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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.........
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
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>
Crap! That should be:
"17 days non stop downloading at peak?"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Don't see what's not right in front of your face, do you?
Boiling a lobster works the same way.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Wait until you start downloading Blu-Ray from content delivery services.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Isn't Blu-Ray 50Gb?
Getting a blow job from somebody doesn't make you their boy friend.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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?
Slingshot is unlimited between 1am-7am. I am moving around 130Gb-150gb for around $130, including phone. You get i think 15gig for 'peak' use, and can buy more at $1 a gig (if you buy 50gigs). Unused data is 'banked' not lost.
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!
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.
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?
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.
I share a house with 9 people and have comcast internet. Everyone in the house is on at least some bit each day with nearly everyone knowing how to stream video/music online as well as games and such.
250g might be good enough for a person, but it sure isn't good enough for a house/apartment with more then 1 or 2 people living in it.
TruePunk | Games
Anyone know if this applies to Comcast Business customers, as well?
All those examples put together won't come anywhere near 250 GB.
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
I am happy with DVD content (no, really, my TV is only 28" and 4:3). I am fine with them charging people more (or, that is, not charging me more) if they want to use a giant pile of bandwidth to watch the shiny.
Of course, now they need to start breaking it out; keeping a line connected has costs regardless of the bandwidth used, so they should be able to provide a second 250 GB of bandwidth for a whole lot less (in areas that aren't congested anyway).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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. ;)
Maybe people don't like the attitude of the telephone company. Particularly those telephone companies that ask people whether they intend making international calls and requiring a deposit if the customer says yes, but require no deposit if the customer says no (Bell Canada), or requires three items of identification such as a passport, electricity bill, and rental agreement before they will connect a telephone line (British Telecom). Cable TV company at the time (Telewest) just required a valid credit card number.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
Australians and New Zealanders seem to be the only people on the planet who think that the entire world's internet connections should be as bad as theirs. Why is that?
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
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.
Have you actually measured your usage? I'd be pretty surprised if it really was over 250GB. If you have a 4Mbit connection then you'd have to be at 25% utilization for the entire month to hit it. If you're all torrenting stuff constantly then I could see it, but there's no way you're going to hit it with just streaming video, music, and games.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
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?
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!
I sure did. Roughly half a meg a second up stream 24/7 for a couple years on Furthur. P2P can't exist without seeders, and as caps are instated that upstream bandwidth is going to become more and more scarce.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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 :)
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?
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.
There always was a number on 'unlimited'. It $bytes_per_sec*60*60*24*31 per month, and that is what they should deliver.
My UID is prime. Hah!
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!
Here are some very trivial uses for high-bandwidth:
Automated downloads at night - I've a plugin for my MythTV that downloads all the HD trailers from Apple, and then I can watch them any time I please.
What if places started to offer this for entire shows? SD shows are 1-2gb. What if a content provider starts offering HD subscriptions for download? I doubt you're going to watch that in real-time as it downloads, so it'll be queued up the night(s) before, but I could see that occuring.
Just that doesn't sound like much, but I've got a household of 6, and I'm sure it can all add up fast.
Not to mention I work from home. Cisco CallManager patches and engineering specials these days are 1-2gb. Unity 5 DVDs are many GB (over 8, I think). It all adds up.
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.
Multiplayer gaming takes very little bandwidth. You can play over a modem, remember?
Visit the
Hulu has some shows in HD.
Xbox360 has pseudo-HD movies (720p) for 'rent'
Watch for Tivo to do the same with their various partnerships like Amazon unbox.
For a while some of the broadcast networks (ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX/WB) had pseudo-HD versions of their primetime shows on their websites, they may still, haven't checked.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The complaint isn't about the amount, it's the advertising. If your public utility advertised an unlimited power plan and you subscribed to it, and later got a new heat pump to replace your gas furnace, and was notified by the util that your electric heat pump was now breaking the "reasonable limit", and they wanted you to shell out some more money or start capping your power (brownout) wouldn't you be upset? What happened to unlimited?
It's like going to an all you can eat buffet and being asked to leave after you walk back to the bar for your fourth plate. If you don't MEAN unlimited, don't SAY unlimited. And more importantly, don't change your mind after I've started eating.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
too bad there isn't an alternative for me. I can't DSL (yuck) or anything else really.
I kind of miss Ricochet, it wasn't fast(128K wireless), but it was cheap and widely available in my area before it collapses under its own runaway growth.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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!
