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Comcast Outlines New Broadband Policy
Slatterz writes "US cable provider Comcast has presented its long-term solution for managing broadband traffic. The new system is set at putting to bed a minor scandal that erupted around the company when it was found that Comcast deliberately limited traffic for certain applications. The company said that under its new system, traffic will be analyzed every fifteen minutes. Users who are found to be occupying large amounts of bandwidth will be placed at a lower priority for network access behind users with less bandwidth-intensive traffic. The new system will not replace or be related to the company's earlier installment of bandwidth caps, which limited a user's data intake to 250GB per month."
There are only two games in town: ATT's DSL (slow) and Comcast (Fast, but with strings).
What's the point of having the internet when you can't do anything on it?
I can deal with that, it's fair and doesn't really stomp on anyone's feet. So what if users eat up all the available bandwidth? Just make it fair who eats up more than others.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
So they're saying that if I am doing something that requires more bandwidth, I will get less bandwidth; and when I don't need much bandwidth, they're going to give me more? I'm really confused by this. Can anyone make sense of this for me?
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
Low priority for large transfers is fine with me, but can we mark which data should be high priority? So we can download a movie from Comcast-Buy-A-Movie-Service in the background while online with Halo 3?
set up mrtg to poll your router and make your own graphs.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
1) User pays for their own broadband access (cost of bandwidth). $$
2) User pay for Netflix a service contract (which includes more bandwidth costs). $$
3) User uses the bandwidth for which he paid by watching streaming movies and suddenly the movies don't load anymore... because it takes a bit of bandwidth to download movies.
4) User buys digital movies from Amazon et al? $$
5) User gets kicked from ISP because he paid enough to use what bandwidth he used.
Sounds like a scam to me!
Why offer high speed internet if you're not going to provide high speed internet?
So when NBC or ABC/ESPN/Disney or CBS/Viacom or Sony Pictures or Time Warner comes to me and says "Look at our really great new streaming movie/TV/video service! Pay only $29.95/mo and you can watch anything anyTIME ALL THE TIME!!!", I'll say "Sorry. Can't do streaming video. It puts me in the Comcast doghouse. I just play Nethack."?
Ok
So suddenly any large use of BW is illegal? Way to distract from the point.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I am upset by the fact that they have now told their users that if they try and use the bandwidth that they were sold for too long a period of time, thier service will be degraded until they fall in to the 50% bracket as compared to all other users. If they can not support speeds that they are advertizing, they should not be selling them. If you have a 250GB a month limit, you should be able to use the speeds you are paying for until you reach that limit.
Offsite backups.
My disk array syncs to a disk array about 2000 miles away, and that one syncs to mine.
I used about 230G last month, and that was the largest part.
The next largest component was torrents of lectures (such as this machine learning class offered by Stanford).
That's probably not throttling. Same thing happens to my cousin, and the same thing happens to me (though not as bad.) Every seed and leech in that torrent is still hammering your connection and timing out, requesting what parts you're advertising. At least that's what my firewall logs seem to suggest.
Power cycle your cable modem and get a new IP address. Your former cloud will no longer be DDoSing your connection.
DATABASE WOW WOW
I'm not sure why this was modded -1, Flamebait. The parent makes a good point - as I posted in a semi-related thread a couple of days ago, I rented a movie from the Playstation store as an HD rental. The filesize was 6275 MB (around 6 GB). This download definitely saturated my connection, as I had the whole thing in around 2 hours. I realize that Comcast has a way of telling (or maybe they don't, who knows) P2P traffic from a straight download, but ultimately the question is the same - if I'm blasting a 6 GB file download in an hour or two, does that piss them off? Because I'm going to be mad if it does, since it was a perfectly legitimate use of the service that I'm paying for (vs. some "gray area" activities).
You could always upgrade to a class of service that doesn't have the caps, or has caps in line with what you require.
A system in which people like you who use 100s or thousands of gigabytes per month pay more than people who use 10 or 15 a year seems entirely fair to me.
If you seriously think you are going to exceed 250GB a month, spend the extra money and get a business account. If you are that heavy of an internet user, moving to 70 bucks a month or so shouldn't be that big of a deal.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
I can't speak for everyone, but I do bioinformatics/computational biology and often telecommute when consulting or to continue the days work at home when deadlines are tight. Depending on the project or analysis task, having local copies of public scientific databases is very useful (eg. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Database/). These databases are rather large and are growing rapidly. Since terabyte drives have become affordable, it's become feasible to maintain up-to-date personal copies at home rather than accessing them via NFS at work or working with representative subsets.
