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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."
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?
If I flood your IP address, 250 GB can disappear pretty fast, and there's really nothing you can do about it. Whether your router drops the packets or not, they'll still be counted against your quota.
Similar if you fire up a p2p program, and download a video or game level or whatever. Once you end it, thousands of other people are still going to be sending packets to your IP address, checking whether you're back online and can share the file.
And it gets worse -- it doesn't even have to be you. Someone else might have done heavy file sharing, and then in the periodic reassignment of IP addresses that Comcast does (to prevent people from running servers), you get that IP. And all the request traffic, which can continue at high volume for days or weeks.
These are all weaknesses with the IP protocol, but it hardly seems fair not to have a system that takes this into consideration.
Is this a problem? Well, according to my router, I have had 18 GB in traffic (in + out) for the month of July for one of my WAN lines. According to the provider, it's been 27 GB. That's a rather big discrepancy. At the same ratio, if your router tells you you have used 180 GB out of the 250, you won't have 70 GB to go, you will already have exceeded the quota and are subject to whatever disciplinary actions Comcast might have in place.
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.
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
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 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
how fast is your cable connection? with adsl every person can have a 24mbps connection, to themselves which doesn't matter how much anyone else is using it nearby.
Cable last I checked is shared on a circuit common to at least a few households, so your mileage may vary depending on neighbours. still, if you can get faster than 24mbit on cable consistently I may consider switching from dsl to cable myself.
At first glance, I thought I'd use this as a reason to continue my comcast bashing, but come on guys.. really? 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, this is a GOOD thing from the point of view that the "Excessive use policy" now has a defined cap, and you know what to avoid to stay off the "bad boy list".. Much better than arbitrarily getting a letter or phonecall just because they see you as a torrent user, therefore you MUST be bad... -Steve
-Steve Tired of voting for the "lesser of two evils?" Come talk about it on www.bothsidesarewrong.com
Can I have rollover Gig?
This is a lie.
The reality is that a large number of accounts, say 15%, aren't registering any bandwidth at all. Comcast is real screwy when it comes to canceling, moving, or enabling service. Every time I have had to change service I had to contact them multiple times and was overcharged each time. They will charge you for service before it is installed. I know from insiders at the company that this is deliberate.
Another 25% are using the modems in USB mode which throttles their bandwidth to about 1 megabit or they are using very old computers or equipment which slows their connection. It's very difficult to go over the cap at these speeds.
About 3-5% are maxing out their connections, usually through downloading usenet feeds and, to a lesser extent, running bittorent trackers.
So what about the other 65%? I seriously doubt they're only downloading 85 MB per day. That's a handful of flash videos. I suspect it more in the 2-3 GB PER DAY range, or about 90GB per month. And it's rapidly going up.
This is headed for another FCC dust-up because I'm CERTAIN that Comcast is going to exclude their VoIP and their video download service (Comcast is partnered with Hulu) from this cap.
The difference is.. the telcos bill you for each call.
Do you want the ISPs to start billing per-megabyte? It's like any business - you advertise a maximum usage that is financially tenable for the business at a given price, with various usage assumptions factored in (time of day, contention ratio etc.), and offer that to the consumer.
Anyone going substantially above the expectations of what you get for your money would be subject to excess charges - someone has to pay for the above-average usage.
Granted, it's a stupid thing that American ISPs have advertised "unlimited" in the past, but there's no good reason to bitch now that they've come clean about exactly what they can handle, and what the expectations are.
They expect $XX per month, you expect YY gigabytes per month. What's wrong with putting that down on paper rather than "uh, yeah, use as much as we consider viable.. we'll tell you when you hit it"?
We could have unlimited internet plans.. but would everyone be willing to pay extra to expand the infrastructure?
My state is trying out regional broadband served by the power district. I think fiber options from all the major vendors will be coming shortly. After all, if they lose these customers they're probably gone forever.
It's not like bandwidth costs a lot of money. If I moved closer to work I could have 100Mbps for $50/mo. Get this - my wife won't move because the area where I can get that from the power district is "too rural". So much for that density argument, eh?
Anyway, kudos to the power districts that are willing to step up and say: "People need broadband. If you won't serve 'em, we will."
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Watching QAM traffic
If you go into the diagnostics screens of your digital cable box you can see how much traffic is transferred. Wikipedia has an OK (not great) article on QAM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation
They're not exactly fixed; they use different compression ratios on different channels, as you can see watching some high-def programming the clarity is sometimes no better than standard def programming because of compression artifacts (blocking, banding, etc.) and if you go into the diagnostic screens you can watch how many packets are being transferred in realtime. (They don't forbid you from going into those screens in case you were wondering - I went into them myself to gather info to report to customer support when I had my service updated and wasn't getting programming I should have access to. They just won't tell you how to go into those screens). Incidentally if you're not 100% sure which channels are actually analog and you have a newer box which gives you S/PDIF on both digital an analog channels, use the diagnostic screens to determine what the tuner is actually receiving.
Now, there is a LOT of unique traffic; on demand programming. So, yes, there are a lot of programming streams unique to individual users at any given moment, probably most commonly weekend evenings.
Receiver Setup
Incidentally, when you upgrade to high def, you will definitely want to get into the receiver's diag and config screens, because your box might be recycled and be configured for a previous install for 720i, 720p, or even 480p at a previous install, or the cable tech might leave it at the default 720p setting. Just FYI.
Bandwidth Cap
250GB? That seems fair at first, until you consider online programming. Do you do a lot of netflix? How much bandwidth does each
I download quite a bit, in spurts. When a new kubuntu, OpenSuSE, or CentOS release comes out, I download DVD and CD ISO images, and I seed them for a bit. That could easily be 10GB in a single day. Now, 250GB / 30 days = 8.3GB / day, just under a dual layer DVD per day. Is that fair when for the last 10 years they have been fraudulently advertising unlimited internet and surreptitiously enforcing unpublished caps?
The Real Reason for Caps?
I think part of the reason for the bandwidth cap rather than throttling (not blocking) the heaviest users is that they do not want you to use netflix, hulu, blockbuster, or other third-party online programming services; they want you to use theirs. I think that what they're saying publicly is just a cover to ward off any potential anti-competitive complaints. Now, let me just restate that this is my opinion (I am not stating this as fact) based on the evidence I see.
The Solution
Contact your local selectmen, town manager, mayor, etc. and let them know that sanctioned monopolies are a bad thing. Want to bring Comcast into check? Get your town to invite competitors so that residents have a choice between two or more cable providers. Forget Verizion and FIOS, since their TV service stinks. Get real competition.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50