Given that Youtube is available quite freely on cell data (hint, iPhone)... not much. People always use the 'streaming music 24/7' example of how they could do this. But numbers don't bear it out. I work at home. I listen to a 128kbps sound stream 8 hours a day, if not more, and the traffic my firewall measures as going to my Soundbridge? 12gb/month.
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.
Are you saying watching HD movies and backing up pictures/home video to Carbonite or something aren't residential activities?
No it's not. It's like complaining that my connection to the power grid can't support eight computers in my home, because the "average user" doesn't have eight computers. Who's to say, though, that I don't have a high-power desktop for gaming (1), a laptop for surfing, etc (2), a laptop for the wife (3), one laptop each for the kids (4, 5), one MythTV box each for the upstairs TV and the downstairs TV (6, 7), and a media server (running Windows HOME Server, not something Enterprisey) (8)?
Sure, this is a hypothetical example, but it's not at all unreasonable. The fact that I'm not "average" doesn't mean I should need a commercial-grade connection.
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.
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.
Schadenfreude, I think. We get so sick of Americans and British thinking they own the world and exporting their nasty foreign policy while we get all our TV, movie and book imports second hand, six months late and twice as expensive.
Plus it's that old pioneer attitude of 'you can darn well learn to put up with anything, young man, it'll build character'.
For the last 20 years we've been busy dismantling our welfare state and installing Thatcherite/Reaganite 'user pays' laissez faire, it hurt like hell, and if WE had to suffer for that free-market crap, you guys who INVENTED it can stand to apply it yourself.
But seriously, if you're using over 250GB a month, that's just greedy. And while *information* is not a zero-sum commodity, bandwidth over a shared cable *is*. Every gigabyte you use around is a gigabyte someone else can't.
It's just basic fairness. You should pay for what you use. Don't sweep use costs under the carpet of hidden externalities. The same principle underlies good economics, good ecology, and good neighbourliness.
Ted Stevens was bought by Big Cable, but he was right, as far as he went, and it won't help to mock him. The Internet *is* a series of data pipes with finite bandwidth, and that needs to be paid by someone. Should really be local user-owned broadband cooperatives rather than profit-driven companies, but even then it'll cost you a nonzero amount to move packets, and it should.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
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!
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.
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
Truthfully...how many of you actually suck down 250GB per month?
I certainly don't (My bandwidth meter says just over 258GB for the last 6 months), but share that among a family of 4+ and things would get considerably tighter.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
It only comes across that way because our ISPs refuse to upgrade to world class speeds and traffic caps. Too much politics involved, when its fairly obvious that it would benefit everyone involved.
Id otherwise be working :(
Yes, because right now, all ISPs in the US and UK are operating at a tremendous loss. Oh wait, they're not. Packets are being moved and paid for in their giant tubes right now. There's no reason to limit everyone worldwide to Australia/NZ levels of dark-age connectivity.
250 GB is not "just greedy" if the infrastructure is in place and the bandwidth is otherwise going to sit there unused.
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!
Yup, we're both retarded.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
[...] but I just got off the phone with them and they have no intentions of imposing any bandwidth limit on their customers.
It won't last. Not if they want to avoid bankruptcy.
Oh, hold on, do you mean 600kbit/sec? That works out to less than 200GB/month if I've done my math right, so that's comparable with Comcast's data cap.
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.
People that say, "this is reasonable" don't get it.
No, I don't think you get it. It costs a certain amount for them to be able to feed you a certain amount of data. At the moment they're on the brink of losing money, due to increasing numbers of very heavy users. They have these choices: (a) apply data caps; (b) radically increase their charges; (c) go bankrupt.
Personally I think (a) is the most reasonable option, YMMV.
Here's the math, ignoring the overhead and using powers of 10 to keep it simple:
250GB = 250 x 10^9 * 8 = 2.00 x 10^12 bits
10Mb/sec = 10^7 bits/sec
1 day = 86400 sec = 8.64 x 10^4 sec
So at a constant 10Mb/sec, your 250GB will be all gone in (2.00 x 10^12 / 10^7) / (8.64 x 10^4) = 2.31 DAYS.
Not 416 days, not 133 days, not 17 days, not "toward the end of the month"...., but day after tomorrow. Doesn't sound so fat to me.
Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain. --Friederich Schiller
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?
