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Comcast's Throttling Plan Has 'Disconnect User' Option
newtley writes "Comcast's new people, not protocols scheme may mean high speed for some, but by no means all. It's also created a draconian 'disconnect' option for use against anyone who fails to toe the Comcast line. But, says Robb Topolski, the Net protocol expert who originally uncovered Comcast's blatant efforts to control its customers, the plan does offer key take-aways, telling P2P users on Comcast how to do what they do without the risk of corporate interference."
Excuse me? Where's the news here? We already knew that Comcast's bandwidth cap will be (starting next month) 250 GB... break it once and you're warned, break it twice your service address is cut off for a year.
Isn't this what you guys wanted? Comcast is being told they're can't discrimate against so-called-p2p protocols... so they're just counting bits and if you use to many, you get a warning, then you're out. Only people who are using their Internet connection as their primary HDTV input will be affected at the proposed level.
There's enough room in 250 GB to watch what you want 16 hours a day... sleep the other eight or you'll go insane!
But there is an issue.
Comcast could do what they should be doing. Number 1 is using the tax-payer money that they were given to upgrade their infrastructures. Number 2 being that they could give a quality service.
Just saying...
The ability to turn off trouble makers is right in line with the end of net neutrality. Look for it to be abused and directed against people who complain.
M$, because life is too short to type icrosoft frequently.
I don't do a lot of torrenting -- only when I really want something I can't find for sale, or to download "legit" stuff -- but I've found that TOR works really well against comcast's nonsense. It isn't like I'm downloading much, maybe ten to fifteen GB on a busy month (and zero most months). Before I found TOR, I'd start a torrent and my connection would be cut off within an hour or two. I could reestablish it by powercycling the cable router, but then would have it happen again in a few minutes. Then, I started spoofing my MAC address, which seemed to buy a few hours each time before the same thing would happen. Finally, I installed TOR and now it just works, at least with rtorrent.
I have read that some people believe that using torrent over TOR is abusive, but I never saw an explanation of why that would be so. If I operate a node (give back) it's fair, isn't it? And if not, why not?
Caveat Utilitor
telling P2P users on Comcast how to do what they do without the risk of corporate interference.
I've already watched a Netflix movie and downloaded a couple iTunes this month.
So I haven't read the referenced articles, as I'm afraid that doing so might exceed some Comcast quota.
How about a better idea. They should put into place a system whereby the speed of your access is inversely proportional to the amount of data you transfer. Thus, when people first sign on to this service, they'll be impressed by its speed. But as time goes on, it'll slow down increasingly, until Google's homepage takes a year to load.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
The plan is to extend per byte per site, which will effectively end the internet as we know it today. The ability to turn off users will be abused in more than one way. Demand infrastructure upgrades and neutrality, you have already paid for it.
No calls now, I'm
If you want/need more, you can get a business class account. I've had business class Internet for many years now. Currently it's with Cox cable, but I've used Speakeasy and Qwest in the past. Business class accounts get you a number of things, like static IPs and such, but one of them is no bandwidth cap. Whatever speed you pay for, you are free to use as much as you like and you'll hear not a peep out of them.
However, you are going to pay more for it. Where a normal cable account might be $50/month, expect to pay over $100/month for a business account. However, if you are the kind of person who needs lots and lots of bandwidth, it seems only fair you should pay more for it.
You have to remember that consumer connections are something like a big LAN. Everyone gets to have nice fast access, but only if people are nice and share it. You use your fast speed when you need it, let others have it. For example I work for a university. We have a nice fast network, I've got gig to my desktop. We've got plenty of upstream too. I've gotten things like 100+mbit download speeds on Linux ISOs and so on. Wonderful, however everyone on campus can't do that 24/7 full bore. If we did, well there's be maybe 300kbps of bandwidth for each of us. It is fast and cheap because we all share.
