, will only piss off like 50 people, not me, screw'em

100gb isn't that bad guys, will only piss off like 500 people, not me, screw'em

OMG! THEY SET THE CAP TO 50gb, As this directly effects me, since the other providers seen how they could lower the caps right along side them... I would like to ask why people are allowed to slowly wittle away at our freedoms, come everyone, join me in fighting this evil company!

(Just woke up, no coffee, not taking the time to make the post not look like I'm being an ass, sorry man)

Re:So much for unlimited internet

[eudaemon]

It did mention the cap is for "residential" accounts. For another $10-$20/mo you can flip to Comcast commercial
and voila no bandwidth caps. My guess is Comcast is going to get a flurry of "commercial" subscribers, and
achieve what they wanted all along -- to jack up the costs of a truly unlimited account, and to cap everyone else.