Slashdot Mirror
Comcast's 105MBit Service Comes With Data Cap
itwbennett writes "Comcast just announced the ultrafast, ultra-broadband 'Extreme 105' 105 Mbit/sec Internet service for an introductory price of $105, when bundled with other services. That's the good news. The bad news: Comcast 'put a data cap on the service of 250 GB per month — about five hours worth of full-bandwidth use,' writes blogger Kevin Fogarty."
250 gigs of data is their normal cap across the board.
Gbit or GB?
Basically, it's like marrying a gorgeous woman. She looks really hot, but you can never just let your lust run wild, because she thinks too highly of herself. Every instance of intercourse must be bargained for, and you're lucky to get it once a week; and when you do, she just lies there like a dead tuna. Soon, you begin to question whether it was worth spending so much money and effort on her.
But it isn't that bad.I haven't come close to maxing it out and I tried. I don't know, how exactly do you use more than 250GB in a month?
There is no speed cap and its the fastest internet available in my area so why not use it? It's not perfect but it beats DSL.
It's 250 GIGs per month. Got it?
That is plenty for me.
Do packages like this encourage piracy?
If you think about it, streaming services can only go so fast. If youre streaming HD video from Netflix 105Mbit/s sounds a bit like overkill. The same can be said for streaming audio. Your media will still playback one second at a time. However, 105Mbit sounds lightning quick if you think about it in terms of downloading content. There are paid services where you can get your media, but they have to limit your speeds. Thousands of people trying to grab files from a server as fast as they can has the potential to cripple the infrastructure
So, where is this speed most effective? P2P applications
Business accounts have a limit. It just isn't acknowledged as any specific limit. You can easily use a terabyte or maybe even two without running into problems. After a certain point, they're likely to want to speak with you about signing up for a more dedicated service at a higher cost.
It's interesting, however, that in the same physical location, they can't afford more than 250gb/mo, because it is consuming all of their precious resources. Pay them an extra $40, however, and that same location and network can suddenly handle six or eight times that much bandwidth. Of course, the other important reason to get their business service is that you can get 5, 10, or even 50 mbps *up*, instead of 768kbps.
No reasonable way to use 250gb a month? Really?
Streaming HD is around 2gb/hr. Watch two movies per day (simple in a household) and you're looking at around 250gb.
Just because you and your grandmother only use it for email and printing out coffee cake recipes doesn't mean the rest of us do.
Sure there is: Netflix. YouTube. Online backup.
The fact that you can't come up with a reasonable way doesn't mean that there is no reasonable way.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
HD podcasts, streaming music, streaming HD netflix, streaming video events, Steam downloads, VPN and VNC work, remote backups, gaming.
I'd be more interested in knowing how someone can *not* use 250gb a month.
250Gbit / 105Mb/s = "about five hours worth of full-bandwidth use". Since when? 250,000,000,000 105,000,000 250,000b / 105b/s ~= 2381s 2381s / 60s/m ~= 40m Either one of the numbers is wrong or his math is way off. Not that this paints a prettier picture. Then again: 250Gbit / 8bit/byte = 31,250,000,000 Who downloads 31Gb per month but doesn't get a dedicated line for the purposes? Well I can guess who - but even a typical blu-ray rip (not an ISO) is what.. 4GiB? That's still about 8 such movies in a month if you're into that sort of thing. If you really need the bandwidth -and- lack of cap.. get a dedicated line. This offer seems to be for people / small business who might need a high burst rate for certain things (i.e. on the phone, need to send a 50MB file being referenced, don't want to wait 2 minutes on the phone for receipt, etc.) but wouldn't typically hit the cap. As long as these caps are clearly advertised.. who cares?
with this service your browser will load a web page incredibly fast (no lag surfing) but good luck trying to download a Linux ISO on dvd (about 4.5 gigs)
oh, you actually want some content in your content?
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
For a nation made up of 'We The People', Corporations have the one and only voice.
Constitution should read 'We The Patrons Of The Companies'
M O O N... That spells Slashdot.
Downloads are around 10Megs per second on a good day, you can download all day for 5 days at this rate and still not max out the 250GB per month. You would would have to deliberately max your speed out all day every day for about a week before you max out the 250GB. Honestly I doubt many people would be able to do it if they were challenged to.
A HD movie on iTunes is 4.7GB down. One movie a day 30 days = 141GB. Now let's do some TV. 4 shows a day also HD ~1GB per. (22min for 3 and 1 40min show) that's another 4 GB * 30 = 120 GB and voila, 262 GB / month.