Same deal on your consumer grade cable modem. If you want a nice cheap price and a fast link, you need to be willing to share with others and that means not running it at full capacity all the time. Otherwise you either have to settle for less bandwidth, or greater costs. Me, I choose the greater cost option and then do as I please.
suck_burners_rice hopes to change it so THAT's funny.
The problem I have with bandwidth caps as offered by ISPs is that when the ISP is also the cable provider the bandwidth cap is anti-competitive with Hulu and other video entertainment sites. As far as I can tell this is prime territory for an anti-trust investigation.
IANAL but it seems to me that these caps are not because of P2P but put in place because of competition for the television audience. By capping the users Comcast seems to be trying to guarantee that their cable service is still viable.
load "$",8,1
What I am about to say is not meant to play the "blame the consumer" game except this could be solved by the Comcast customers if they weren't so willing to act like sheep. There's only one way for the public to deal with Comcast, a mass boycott.
This anti-consumer behavior will only continue until their clientele start to leave en-masse. Only a large exodus from Comcast will force them to re-evaluate their bad attitude towards the very people who put bread on their tables.
I am speaking as someone who is practicing what they preach. When I moved into a Comcast area (the bay area) I decided to avoid them and switched to a local DSL provider. I will never be a Comcast customer, I just wish others would switch to alternate providers and give Comcast something to think about.
For those who live in areas where they're ostensibly forced to use Comcast consider satellite providers such as HughesNet.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Excuse my ignorance, but when they say 250 GB, I assume they mean 250 GB of downstream and upstream usage combined? With P2P usage, wouldn't this cause that 250 GB to go really quickly?
If you can talk brilliantly enough about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.
250 GB is both transparent and a real shitload of bandwidth.
This is 7 hour a day, 7 days a week, of 720p HDTV video over Hulu. It takes a LOT to reach this point.
Additionally, beacuse any user who gets terminated will undoubtedly ALSO terminate their cable TV and phone services with Comcast, its something that a company would not want to do lightly.
Test your net with Netalyzr
I looked at the paper everyone making your argument uses. The money in question went to telecom companies. NOT cable companies which Comcast and others are.
Now while I'm here I think it a tad ironic that when content is being discussed the "mommy taught us to share" argument makes an appearance, but when broadband comes up it's "unlimited" for ME and the rest of you have to fight it out amongst yourselves what's left.
So Comcast customers need to homebrew their own bandwidth monitor to see if they're nearing their cap each month? Pretty hefty consequences when you are not provided with an official way of measuring your own usage.
So - we all sit at the Internet buffet - just so happens that cable IO has the capability to deliver remarkable amounts of data - who says it should?
Agreed that they are fairly shady in their purposes - but you have to concur - traffic exceeding 250gig - protected? huh? come on - that's a LOT of pr0n
So Comcast customers need to homebrew their own bandwidth monitor to see if they're nearing their cap each month? Pretty hefty consequences when you are not provided with an official way of measuring your own usage.
I have WildBlue Satellite for internet, as I live out in the boonies where there is no cable or DSL. I am restricted to 17 gigs download, 5 gigs upload, the least restrictive option available to me (Hughes Net and Starband are worse in that regard). At this point, I would fucking kill for a 250gig cap.
That said, most people won't ever come close to hitting it. I don't use P2P (it simply doesn't work on a satellite connection) but I do a reasonable amount of downloading, and I manage to keep around 11 gigs download.
That said, Comcast definitely needs to provide a bandwidth meter. They're obviously metering bandwidth to employ the cap, it would be a simple matter to provide a web interface for their customers. Hell, every satellite ISP does it. Comcast must just be lazy, incompetent, or both.
I still don't get it. ISPs have been putting bandwidth caps on web servers for quite a long time. But people complain when ISPs do this to web browsers?
The amount of bandwidth is irrelevant. What matters is that you know what you are getting for a certain price. If I know that 250GB is enough for my needs, then I'm all set. If Comcast were to throttle my connection without telling me where the threshold is, then that would be a problem.