Your analogy isn't very good because you pay per watt for your electrical consumption.
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.
With that many users, you are well beyond a consumer grade connection. While it will work, dont complain if you go over. Nine people is well above the norm to share one connection and not to expect to pay more, or meter your use accordingly.
Good-bye
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.
if sticking with the power grid analogy, I'd more liken it to the following
I want to run a tig welder (download hd movies) from my home power source (net connection) while I probably could on a low power setting (small number downloaded) upping the required power kills the juice since the house power connection cannot handle it and was not designed for it. If a residential supply does not suit your needs, you'll need 3 phase (business internet) and all the things that come with that.
Remember when the internet was sold by how many hours you were logged in?
Bandwidth is only a zero-sum game when it's at 100%. If a cable is sitting at 50%, then using more of it has an incremental cost of zero. To put it another way: each byte you use at peak time costs a whole lot, but each byte you use at off-peak time is free. This severely complicates pricing and cost analysis.
I agree that the 250GB cap is exceedingly generous, however. Just so long as they're up-front about it and no longer try to sell this as "unlimited", I have no problem with it whatsoever.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
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!!!
You could always move out of NZ you know. We expect higher speeds and more bandwidth because we are in the middle of the grid, not 4-6000 miles of fiber away from it. That is the reason internet access is so expensive out there, most of the internet is hosted in Europe and the USA, so your providers have to pay for pretty much all of the data that is accessed since it is all outside the continent.
Yeah, don't give me these "what if" scenarios, give me your actual usage.
250GB is one sixth of what you'd get if you used comcast's low-end connection at full blast, 24/7, with no gaps, slowdowns, or breaks. In other words, it's five days straight of non-stop downloading at maximum speed.
I really doubt you're coming anywhere close to the limit. Will you exceed it someday? Probably, demand always goes up. But then once that happens, perhaps you should consider paying extra for your extra usage.
As long as Comcast is up-front about the limit, I have no problem with it. If you start to go over, pay them more money! The idea that internet connections shouldn't cost more just because you use them more makes no sense to me. If you're going to download over 250GB of stuff to support your television habit, then perhaps you should be paying more money than granny down the street who only uses it for e-mail.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
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?
This is a common misnomer. 8GB of traffic does not equate to 8GB of data on your end. There is a huge amount of overhead with the IP protocol. Depending on what you're downloading, your end result can range from 4-6GB of usable data on your hard drive.
Also, what's keeping them from sending unwanted traffic to your modem? Most folks wouldn't know (although one responder noted he saw 18G of traffic but the ISP said 27GB). Who'd a' thunk it... spam IP packets.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
And why should those of us who live alone subsidize 9 people paying paying the same price as one of us?
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1) Finish your P2P download
2) Release your DHCP lease
3) Power down the cable modem
4) Increment the MAC address on the WAN side of your router, or use a random MAC address
5) Power up the cable modem
When it all comes back up and you get your DHCP lease, you should have a different IP address on the WAN side. I mainly use this because every time I use BitTorrent (even for something like Fedora distro downloads) I get slammed by DoS attacks of some sort or other, so it's in my best interests to change my IP address afterwards.
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!
I presume the GP implied downloading the data of a BluRay disc from content delivery services in its original format. Don't be so pedantic. HD can be downloaded after being recompressed and 720p movies fit rather nicely (and still look good at 120" preojection) onto a 4.5GB file, so it's really no worse than getting a DVD. Then again, getting a bit for bit BluRay version of a movie would seriously tax all but a select few high speed residential connections in the real world.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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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"f 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."
Yes.
So the correct answer is *fix the protocols* which incorrectly assume that Internet traffic costs nothing and send ridiculously huge numbers of packets, not sweep the problem under the carpet by hiding it with an all-you-can-eat charging regime.
If enough people in North America start hurting financially because TCP/IP is broken, maybe it'll get fixed, and that'll in turn fix a whole raft of serious efficiency and DOS issues, not just the short-term 'my cable bill is too big!' one.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
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.
thats bullshit, they soak you bcause they can. keep paying 4000% preiums regards, mike
When will people learn that decrying TCP and IP isn't going to accomplish anything? It's very easy to blame the entrenched protocols, and much harder to propose solutions that might actually work. If you say that it'll all go away once we get rid of TCP and IP, nobody can prove you wrong, since we'll never get rid of them!