Not counting any YouTube, software, gaming, general Internet, skype or FaceTime, Flickr or anything else.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
How many movies do you watch a month? I do all of that stuff and I've not been able to max out past 200GB in any month.
... coming from a company that made it into the final four of the worst companies in America? It took a company as bad as BP to knock Comcast out of the running.
No of course not. There are plenty of sites which make use of the speed. HDTV streams, youtube, the cloud.
The faster your connection the higher the quality of stream you can use, and the more HDTV streams you can have at once. So you can stream 4 HDTV movies at once without any pauses or slowdown.
The linked article is in error. The cap is 250 gigabytes per month.
http://xfinity.comcast.net/terms/network/amendment/
+0 Meh
250Gbit / 105Mb/s = "about five hours worth of full-bandwidth use". Since when?
250,000,000,000
105,000,000
250,000b / 105b/s ~= 2381s
2381s / 60s/m ~= 40m
Either one of the numbers is wrong or his math is way off.
Not that this paints a prettier picture.
Then again:
250Gbit / 8bit/byte = 31,250,000,000
Who downloads 31Gb per month but doesn't get a dedicated line for the purposes?
Well I can guess who - but even a typical blu-ray rip (not an ISO) is what.. 4GiB? That's still about 8 such movies in a month if you're into that sort of thing.
If you really need the bandwidth -and- lack of cap.. get a dedicated line. This offer seems to be for people / small business who might need a high burst rate for certain things (i.e. on the phone, need to send a 50MB file being referenced, don't want to wait 2 minutes on the phone for receipt, etc.) but wouldn't typically hit the cap.
As long as these caps are clearly advertised.. who cares?
You don't have a clue how young people use the internet. I'm guessing you've never been to the tube sites. You probably think the only way to download more than 30 gigs a month is piracy. If you watch HDTV on your computer, and each show is a few gigs, you will easily get up to 30 gigs in a month. You might even get up to 150 gigs. But you probably will not get up to 250 gigs.
As far as dedicated lines go, this service is meant to compete with FIOS and bring the USA up to speed with China, Japan and Europe.
I've had 100Mbps fiber for 10 years now, at half that price... with no caps. One Gbps is the new 100 Mbps here.
I feel bad for Americans who are at the mercy of the duopoly who, for all practical purposes, control the internet in the US.
In the UK, we only really have one cable company - Virgin Media.
They offer 10, 30, 50 and 100Mbit services - all "unlimited" (with an Acceptable Use Policy attached for people who constantly throttle their full connection). The kicker is they employ some pretty heavy traffic management. Download more than about 3Gb in the evening (between 4pm and midnight) and your connection speed gets cut by 75%. So the 30 becomes about 6 or 7mbit.
The thing is, you can still keep downloading as much as you want, it's just slower - so which system is better?
They also employ traffic shaping, so between the same hours (And ALL weekend), P2P and newsgroup traffic gets slowed by 75% as well, no matter how much you're downloading.
It's a bit of a ridiculous catch. There are some decent DSL providers that have no usage limits, but they can only offer an "Up to" connection that can do 24mbit, but you're more likely to get about 8mbit (on average), whereas on Virgin you'll get the speed you signed up for (until traffic management/shaping kicks in). So /.ers which would you rather have, obscene traffic management or hard caps?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
What I was talking about was already pointed out by others while I was typing my post - but seeing as I have to wait half an eternity to post another comment, the following didn't get included 15 minutes ago:
Right. 250GB. Gigabyte. That's what I get for even double-checking by reading the blog post:
250Gigabyte cap does result in 5 hours. On the other hand, it also results in a 250Gigabyte cap.
That's not 8 BD movie tips. That's 62 BD movie rips.
Now I really don't understand what the fuss is about and I stand by my earlier statement... if you want that 24/7, no cap, get a dedicated line.
And given that there is this posting frequency limit... I know perfectly well how people use their connections. People who watch YouTube all day long or fully use their Netflix account - not just piracy. I get that. But for those people, perhaps a lower speed account with a higher cap (or 'fair use policy' type cap) would be more appropriate?
Why are you judging? Maybe he has more than one kid? One child is watching the new pixar movie, while another is upstairs working on a online college course that has them running through some online lectures.
Then, you have the Mom, who is a work at home mom and has to constantly keep up-to-date with their training materials.
Now, this mom that works from home, always has to have some type of white noise in the background so jumps onto a hulu channel herself.