People complaining about HDTV channels being reduced in quality on a day-to-day basis is an issue. People not getting more than their fair share as described in the TOS for a certain price is not.
I live in Atlanta and Comcast is it for High Speed Internet. There is no one else for cable. There's no fiber. And DSL is still a joke in my torrenting, usenetting, multitasking opinion. How can they get away with something like this when they have such an obvious monopoly? Say I wanted to seed a linux distro 24/7 with my account or some popular torrent. Looks like that would get me banned. Wow, I am pissed and I do no like Comcast.
Why are corporations always the bad guys? A corporation is not a thing, it is just people. People make the decisions, and people implement them. Corporations are owned by their stockholders, and the people running the corps make decisions to maximize the value of the shareholders. Why is that bad?
"Additionally, an easily-viewable bandwidth meter would in all probability only encourage customers to get much closer to the limit than they would otherwise. It's fear-based policy. The more of their customers that decide "I'd better not download this movie/album/ISO/whatever, I might hit my bandwidth cap", the better. Comcast wants customers to stay in the dark regarding usage and be as conservative as possible in their internet activities, while still pretending to offer the full 250 GB."
Gee! What you all say to get in a political dig. Keeping track of your bits is a solved problem for the customer. You all just have to use them. As for "pretending"? Well if you can go up to your limit? Then there's no "pretend", any more than there's "pretend" in your checking account.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
A draconian option for those who don't toe the line? Blatant efforts to control their customers? Corporate interference? Are you sure you aren't being just a teensy wee bit melodramatic about this?
I recently got Comcast (they are the only provider available at my new place), I routinely get download speeds around 1-2MB/s (with a 'bytes', not a 'bits'), including torrents, and the price is more or less reasonable. By my calculations I am damn unlikely to ever hit the 250GB cap (I may use 8GB in day from time to time, but far from most days), and even if I do, I was aware of this limitation of the service before signing up.
So remind me, why am I so damn outraged about this? Is it because someone would dare to suggest that there be some kind of limit to the amount of porn and movies I can download for 60 bucks a month?
I used to pay through the nose for Speakeasy, so far I'm getting a better service from Comcast.
sic transit gloria mundi
Before I found TOR, I'd start a torrent and my connection would be cut off within an hour or two. I could reestablish it by powercycling the cable router, but then would have it happen again in a few minutes.
Most likely this has nothing to do with Comcast and everything to do with either your router or your cable modem. Torrents are very greedy and, depending on your torrent client, can open too many connections for your router/cable modem to handle. The router/cable modem keeps track of these connections even after they're closed, and if it runs out of memory the symptoms you described may occur.
Try limiting the number of simultaneous connections your torrent client uses. Start at something reasonable like 40, and if it fixes the problem, great, if not, try going even lower.
Well I guess since I'm a Comcast customer and I disapprove of how they handle my business, I'll just have to switch providers. Oh wait, they have a monopoly where I live... f*ck.
Seriously? Let's take a second to (there goes my karma) see this from Comcast's point of view. They want to run a profitable business. We want net neutrality - the ability to use our bits as we see fit. Comcast sold unlimited internet, and found that they were losing money on too many accounts - so they switched to selling limited internet. This is a step *forward*, not back. Comcast is now being honest about its caps. Ultimately, we need them more than they need us. There's two ways to handle the increased bandwidth usage that bittorrent and streaming HD have created - we can let Comcast DPI, throttle, and otherwise mess with our bits, or we can accept that the cost of a commodity is fixed to how much we use it (like every other commodity we use). I don't see why its so bad that Comcast should enforce bandwidth caps. And we get all excited about the cutoff, but think how mad you would be if they went the other route - charging you a higher rate per Mb when you went over.
My wife an I watch a different Netflix Watch It Now movie every night. We've already got AT&T coming out to install U-verse (new subdivision; fiber to the house). AT&T gave me something in writing says there is absolutely, positively no cap. It's cheaper than Comcast to boot.
