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Comcast Launches Broadband Meter
nlawalker writes "Beginning on Tuesday, January 12, Comcast high-speed internet users in Washington state will have access to an online tool that displays their bandwidth usage for the most recent three calendar (not billing) months of usage, including the current month. Washington is the second market to receive access to the tool, following its introduction in Portland. 'For the fraction of less than 1 percent of our customers who are concerned about exceeding our excessive use threshold, we believe this meter will help them monitor and calibrate their usage,' said spokesman Steve Kipp. Perhaps those who aren't using 250GB a month should take it as a challenge."
Perhaps those who aren't using 250GB a month should take it as a challenge.
Perhaps those who aren't using 250GB a month should start sharing more porn! Darn leechers!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
"Here's a fake metric that has no meaningful relation to what we're going to bill you for."
On a side note pfsense keeps track of this for you, and I'm fairly certain the majority of those cheap shit Linksys or Dlink "routers" do as well. You can even match them to your billing cycle. Yay.
you can also go online and download one of many broadband meters... who knows there meter could be rigged to show you using more bandwidth then you really are just to give you a reason to overcharge you.
Transfer caps are disclosed, enforced, and comparatively low in New Zealand and Australia because transpacific bandwidth is so expensive. I think the perceived lack of caps in U.S. ISP has something to do with the fact that popular web sites are hosted on the same continent as Comcast's customers, so no one has to pay for transpacific bandwidth.
In college (I went to Penn State) they had a similar monitor that would update and show you if you were getting close to, or had already exceeded the limits for the month. After the first infraction in a semster, they'd cut you back to dialup speeds for about a week, then at the second infraction, for the rest of the semester, and after the third (assuming you could even get there at dialup speeds) you were cut off. My friends and I took this as a challenge, so we were always trying to get as close to the download limit without going over, even people who otherwise would not download much at all. I would anticipate this will only encourage similar behavior.
Basically, they're saying for 5% of the price of a T1 you get 5% the capacity over a month.
So, continuing on about the tenth year in a row, I continue find it very hard to give a shit.
On the Technical side, this isn't any major feat. You're correct.
However, this is a tool that they'll start using to socially condition people into tiered plans. Imagine an ad from comcast in the near future, "Be Green! Lower your monthly usage! To find out how, check our Tips and Tricks section, and track your online usage using our 'IntelliGreen Online Usage Tracker'*"
*use of the IntelliGreen Online Usage Tracker will count toward your monthly usage cap at 1/2 the byte rate because it's Green!
This is just Comcast trying to legitimize their practice cutting off users who exceed their data transfer cap.
I suppose it's better than not being told how close you are to having your service suspended for a year, but I'd prefer it if their service were clearly advertised as metered service and had reasonable fees for overages instead of suspending users' accounts.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
.. in any area - broadband, speed limits, personal days off etc. etc. is that if you put a cap on anything, then people will consider anything below the cap as a right and use their right to the fullest. So Comcast may see a huge increase in traffic summed up as people start acting according to their rights.
Q: How does a Unix guru have sex? A: unzip;strip;touch;finger;mount;fsck;more;yes;umount;sleep
For all this handwringing, I've never seen this feature on my Comcast account. Yes, I live in Portland.
Maybe it's because I pay for the higher tier?
I agree, they should break it down into broad categories
Email
Instant Messaging clients
Linux ISOs
Pron
Lolcats
WoW
Other
--- Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity
No. I think they stopped calling it unlimited two or three years ago.
Now users can band together and sell off their "quota credits" to each other the way corporations do with carbon credits.
Less than 1% use that bandwidth and it affects their network, isn't that absurd? Isn't that an indication of a terrible network? I honestly don't know the answers to these questions, but if you can't support 1% of your users at that level then IMO you have a crap network.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Also, if you own a Linksys WRT54G model router, of most firmware variations, you can get custom firmware that will track WLAN usage. It was quite handy when I had to pick a broadband connection plan when I moved to a new state.
Here I am, here I remain.
Perhaps those who aren't using 250GB a month should take it as a challenge.
You're not kidding. There's a story in Freakonomics about a daycare center that had problems with people not picking their kids up on time. So they figured they would charge a fee; penalize people for leaving their kids and they'll stop, right? Instead, more people started showing up late. Turns out that paying a fee assuaged peoples guilt for not showing up on time. Before they felt like jerks for being late, now they could just pay a fee and feel better. Moral of the story, incentives don't always work the way you think they will.
So when you give people this new information, what's going to happen? 90% of people are not using that much bandwidth already. Comcast is giving them a chart that says "look how little bandwidth you're using, you could use a lot more and not get in trouble". Some of those people are going to start using more bandwith, and I'll bet those people will more than offset the minority of heavy users who might curtail their usage.
The real solution to this problem is for Comcast, and every other ISP to invest more into infrastructure.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Fine print is a common business practice, only because people are so unreasonable sometimes. I ran a restaurant where we had all you can eat specials, and we had to put a little fine print to say you couldn't stay longer than two hours, since the first weekend a couple of people stayed for nearly four hours, and then tried to refuse to leave.
Or just watch a few HQ videos, participate in some [legit] torrents, etc. We easily go far past 250GB per month on our fiber connection (which is uncapped, unthrottled, etc.)
250GB is more than eight days of Netflix movies streaming, or two months of non-stop standard def Youtube watching, or downloading 64,000 songs. If you're hitting the upper limit, you probably don't mind spending another $30 for the "premium" no cap services, and if you're running a business from home, you'll need to pay for that kind of service.
I do not support a commercially owned last mile, but this is really a non issue for most people.
Actually, if you RTFA, they've had the 250GB cap since October 2008, which was established after users complained for getting cut off for passing some threshold Comcast made up but refused to disclose. Or rather, they disclosed that there WAS a cap, but wouldn't disclose what it was.
My sig can beat up your sig.
They won't bother you unless they're having performance problems on that node, and even then they only bother the top n% (not sure what n is) which is not necessarily 250GB.
250GB is just the floor for "we won't bother anyone under this amount".
Trust me, Comcast doesn't WANT to lose customers, and won't get rid of you unless you're causing real, actual problems. They may be greedy at times but they're not entirely stupid. $40 a month is better than $0.
Price trends down toward cost only in a competitive environment. Things like last mile bandwidth or transpacific bandwidth are a lot closer to a monopoly or oligopoly because of the $300 million entry barrier, and monopolists collect rents.
250 gigabytes or 250 industry gigabytes? Base 2 or base 10? There's a big difference!
The rest of the world has had this for some time. Nice to see you're catching up.
If the metre is half way decent this will be a valuable tool in tracking and assessing your own download habits, but given the level of competence displayed by US telco's something tells me this wont be the case.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Cute, but if you were to y'know... ACTUALLY CHECK WITH COMCAST, you'll find there is no such thing.
Comcast does offer a "no cap service". According to the Comcast business rep I talked with, Comcast business accounts are exempt from the bandwidth caps. And yes, if your willing to pay for it, they will gladly setup a business account at a residential address. For the 50mb/10mb service you can expect to pay $100+ more than the standard residential 50mb/10mb package.
I'm disappointed in all the geeks on this site misusing the term "bandwidth." Bandwidth is a measure of rate, not of volume.
I can understand a Comcast marketing droid calling it a "bandwidth meter" because it's a non-geek selling it to non-geeks. But we shouldn't use the word improperly just because some stupid people do.
Earning my karma today, that's for sure.
John
...Really?
You're going to bitch about people bitching about bandwidth... on a story about bandwidth? At least they're on topic, you ranting moron. I don't disagree these are problems, but seriously, shut the fuck up.