250GB is easy to burn through if you are single, and EVEN EASIER to burn though if you are married and have kids.
I'm on an 8Mbit connection as that is the fastest I can get around here. There's no data cap or anything, not even a fair use policy (something that has been used a lot here in The Netherlands). I download around 1.2 TB per month. So even on my connection I max out your cap in less than a week. You say it isn't that bad but I would never get a connection with a cap as low as that. Especially if I would have such speeds available.
While obviously not slashdot readers, anyone with teenaged kids can easily find themselves in that type of position - while they might not each watch a movie per day, when you take a couple kids watching a different movie each every few days, or watching different tv shows, in addition to the usage that the parents are using. Heck, my 5 and 7 year old don't watch the same shows - the ones the 5 year old likes are too babyish for the 7 year old, and the ones the 7 year likes are too scary for the 5 year old. Then add in streaming stuff for us to watch... You can very rapidly hit the required number of viewing hours, if you remember that you don't all have to be locked in a single room, watching the same stuff all the time.
Isn't this how leases work? Leases always have some limited number of miles and any miles above that will be charged at very expensive rate.
I torrent, and my household moves ~500Gb a month. I live in central europe. And I have not only not been restricted, but offers have been made for stepping up a package for no additional cost. You would think the U.S. would fair better. For reference, dirt cheap landline phone, ~40TV Channels and 30/5 mbit line. I use one of the more expensive telcos, and spend less than 40 usd.
Try Hughesnet "broadband" -- daily cap of under 400 Mb. Can't even update my phone much less stream anything.
10mbit for 1 day = 540 Gigabytes
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Because Al Gore invented the internet, and thus the US should have the best internet infrastructure in the world.
Here is a quick comparison for ya:
Twenty 56k modems (say throughput of 5KB/sec @ 24/7) would be able to pass this cap.
108 gigabytes for 1 day duh, 5 days at 10mbits = 540 gigabytes.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
I doubt it's really 250 gBIT...... it's gotta be 250 GBYTES.
250gBIT is only about 32gigs, so there's no fuckin way that's right.
how exactly do you use more than 250GB in a month?
Rsync.net. Why do you need 100 mbits/second if you're not really going to use it?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The coward is right with his typo: there is one reasonable way anyone can use their 250GB/mo 105Mb/s service, to download one uncompressed hd video in four hours. There are no two reasonable ways, once you have used up your one reasonable way for the month, you are SOL.
Just put a 1 megabit/sec camera feed on it and you're over.
FWIW within Japan you get similar insane speed but again a similar 300GB cap as far as I know.
Not that I have ever run into such a cap. But it may affect a video application I'm planning now.
If they would just give a clear service menu as to what it costs to get the real thing.
But that would be like a contract that lets you run your own ISP and would likely be at least twice the price.
Ehmm... I don't know where you live, but assuming there are caps everywhere just because "you had since day one", is at least ignorant. It must be a very backwards place if caps are 10-40GB.
For example, I live in one of the least developed (in Broadband service) EU countries (Greece) and the only cap I have seen is for internet on 3G Mobile networks, where it is at 30GB (it is plenty as a 3G connection is not supposed to replace your DSL). The DSL service on the other hand is never capped (unless you ask to get charged by usage) and usually costs 20-40 Euro (depending the ISP and options) for ADSL2+ up to 24Mbit service. But as I said this is also considered lame compared to, say, Northern Europe. From this year there will also be VDSL connections at 50Mbit with prices announced at around 50 Euro again with no mention of caps.
$105 for 250GB is ridiculous any way you look at it. The fact that the service is 105Mbit makes it even more likely to hit the limit.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Feels good to have Fiber with no cap. :)
http://mc.jamonek.com - Minecraft Signature Generator
You mean, it's kind of like buying the world's fastest production car, and then only being able to drive it 2500 miles a year.
250 billion bits? That sounds as stupid as a republican opening her mouth !! Caps are ALWAYS given in bytes. Another hack without a clue is on the loose !! SAGA !!
its to generate comments like yours, duh.
That's useful. Thanks comcrap.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
No, they simply support the new wave of everyone streaming their content from places like netflix, pandora, amazon, etc.
Of course if you do this you get penalized, but that's not my point.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You sound Australian.
Your internet sucks. Stop trying to drag the rest of the world down with you.
Ridiculous.
Please USA, sort your shit. Internet must get cheaper, not more expensive!.
-Woof woof woof!