Your ability to share with your neighbor is intimately linked to your free press and "legitimate" content. When you surrender your right to share and give control to some third party, you will lose your free press. The ability to censor you is what this is all about. Big publishers want all the control they have become accustom to with broadcast and then some. If you buy into the line, "these people are pirates who want nothing more than to steal" you have lost all faith in your neighbors and might as well disconnect your internet connection now. It always has been your neighbors who create your culture.
M$, because life is too short to type icrosoft frequently.
Blaming the consumer for using the previously unlimited service ISP used to provide is wrong. If any body says "well is this what you want it?" is retarded. The ISP's have built the network they now control with the tax payers money they owe the user not the other way around. Bandwidth is not a limited resource it always adapts unless it's managed by incompetent people who already have uncreative minds. By the way my monthly usage is around 60GB, yet I think of the future.
It's not that Comcast is setting bandwidth caps. It's that they have no choice. Now that you can get high-speed internet service via the cellphone network, AND Verizon is rolling out FiOS everywhere, how can they compete?
Remember, the internet runs over the *phone* network. The big cellphone/telecommunications providers own most of that. AT&T and Verizon are both Tier 1 providers with huge networks. It's almost *guaranteed* the Comcast is paying AT&T and/or Verizon for bandwidth and/or transit. And yet, Verizon and AT&T are competing with them.
And the same is true for most of the other cable TV providers in the United States. They have been offering phone and internet service for the past 5 years or so, but only because the telcos weren't doing it. They are now. The cable companies are FUCKED.
Currently on the lowest tier of comcast HOME service my speeds are 1.5MB/150KB. (real sustained KB speeds, beyond that speedboost thing.)
And comcast will not sell me a business account. I tried to get one of those in the beginning.
I find it really funny how every time this comes up, rather than fulfill the contractual obligations they originally signed with people, Comcrap has a bunch of its plants hop onto Slashdot screaming "pay us more money."
However, if you are the kind of person who needs lots and lots of bandwidth, it seems only fair you should pay more for it.
I'm not the person who needs "lots and lots of bandwidth." I expect that, rather than be let get away with this crap, Comcrap and the other telcos be required to live up to their contractual obligations.
They've screwed the customer, committed an amazing number of breaches of contract, and now want to have a do-over and get off scot free. I don't think we, the people, should let them.
If you can read this sig, congratulations, you have your glasses on!
The position that an entity like Comcast enjoys is that of a local monopoly. There *may* be competition, but for most, we have only one viable option for broad band. Like I said, I have *no* problem with a bandwidth limitation on service as long as it is a reasonable business proposition based on the locally awarded monopoly position and market conditions.
The issue I have is the contortions and control. There is no reason why port 80 should be any more favored than any other port. I want "broad band" access, give me access with a documented usage policy. Because you are a locally approved monopoly, that policy must be neutral!
These things are neither hard nor unreasonable. The problem is that business in the U.S. in the last 7 1/2 years have gotten used to dictating unfair terms.
My Comcast Exp: Florida/Fort Lauderdale: I have always left by total upload speed capped at 24 Kb, so the excuse that I am seeding is rubbish. As soon as I load a torrent my download bandwidth drops to 10Kb. I cannot resolve pages, my browser gets timeouts. Email cannot connect, even the Comcast email, Yahoo and MSN Clients both disconnect. Within ten minutes of closing the bittorrent app, my connection speeds up again. Of course the self-proclaimed "Engineer" from Comcast told me my computer is not compatible with Comcast, despite it working great until bittorent opens. I informed her that I was aware of the bandwidth throttling, but she was telling me that "Bittorent, or whatever it is, is not compatible with Comcast at this time, please call Microsoft for help. Is there anything else I can help you with" Last night I decided to play hard and leave my bittorent client open chugging along at 4Kb. This morning no internet, not even tracert to www.cnn.com or www.comcast.net would work. I went out and came back at night about 9:30 Pm Eastern, my internet is back to normal speed. WTF..they are surely laying the smacketh down on me :-(
I wish IRC had a 'disconnect user' option.