In reality, TCP and IP are damn good. SCTP and DCCP are evolutionary improvements of TCP and UDP, respectively. We should use them, but TCP, UDP, and IP practically come naturally out of the problem of worldwide networking as naturally as the Pythagorean Theorem comes out of geometry.
I propose a rule:
When blaming TCP and IP for a problem, you must explain how your replacement would be different. Don't forget to explain your replacement protocol's effect on scalability, privacy, portability, and availability.
You ignored half of what he said - the IP address you receive after rebooting your cable modem could very well be the IP address most recently held by another heavy P2P user - thus giving you all the traffic you were trying to avoid in the first place.
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?
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.)
And why should those of us who live alone subsidize 9 people paying paying the same price as one of us?
Why should somebody be limited when they were sold an unlimited plan? Fact is is that broadband providers messed up when they sold unlimited plans.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
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?
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?
Yeah! Now if I hook up the line and "share" with my entire apartment building that has 400 suites, well, I'll run out of this limit too!
This is no way enough!!
Rip Off!! /sarcasm
But they never advertised $bytes_per_sec. They advertised "Up to $bytes_per_sec".
...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.
I'm reminded of how text messaging works for cell phones. You get charged for both sending and receiving texts - and both the sender and reciever pay for the same text.
It is a poorly kept secret that you can send texts to phones through e-mail, and thus only the receiver pays for the text. If you wrote a program to sent a dozen spam messages per hour to a particular phone number, at $0.20 per message it could add up quite quickly (unless the target has unlimited messaging, of course). If you're looking for a way to make someone bleed money, that's one way to do it.
That seems quite similar to the possibility of forcing someone over their ISP-enforced bandwidth cap by spamming them with unwanted packets... and it could (would?) get far worse if ISPs start to charge automatically for excess traffic.
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've seen it happen. I was temporarily living somewhere where Comcast was provided, and there was continuous activity, 24/7, trying to reach something at some port (14??). I tried powering everything off to get a new IP address, but the traffic continued. I doubt was P2P traffic, since they would give up eventually. My only guess is that there was a computer controlling a botnet on that IP address at some point, so there were thousands of zombie PCs trying to communicate with it. The internet was quite slow at times, but I don't know if it was all that traffic or congestion on the network or just Comcast having issues.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, damn those companies, always trying to get money in exchange for their services.
And the point is that they're not selling unlimited plans anymore. Time to upgrade if you have 9 people trying to share a less than 9 person plan.
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."
Here's a little comparison between Bluray, AppleTV, Video on Demand, and DVD
Maybe they all look fine to you-- but the purpose of Bluray is to look spectacular--and unfortunately, that goal eats up bandwidth. In most of the comparisons, the video-on demand offering fares poorly. But the bandwidth cap cuts off alternatives.
Still most 50 GB bluray discs are bloated with features,games, and (in the opinion of some) lossless audio. A bluray movie might only be 26-27 gigabytes.
If you get DDoSed, I imagine your provider will work something out with you. After all, you were the victim of an illegal act. Get the police involved.
As for the P2P scenario, that's just ridiculous. The worst that will happen is that you'll be the target of a bunch of TCP SYN packets, which will be refused or ignored by your computer. If the other side is particularly persistent then you may end up getting a bunch of these. But there's no way that it's going to amount to any visible fraction of a 250GB monthly limit. No P2P protocol that I'm aware of will continue to blast data at an IP address that is no longer responding, or is actively refusing connections.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Why does everybody bring up the example of gaming? Are you all that fucking clueless than you think games take up enough bandwidth to add up to 1Mbit of continuous 24/7 data traffic?
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
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.
Why should somebody be asked to leave an all you can eat restaurant because they ate all the food and there was nothing left to consume?
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.
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
Which planet do you live on, and can I move there? We're talking Comcast here. You won't even get to speak to someone authorized to work something out.
I'm surprised (or, given the rest of your post, perhaps not) that you've never heard of Kademlia. It's likely the second biggest protocol on the net in amount of data moved. It uses UDP, which are fire-and-forget packets. This also means that it won't easily give up on a remote node, because there might be packet loss either way preventing you from getting any return messages.
I once walked into my office to hear my disk chattering so fast I thought I caught it crashing. It turned out to be some script kiddie trying to hack my system from outside Comcast's network. The disk activity was my hardware firewall logging all of the attacks. It was sporadic but intense over several days. I changed my IP a couple of times and had several useless calls to Comcast support. I finally got someone who understood the problem and asked me to send him the log. I asked how many Gigs he wanted? He couldn't believe how fast it was coming in.