Most of these 20++MBit/sec are not intended for use by a single connection. In fact most circuits will have bottlenecks somewhere down the line that prevent you getting anywhere near your nominal data rate on a single connection. These deals are intended for multi-user (i.e. families) where the children are playing Wii, downloading "art", video chatting etc. and other people are watching a streamed movie and backing up their work - all at the same time. It's surprising how much bandwidth that all sucks up and if it's a nightly event then, yes: you can hit the monthly cap very quickly, when you have 5 people hacking at it for several nights a week.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Whenever I come across the weekly article on slashdot that brings up the data cap debate, I always see the same comments:
"Ohh, who would ever come close to this cap of x? I never come close!"
That's great, it's difficult for one person to reach that cap alone... but what happens when there are more people in the house using the internet too?
I'm a student that lives with 5 other students, and with all the youtube we watch, online games we play, and other things we do on the internet instead of homework or sleeping, I'd say that we could easily exceed that limit, and that's with minimal p2p use.
Although, I can't wait for internet that fast to be offered. 105mbps / 6 means that video streaming speeds won't take a peculiar dip at 11pm.
I have yet to discover the root of this problem.
Caps to me are still the real issue. I say that because once you have any decent broadband connection it is typically going to be 'fast enough' for an average end user. Most end users are not downloading an ISO a day or something to that effect. In fact since most if not all end user pipes are not even close to full duplex they are not really that much good for anything but normal end user type stuff.
Now I will throw in the caveat that as you add more users to a connection clearly that is when a bigger pipe will help. But that still brings us around to again the real issue, caps. With more users you are running even a bigger risk of going over a cap if you are using what the modern internet can do. Streaming, online gaming, downloads, smartphones/tablets switching over to Wifi mode when they are in range, and of course all of the standard stuff like email/web/IM/etc.
Caps are something that need to be seriously regulated as it is not like we have a lot of options when it comes to our broadband options. They should be pretty damn high as in you really would be having to running full bandwidth for a week straight out of a month.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Whatever happened to sending the kids outside to play soccer or some make-believe game? No wonder this nation is so overweight and no one knows how to socialize when people whine about not having enough bandwidth to consume this level of TV watching. I let my kids watch about an hour of TV a day, tops. Then the damn thing gets turned off. If they complain about being bored I tell them I'll happily put a puzzle together with them or get the chess board out or put on the baseball glove. If anyone is consuming 250GB a month on a regular basis with gaming and media, you need to seriously take a hard look at your life and get out the door every now and then. The ISPs in this country would do the healthcare system a serious favor if they would all put a 10GB/month cap on everyone's internet usage. (This is hilarious: I'm turning into my dad!)
Comcast is a bit ridiculous on their data caps and pricing.
Having worked for a small-business ISP in the past, the cost of bandwidth doesn't match up to the cost in services that Comcast provides. It's a matter of fact that Comcast's rates well exceed cost and reasonable business profit of 20%.
If you use a resold bandwidth model of in/out of $0.18/$0.08, your costs should be about $65.00/mo per 250GB up and 250GB down. However, if you own your own infrastructure, those costs are significantly reduced. I'd estimate Comcast is spending no more than pennies for their bandwidth and are making an absolute killing on internet services.
I've contemplated going back into the ISP field, but this time as an owner. I imagine that a lot of customers see these rates and caps as nickel and diming, and people are sick of it. I'm sick of it.
http://www.allometry.com
How do you use 250GB/month? Have a family and you'll find out. It becomes REALLY easy to bump against the cap if you ditch cable and buy all your TV shows from iTunes.
The rest of the world has had caps since day one.
Here we had caps. Now we don't. Apparently in the US it works backwards.
Dilbert RSS feed
also deadpanning on how the node is setup up / how many people are on it you may have a hard time even getting to 105MEG download speed.
Forever alone?
Dilbert RSS feed
Yeah, or some sort of service billing itself as being "unlimited."
Oh wait.
A buddy of mine has six heavy internet users on a 10MBit pipe. Believe me, with all of them wanting to stream video, download torrents, play music, etc. they'd exceed the cap in no time.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
...I don't know, how exactly do you use more than 250GB in a month?
(Overheard from Charlie Sheen) "pfft...fucking amateurs."
Maybe I'm the odd man out here, but my roommate and I were averaging 2 TBs/month for roughly a year. Between gaming, video streaming, BitTorrent, and file transfer and software development on the computer science departmental machines at our university this didn't seem like a big deal. After doing the math, though, I am much happier with our service than I was before. Turns out we were, in fact, getting roughly 6 Mbps all the time.