But then no bitching if all you can buy is 256kbps. Bandwidth isn't free and the larger the links get, the more pricey they are. You can see this with LAN hardware. It is damn near impossible to get 10mbit switches anymore, 100mbit is the minimum and those are cheap as hell. However gigabit goes up a good deal in cost. A 24-port 100mbite switch might run you $100. A 24-port gigabit switch from the same vendor is over $400. Ok well then 10gbit goes waaaay up. Now you are talking thousands of dollars to get a gigabit switch with even a couple 10gbit ports, and then several hundred per port to get the transceivers.
Now suppose you want to design a network for 500 computers on 5 floors (100 per floor) that gives 100mbit to the desktop. So you get a bunch of 24-port switches and hook them together. Turns out you need about 31 of them. 1 central switch, 5 floor switches and 25 access switches. Those are about $100 each so $3100 total. Ok great.
However you then decide you want everyone to always get their full 100mbit. So now you still connect the computers with 24-port 10/100 switches. However those switches need to have at least 2 gigabit ports (channeled together) on them for uplink, assuming you hook 20 PCs to each. So you now need 25 access switches, but each now costs $180. That's $4500 for for the access switches. Now on each floor, your floor switch has to be able to take 10 1gbit connections in and so a 10gbit connection out. For that you are talking about $2500 per switch for the switch and transceiver. So $12,500 for those. Then for your core switch, you need something with 5 10gbit ports. That is getting extremely high end, and is nearly $10,000 for the switch and transceivers. So for this solution you are talking $27,000.
Well that's a difference of $6/computer and $54/computer. Costs a hell of a lot more to do guaranteed bandwidth. Also this is just a small scale example. Now suppose you have 10 buildings that need connection, then 20 cities with 10 building complexes, and so on. Gets amazingly expensive if you have this "Everyone must have dedicated bandwidth" idea.
What's more, you'd find that for less than that, you could do something that's better overall. If you ran gigabit to the desktop, gig to the floor switches and then gig or maybe 2 gig to the core you'd find that in real usage, everyone would have faster transfers, and you'd pay a less than the dedicated 100mbit solution. Yes, it can get overloaded, however so long as people share it'll actually be faster for everyone.
The difference between residential service and business class must depend on where you are in the country. I switched from standard residential service to business class with a fixed IP address and my download speed went from about 2 Mbps to over 20 Mbps. You also get different support staff that, in my case, actually knew what they were doing. Again, in my case, the additional $10/mo was well worth it. Unfortunately, based on other posts, your mileage may vary considerably.
Last month, I got a little carried away with binary newsgroups.
I got a phone call from Comcast. They informed me that I had managed to suck 450GB of data over my connection that month.
They said that if I didn't immediately curtail my traffic, I would not only be disconnected, but my service would be terminated for twelve months with no option for reactivation.
I really should have called up Qwest and gotten DSL and cancel my cable. A threat like that, to me, is unacceptable. If I actually had an option for a decent connection, I'd have jumped ship over a year ago.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
Someone mentioned that comcast should use the TAXPAYERS $$$ it recieved to upgrade its network.
I fully agree with that. My question is What taxpayers money are you talking about. i heard once that the cable companies and/or the telephone companies got a boatload of cash as a gov subsady or tax breaks to do just that Upgrade the networks to Fiber. Can you please tell us what you know about if the governmant gave them $$ from our pockets to do an upgrade. please give actual info on when where ect..
If this is true then it sounds like fraud to me (not that anything would ever come from it)
Comcast will not likely be the last cable provider to implement such a cap policy. Expect in the not too distant future new routers or firmware for existing models with a monthly bandwidth measurement feature and real time usage monitor in the web GUI management interface.
It will allow setting of an email address to which it will send daily, weekly, and/or monthly usage statistics to said address.