*I* couldn't believe that they would pass that volume of easy to spot attacks to their whole subnet. If my cheap SMC router could spot it their commercial ones should have been able to. I wonder how many people in my neighborhood would have gone over a 250 limit with their PC turned off that week?
Except that if you change the MAC address, the firmware on the cable modem may no longer allow you to talk. They are locked to one particular MAC, and if you ever change your router (or PC), you may have to call support to have the new MAC recognized and authorized.
That's happened to me twice -- once with Cox, and once with Comcast. And it's the reason why many routers allow you to change the apparent MAC in the first place, to avoid it changing, so you won't have to call support.
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
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. ;_;
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!!!
I don't care how good American broadband users have it, they should always be pushing for it to be better. You should be doing the same, and if you're not, wahhh fucking wahh, feel free to whine somewhere else.
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....
You count traffic *IN*. Sometimes providers count *IN* and *OUT* to total traffic.
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
Unless Japan and South Korea do not count as part of the "real world" to you. :)
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
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.
I seriously doubt that 1% of users are using 250GB of bandwidth a month, no less 400GB. That is just a tremendous amount of storage, more than most peoples hard drives. In a single year they would have to download over 3TB of data. The only people I can even imagine doing this are torrenting constantly, and are addicted to downloading, and don't even bother to watch/listen/play the things they are downloading. To download 250GB in a month, you need to sustain a download of ~96KB/s all month long. I just don't see it happening. I'm sure some slashdot users manage it where they have 4 or 5 geeks sharing a house and each torrenting 24/7, and playing WoW, etc constantly. But those are definitely the minority. I'd imagine the 1% figure is likely below 100GB at the moment.
Of course, the average will increase with time, but I don't see it as a bad thing to make people who use more bandwidth pay more. I wish there wasn't a monopoly controlling it, so pricing could be fairer, but I don't see why my parents who use their cable modem for email and web browsing should have to pay extra so that the cable company can upgrade their network for a few other people who are constantly downloading. Tiered service is likely the way of the future, it's no different than how most everything is sold. However, it is likely that ISPs will still have plans that are "unlimited within reason", and if they're smart, they will average a users downloading over more than a month to get a better average.
Phil
"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, no, I count both. The SNMP MIB on my router provides for both, for every interface.
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...
That would be a good analogy for internet.
Currently, I have Charter Communications with a 5 G-bit/sec provision. Normally, it would cost me 50 bucks, but I got a special "FOAF" deal for only 20 bucks.
Try as I might, I can never go above 5Gb/sec, so I'm capped.
My capping, however, is fixed, and automatic. I can't download 'too much' simply because I'm throttled at 5Gb/sec. Not bad, considering all I want is to be able to do apt-get, mirror some RFC's, and maybe do a bittorrent eventually.
I like my service, becuase I simply have to wait for the stuff to get through my pipe. However, knowing that my provider has a realtime throttle as opposed to a monthly cap, means that I won't be getting any nasty surprises.
Now, I do suffer from not using my bandwidth all the time...but I got the slowest "provison" they ahd to offer, and for someone unfortunate enough to not even have dialup, it's really sweet.
I like my service because there are no surprises. And I was geeky enough to set up my own internet even though the install guys couldn't figure out my linux box.
The funny bit was when they asked me if I had "XP or vista", and I went "huh? oh, neither I use linux".
Install guys: uh, wtf?
But yeah, with Charter Communications, there are no surprises.
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]-
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.
I don't know...are you having problems with Comcast in J & SK, too? See, this thread was about US service. Taking the idiom "real world" and thinking I'm referring to the global internet conditions, makes little sense.
Still, if you can find support that more than 2% of the world's residential connections are faster than 2.5Mb (the speed it would take to download a 25GB movie in a day), I'm willing to stand corrected. I'll even let you use stats for number of connections instead of land area, just to give you a running start.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.....
Just checking my router's logs, I probably average around 4-5GB a day. This would put me in the 120-150GB/mo range. And this is just with a few torrents, some game patches (these can get very large, 0.5-1GB each), a few CD images. I don't consider myself a heavy torrenter or a download addict by any means. Not even in the top 1% I'm sure.