Streaming HD is around 2gb/hr. Watch two movies per day (simple in a household) and you're looking at around 250gb.
Comcast would rather have you use its On Demand offerings. Netflix? Apple? Youtube? Hulu? Those are all competitors.
HD podcasts, streaming music, streaming HD netflix, streaming video events, Steam downloads, VPN and VNC work, remote backups, gaming.
I'd be more interested in knowing how someone can *not* use 250gb a month.
You could try stepping outside once in a while?
But it isn't that bad.I haven't come close to maxing it out and I tried. I don't know, how exactly do you use more than 250GB in a month?
You give up broadcast TV and just use and have more than one person use Netflix and Hulu.
Also, my kids definitely watch less TV than we did. I'm afraid they still get just as much or more "screen time," but game consoles, flash games, and web surfing have really cut into TV time, and all use less much bandwidth than streaming video.
It does seem odd that Comcast's super-premium service has the same cap as every other tier, but it's not a very restrictive cap.
Actually it says 250G*bit*, so 250/8 = ~31.25GB/month.
;) ) / 15 Gbit up. Plus free webspace, domain name, ability to open port 80 and 25 for web hosting, and best of all, no capping that I know of.
I'll stick with Cablevision's Optimum Ultra. An extra $50 a month on top of their Boost plan (30down/5up) for 101Gbit down (where do you think that 105 came from?
But, either way, thank goodness for competition.
"What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?" - Doctor Who
You're retarded if you can't cap it out. I hit about 150gig a month with my 3MB/s connection. If you want to cap out that connected get go download the top 5 torrents on the pirate bay and let it sit for about a day. You'll be way over your limit guaranteed. If you want to make it all legal, get the top 5 linux distros. You'll still cap it out.
The rest of the world has had caps since day one.
I have lived in 4 different countries in past 10 years.
I've never had any bandwidth caps, and had fully unlimited Internet (and never had a call from ISP, no matter how much bandwidth I spent).
So, what is that "rest of the world" you are talking about?
Australia and New Zealand are not really "the rest of the world".
"You could try stepping outside once in a while?"
And ruin my naturally transparent skin? The day-star is a cruel mistress.
A lot of anonymous cowards claiming that it's unreasonable to go past 250 GB even with a 100+ Mbps connection.
As someone who has a 100/100 Mbps connection this seems weird, I can easily use more bandwidth than that in a month. Hell, on a few occasions I've used more in a week. And that's only downstream.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
But it isn't that bad.I haven't come close to maxing it out and I tried. I don't know, how exactly do you use more than 250GB in a month?
You're doing it wrong!
This is blinging
When I download a upgrade to my Ubuntu system I never get a download speed greater than a hundred thousand bytes per second.
If you're getting low-end-DSL download speeds from your chosen Ubuntu repository mirror, perhaps you need to choose a different mirror. It's unfortunate that apt-get can't download from multiple mirrors at once.
I don't get why Americans think they are so entilted to unlimited broadband
We've *always* had unlimited broadband and we've seen the rise of services like actual video-on-demand as a result of it.
We've been doing it the right way here all along, you should be backing us up instead of whining about how we should get as shitty of service as you.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
All it takes is two Netflix streaming users in one household. Right before the cap started Comcast opened a reporting page to show us our average usage for the previous three months. I had hit the cap on all three months, even if for month three I cut down my torrent usage down to zero. That means we hit our cap just watching streamed video. I ditched Comcast (22/8, not that it ever performed at that level) for FIOS (25/25 for $5 per month, always performs beautifully) and never looked back.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Wasn't the 300GB cap _per day_, not per month? And only on upload, too?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Agreed.. please define the measurement in 'Library of Congress's or with a valid car analogy.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
All this talk of the data cap... what consumer grade router is even capable of utilizing that speed? How about any consumer OS? This is a marketing stunt and nothing more... or is there a slew of GigE WAN port consumer routers that can actually handle the routing at these speeds that I'm not aware of?
"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." --Howard Aike
I don't know, how exactly do you use more than 250GB in a month?
I can think of a few ways:
Yes, it is certainly possible for someone to hit a 250GB cap, if they are not "just another consumer." What is the point of getting so much bandwidth if you are not going to put it to good use?
Palm trees and 8
So it's like paying monthly for a Ferrari then after only a few miles the tires are falling off the car ??!!?
That was kinda my take on this. Yeah, caps are stupid but geez. Turn the damn things OFF for a while.