What will be interesting is when Comcast TOS's a customer for exceeding the limit, then the customer fights back with his/her own logs, which show they are under the limit. Then what does the court decide, especially if the measuring equipment at both ends is Cisco, since Cisco owns Linksys?
I don't know about you, but I can't /afford/ to download ads..
If you are in an underserved area without competition, what does it take in practical and financial terms to build out a community ISP that can compete with the Comcasts of the world?
A 24-port ADSL2+ DSLAM and associated CPE would run about $200-300 per user, "last quarter mile" wiring could be anywhere from $300-3,000 per user.
What would you have to pay to get an OC3 for upstream connection?
I looked at a few years back when end-user bandwidth wasn't as much of an issue and you could get much better reach, but it still came back with a per-subscriber cost around $60/month. How big do you have to get to provide a better value than a Comcast?
When is somebody going to make cables obsolete and invent an ansible?
I just signed up for AT&T U-Verse, it'll be installed Oct 7th, just in time for the comcast caps. This way when comcast calls, I tell them where to shove it and OBTW I'll take that voip phone number with me. SEE YA!
Coincidentally AT&T offers a rebate that just so happens to be the same as Comcast's early termination fee.
Don't know how I missed this on the post I just made, that should say that you could give each of 1000 customers the equivalent of 1mb of guaranteed bandwidth at the $35 a month rate. I forgot to include the count. If you sold it to 2000 customers, the figure would be 512K symmetric for maybe $20 a month. Or you could simply sell anyone as much bandwidth as they wanted to buy, for $35 per 1024K of bandwidth per month. If someone wants a 10M bandwidth, it costs them $350. But they have guaranteed connectivity, it's not a sham. Which is why Comcast can sell you a connection claiming it's 16 meg at $55 a month, because it's not guaranteed, they have to be offering a minimum of 10 other people the same 16 meg a month to afford that price for that much bandwidth.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Was sold this bill of goods as 'unlimited' and limits have been all that I have gotten on a regular basis, the service was best when it as @Home, not ATT, not Comcast. I live in a rural area where the only other low latent/high speed connection available is, you guess it, not available. That added to the little fact that Broadband in the US is already horribly outclassed by that which is available elsewhere in the world; one of my friends just moved to Korea, make fun of them playing Starcraft all you want but his unfurnished apartment came with a 30mbit up/down link, expense absorbed in the rent.... Comcast claims they are doing this to stop the 1% of the users they are using most of the bandwidth, I actually believe this, but think they should be offering a higher tier to those folks and leave the rest of us 'customers' alone. Anyone else recall the unlimited broadband ads they ran? Smell class action?
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
Read your TOS; they could always terminate you. Comcast is under no obligation to keep providing you with service. And why should they? What kind of bizarre mindset is that in which companies are required to provide you service, give you unlimited bandwidth, and all below cost?
...to pay your $699 licensing fee you cock smoking twitter!
The issue is neutrality and censorship
While I don't necessarily doubt that ISPs are salivating at the pay-per-byte thing, the whole truthout.org thing is a figment of your feverish imagination, fueled mostly by your insane hatred of Microsoft. At the very least you should research your claims before using them in any sort of cuasi-authoritative way.
Go ahead and read through these and then come back and tell me that "M$" or Google or Yahoo or any ISPs are blocking *anything* related to truthout.org at all. And please don't reply to me with your name trolls or sockpuppets.
http://directmag.com/disciplines/email/truthout_blocked_censorship/
http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss@isoc-ny.org/msg00354.html
http://mainsleazespam.com/collateral/truthout_org.html
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001260.html
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
With Comcast having issues with the FCC because of their aggressive traffic management they are essentially admitting that "shared bandwidth" cable technology is inferior to the speeds of DSL. If the phone companies were smart they would drive a stake through Comcast's heart and jump on this as an ad campaign. Of course big companies are generally NOT smart at all and the DSL providers will look at this as a chance to also save a few bucks on bandwidth charges rather than stomp their competitors into the ground.
If your in the marketing department of a Telco and want a great ad campaign THIS IS IT!