I'm sure if I wanted to, I could hit 250GB/mo. It's not even beyond thinking that within a year or two, people will be downloading 1TB/mo. Look at the size of HD movies.
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
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.
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.
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?
The issue here is not whether or not 250GB is enough today, but whether or not it's enough for a year from now, or even 6 months.
Over the last two years there has been a very clear movement of video distribution from broadcast to online. The clear projection of this movement, that many customers were hoping for, is services that provide enough HD content to finally supplant traditional broadcast mediums as the primary source of video in the home.
A 250GB cap puts a very real limit on what these services can accomplish. Companies like Apple and Netflix are unlikely to roll out HD services if millions of their potential customers do not have the necessary bandwidth for such services.
Similarly a bandwidth cap puts constraints on other innovations. Companies with new bandwidth intensive products and services now face a new constraint on the feasibility of bringing these products and services to market, which in turn means that many new potential innovations in online services will not make it to market here in the US.
Additionally, you're completely neglecting the fact that the average household is not 1 person. A household with two parents and two children will only get 62.5GB per person per month. It should be clear to anyone here on /. how easy it would be for such a household to go over their bandwidth cap using legitimate sources of content.
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.
I'm guessing you haven't played many modern shooters over DSL which often provides significantly less peak bandwidth than 250GB/month, which people seem to manage to do without any problems at all.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
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.
At the risk of proving the point of our corporate overlords, let the calculating commence
First the assumption, my quick checks clocked most youtube videos at about 30KB/s (not 30Kbps, very different), so ok, since we're not only getting the video and math is hard, let's just say you pull a continuous stream of 50K/s, for 1 hour, every day, for 1 month.
so in that 1 hour, you pull ( 50K/s * 3600s/hr ) = 180,000K watching yer anime music videos, or ~176MB, per hour.
oh and you do it every day (junkie) so take your standard issue month of 30 days and you're eating about 5.2GB toobin'
what about the other 23 hours? you've used 2% of your cap in about 4% of the time you've got to hit the cap (you did that 2% in 30hrs, and you've got 30*24=720 hours total)
What it boils down to is that you get 250GB to do whatever you want with in 30 days,
you could call it 8.3GB/day, 356MB/hour. 5.9MB/min. 101KB/s. Your line tops out at ~384KB/s yeah? you can use 1/4th of it, averaged over the course of the month. sorry, better live someplace without a monopoly next time.
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 ----
The FCC should stop this before we have to sue.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I ignored it because I don't consider it relevant. You could also have a meteorite fall on your house while you're sleeping and kill you, but what's the point of worrying about it? It's not something you can easily predict, now is it? Same with getting someone else's IP address; how can you tell? Besides which what's the ratio of non-P2P users to that of heavy P2P users? Probably very small, a fraction of a percent I'd wager. If you hold true that a heavy P2P user's IP address is going to be pounded by other P2P users waiting for them to come back online, then every time I've done the above I'd see all sorts of random traffic in the form of blinking activity lights on my cable modem -- which I do not.
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.
Imagine this: You ask someone working at a public information booth somewhere for a common bit of information. You come back a couple days later and the same person is working there, you try to chat them up, but they don't remember who you are. Why? They talk to hundreds of people per day, and you saw them once, so unless their memory is remarkable, they aren't going to remember you. Similarly a large ISP like Comcast doesn't log every single packet that comes through their network; at best if you attract their attention then they might log all the traffic that you are generating.
I know some ISPs work differently, but on Comcast cable modems the serial number of the cable modem is what's used for authentication on their network, and the MAC of the computer (or router in this case) is what's used for obtaining a DHCP lease, which is why this works for me. Your mileage may vary. You can try it and see if it works for you or not, if it doesn't, then put it back the way it was and no harm done.
BTW I found that it's necessary to power-cycle the cable modem when doing this otherwise you do get the problem you describe of it "not allowing you to talk".
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.
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.
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)
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.
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)
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 ----
They aren't the only people; there are plenty more (Russia, China etc) but they don't know English well enough to come to Slashdot and complain about it.
We run 2 business and 3 people off a 10GB plan. "Enough" is entirely relative.
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.
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
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.
And the point is that they're not selling unlimited plans anymore.
They may not now but they did. When I signed up for my cable access it was unlimited. The contract I signed only had the limitation that I could not run a webserver on my connection. I know, I also read contracts before I sign them.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
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.