Perfectly legal, legitimate and probably more useful to society than streaming HD content. This is the kind of stuff we used the internet for back before it hit the bigtime, so as legitimate a use of the internet as what people now consider "normal use" (web browsing, shopping, watching video, streaming music, and yes I do those too).
Uh, let's see:
- Downloading F/OSS software?
- hulu.com?
- Various TV networks?
- Netflix?
- VOIP?
Face it: (IMHO) Comcast is afraid of streaming video sites, and are using P2P as an excuse to curb competition. They do not want to happen to them what happened to land line telephone companies when cellular and VOIP took off.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
its called "class action lawsuit" - it works !
Read radical news here
"Broadband: You can't have any(tm)."
Then shouldn't the people who use 10 or 15 a year pay considerably less than they are now?
After all, the only reason pricing is at this point is because they reasoned that the people using the service at only 5% capacity would effectively subsidized the others who use it at 100% capacity.
If you're now making those who would use it at 100% capacity pay more for service, shouldn't those who are only using a fraction of the network capacity get a major discount to their connectivity?
Making backups is hardly a "business class task"...
You are the reason these policies have been put into place. By using consumer internet for business class tasks, you have screwed us all.
Yes, how DARE he use a resource that was underspec'd and oversold! It's all his fault that Comcast uses shady business practices!
...now get off our lawn...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Then shouldn't the people who use 10 or 15 a year pay considerably less than they are now?
Perhaps a bit less, but not necessarily considerably less. (After all, there is considerable fixed overhead to a DSL line on top of the bandwidth, those 5% bandwidth users consume telephone support, need their "modems" fixed, have line trouble, etc at the same rate as the 100% users.)
After all, the only reason pricing is at this point is because they reasoned that the people using the service at only 5% capacity would effectively subsidized the others who use it at 100% capacity.
That's true to a point, but its a gross oversimplification.
If you're now making those who would use it at 100% capacity pay more for service, shouldn't those who are only using a fraction of the network capacity get a major discount to their connectivity?
Let me give you an example to illustrate my point.
Lets say we have a service that costs $20 for the average person. But instead we charge $21. So if 1000 people pay 21$ instead of 20$ for a service, that subsidizes the 1% of people who uses $120 worth of service. Are you with me?
So costs are: 990 people use $20 worth of service ($19800) plus 10 people use $120 worth of service ($1200) = $21000.
While revenue is: 1000 people * $21 = $21000.
So the low end users are subsidizing the high end users, and we 'break even'.
That's more or less how the subsidy works in reality.
So if we start charging those 10 people $120 directly. We can afford to knock a whole dollar off everyone else's plan? Big flipping deal. That gets lost in the noise.
(The "noise" being price increases due to inflation, cost decreases due to modern technology, it gets used to cover some new 'feature' like anti-spam on the server, or free antivirus for subscribers, etc, etc).
He's not talking about syncing up a 15gig home directory. He's talking about producing 230gigs of data per month in deltas to whatever he's generating (I hope he's using rsync and not something naive).
Backing up 230 gigs/month is certainly business class usage. If "business" isn't a good adjective use "large" if you want. You don't have to be making money to need "business" features.
-Bucky
You were sold a resedential service with residential terms and conditions.
Your terms include:
So you bought a product that bulk transfers of files may be restricted. Why are you complaining when Comcast are giving you exactly what you bought? As others have said, they probably also sell products more suited to your needs.
The system (based on everything I've read) does not care, or try to detect, the contents of your packets.* It doesn't care whether what you're downloading is legal or not.
This is exactly as it should be, since it doesn't matter to other people on the local node what you're doing, only that you're hogging bandwidth. Legal movies, illegal movies, videoconferencing, a totally opaque VPN connection ... it doesn't matter. They all have the same effect on other users of the network, and should all be treated exactly the same way.
* Or so they claim. Some people have noted that the hardware they're using comes from a company most noted for its sophisticated and purpose-built DPI products, which seems like a bit of an odd choice of vendor for something that's really quite simple. I don't have a dog in that fight, but I'm taking them at face value for now.
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