Rogers and Bell have had caps FOREVER in Canada.... they jacked all the prices too, and I think it's just a $$$ grab. They divvy up different "cap" settings, like cell phones.
It sucks.
http://www.bell.ca/shopping/PrsShpInt_Int_Chart_Dsl.page
I can't get to the rogers page, but here's a link noting how they started to gouge right after implementing caps:
http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=78343
And here is where they let you look up your usage:
http://www.hispeed.rogers.com/bband/content/keepingpace/trackyourusage.html
The reality for me is this: the only significant downloads I do are from a paid audiobook site a few times a month, maybe a couple hundred MB each time. Since Comcast took over this area from Time Warner and got settled in, I can no longer download even those few audiobooks. Although my Comcast feed seems to work OK for regular surfing, the books crawl, with predicted completion times of hours or even days. I switch to my 6 Mbps DSL and the books download at a steady 600+ KBytes/sec. Those Comcast TV ads about how much faster they are than DSL are a sick joke in this household.
This is particularly distressing because I pay close to $140/mo for static IP cable Internet from Comcast. My static IP DSL, always much faster than Comcast, is significantly less expensive.
So... soon I will switch the near-zero-traffic servers I have over to my static IP DSL and tell Comcast to shove their service up their collective asses. I will replace them with Uverse, as I really do need the reliability of more than one feed.
Look at the bright side: there's always seppuku.
The only thing more stupid than a telco is a cable company. It's in their genes. The cable Internet technology made available to them is fantastic but they are so stupid that they would rather offer 200 pay per view channels and 30 home shopping channels than dedicate even 2 channels to cable Internet. Unless they have wised up very recently, all cable Internet is delivered over only one TV channel, while the equipment they use makes it very easy to use multiple channels to, say, segregate residential from business class customers. But no. They're just congenitally stupid.
Look at the bright side: there's always seppuku.
A couple iTunes? You mean the whole store? You're fucked.
This is what bothers me, not the folks who download stuff ilegally 24/7 but those of use who watch movies, use itunes for songs, ect. What if I like listening to streaming radio, ooh I do, so now I've blown my cap rather quickly. Comcast, aka Big Brother, should do it the right way. Levels of service is the right way to go. Instead of promoting the future they want to send all of us back to dialup.
They're saying "But that means we won't be able to steal movies anymore!" when the real problem is "That means we won't be able to download the legal content anymore!"
But who has vetted the works that you call "legal content" to make sure that they haven't been accidentally copied from a copyrighted work?
Matter of fact, I have never even noticed Twitter at all.
That's because the real twitter (not the one with 14 alleged socks) only posts 140 characters at a time, too few to be a real annoyance.
If I use 10-100x less than him, why should I still have to pay the same amount of money?
Because there is a fixed cost involved in running even 1 kbps over an end user's last mile, let alone 1 Mbps.
With a hard cap, I'm going to have even less compunction about running an ad blocker to filter out megabytes and megabytes of graphics, animated GIFs, and Flash that just distract from the content I'm after.
Limits like this aren't new: in 2001 I was confronted by Cox and told that my downloading of over 1GB/day wasn't acceptable, and that I could choose right then to either upgrade to a business account or be cut off for a year. I upgraded to business and I haven't heard a peep about excessive downloading since. No it's not what everyone was wanting to hear and I also think companies should stick to their contracts the way they present them to people, but I also know that companies are made up of people and people by nature are going to do whatever they can possibly get away with for as long as they can get away with it. The only reason any of you are bitching about it now is because someone found out and made you aware of what's been happening for much longer than anyone realizes. Welcome to human nature...
Business Class is not available to all end users
My Google-fu is failing me today. Do you have a reference for this? Is availability based on city zoning ordinances? Or is Business Class service not available at all in some markets where Comcast provides residential High Speed Internet?
"draconian 'disconnect' option for use against anyone who fails to toe"
Comcast is imitating Scientology, it appears.