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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.
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.........
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>
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
400gb? What are you downloading, the entire bible word by word in 1280x1024 bmp format?
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?
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?
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?
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?
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!
That statement actually relates well to a very insightful point made at the end of the article:
You are lucky to have some genuine competition in the form of FIOS. If I could, I would switch to that in a heartbeat, even if I had to pay a relatively large installation fee (probably up to 200 dollars). Unfortunately, just about everywhere I go I'm locked down to one provider. In the tiny town of Jackson, OH, I am restricted to Time Warner Cable (another company working on a cap), and before I was transferred here I lived in Minneapolis, subject to Comcast. I suppose I could potentially get DSL, but that is so much slower than cable it almost doesn't count as competition in the broadband market, and satellite is so latency heavy it doesn't count either. That leaves cable standing alone, unless you are lucky enough to have true broadband competition through FIOS.
In my opinion, cable providers are starting to stifle innovation and competition the same way large cell phone providers do. They see one company screwing the customers with a cap, and figure, "Hey, I can do that too! Now I can keep more money for profits instead of network upgrades." And with no competition to force changes on them, that's the way things will stay. Both cell phone companies and cable companies are able to stay the way they are because of huge barriers to entry... you can't lay another set of cable lines in every town, and it's prohibitively expensive to try to set up another nationwide cellular network. In instances like these, the government does need to step in to regulate the monopolies/oligopolies. My water company doesn't put a cap on how much I use because the government regulates that monopoly (granted, I do pay more the more I use, but if the cable companies went to that model without government intervention, it would probably be priced like the cell phone companies price text messages: 10 cents a kilobyte or something ridiculous. That's why I'm currently opposed to anything other than a flat rate from them).
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Comcast hasn't used the word "unlimited" in ages. They don't have to, almost no one thinks in terms of "how much can I download," they just look at the speed numbers.
Instead they just refer to their service as something vague like "always-on, high speed Internet access."
Which is still a complete lie, based on how often my connection goes down. Sure, my modem is always-on, but whatever's at the other end sure doesn't seem to be.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Yes indeed that would be helpful. I watch Netflix videos every night with the Roku box (like it a lot). There's no way I know of to measure my total Netflix usage. It's probably much greater than my Internet use. Comcast is my ISP and this is from the FAQ.
How does Comcast help its customers track their usage so they can avoid exceeding the limit?
There are many online tools customers can download and use to measure their consumption. Customers can find such tools by simply doing a Web search - for example, a search for "bandwidth meter" will provide some options. Customers using multiple PCs should just be aware that they will need to measure and combine their total monthly usage in order to identify the data usage for their entire account.
Does not help!
In order to enforce their 250GB limit they first have to measure it. It would seem very simple for Comcast to display the current measurement on my account page.
I can't think of any reason they would want to hide it -- except to hide the fact that most customers are using only a few percent of what they are paying for.
I think it's time people start investigating coop/municipal fiber solutions, similar to UTOPIA in Utah. Why let Comcast control the spigot when it can be done cheaper and with a higher level of service?
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.