Off course, there are many activities that include up / downloading data for things other that personal entertainment but it strikes me that some folks have an unhealthy obsession with staring at LCD screens (righteously typed on a computer in the basement).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I've downloaded over 600GB this month on a 50Mbit line. I usually average around 350-450, but I had a hard drive crash and lost a lot.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Me and my girlfriend have a 175 GB cap with a 50 Mbps connection and we regularly butt heads with the cap. We each use 80-90 GB/month. Though I tend to use more. I've used about 40 GB in 10 days. Pre -download of portal 2. Redownload of Empire total war, those combined put me to 26 GB and it took me about 2 hours. Somewhere in there I bought Magika, I can't remember how big it was though. I still haven't actually accomplished anything useful with my internet and I'm pushing mid 30's of GB, and I still have 20 days left in the month, and that's just me. Then I have any code I'm working on, or more to the point the art assets that go with it, movies, music etc. We're in canada so while netflix is here, it's simply not an option. Though she (my GF) uses a number of sketchy video downloading sites to watch TV and movies 'on demand' that eats up a lot too. I expect to hit a couple of GB for a world of warcraft patch as well.
One of my co-workers (who is sort of half my boss) has his wife and two mostly grown kids at home. He's similar to me in terms of use, movies, games that sort of thing. So are his kids. He's easily pushing 350, 400 a month.
For me the biggest culprits are old (say 1-3 years old) games, that are on sale on the various online retailers. They're still the same size as todays games more or less, but for 5 bucks I can buy a lot more of them than at say, 50 also a year after release all the patches are done which mean games that might be kinda broken on release are actually pretty decent. Either way there's a lot there.
how exactly do you use more than 250GB in a month?
Backing up a single hard drive over the internet. To The Cloud!
I pay for two meg up with Comcast, and use part of that. I've got a tor relay set for one meg and seed some open source torrents at half a meg during the day, two meg at night. Total aggregate use rarely exceeds two meg up on my mrtg graphs. These are uses compatible with my business mission and aren't going to generate any 3rd party complaints.
Now, even thought I pay for two meg up, I get about four meg up. I could push it, but that would violate my "don't be stupid, don't be greedy" rule. I assume most people who run into trouble with their providers are being stupid and/or greedy. Yeah, yeah, "you advertised that I had a right to be greedy." Since when do we listen to anything marketing people have to say?
Comcast's Internet behavior has improved quite a bit over the last decade. I think they understand that they're now an Internet company that also provides video services to their residential customers. The business side is what Internet costs, the residential side is likely subsidized by the video revenues, and each appears to be run accordingly.
They're providing many of my clients with a stable 50/10 for less than the ILEC will charge for a T1 - I've got little room for complaints.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You could try stepping outside once in a while?
And ruin my naturally transparent skin?
You know, they do make protective equipment for that, called a thobe. It's a sack that fits over your shoulders and reaches to your ankles, with sleeves for your arms. Then add a cap to keep the sun off your face. Alvin Seville has the right idea.
In fact most of Europe doesn't have caps... except the UK
I'm on Virgin cable ('Medium' Internet package) in the UK and I don't have a cap as such. I get reduced to 1/4 speed for 5 hrs if I download more than a given amount in specified peak hours, but there is no specific total cap (i.e. a point where I get cut off or have to pay more) per month.
To summarize: some people in the UK have caps. Other don't.
And BTW we are special, but no more autistic than your average slashdotter.
I go over the cap almost every month, I have not received a warning for going over, but I suspect it may be due to the fact I am under contract for 2 years of service. Netflix streaming on multiple devices will eat that cap away. I rarely download files. http://speedtest.net/result/1232680921.png
As someone who has a 100/100 Mbps connection this seems weird, I can easily use more bandwidth than that in a month.
I only have 25/15, and over the past two years I have averaged 270GB/month in download. That's about 800Kbps, or 0.75% utilization on a 100Mbps line. It's only 3% on my line, so it's not like it's "busy".
great! now we can pay triple or four tines as much for a service thats available in rural villages in france and the UK . america has shit internet for a country thats supposedly so well off. wake me up when 105Mbs is bundled with phone and television. for 40 or 50 bucks a month. oh , and comcast can eat a fat one.
like a man without arms, you can't hang......
Well, imagine you have a car with 250,000,000,000 seatbelts that break after being used once. The car has 105 million seats, and can drive in both directions on a road at once.
Also, there is only one road, and it is constantly clogged by other cars because the municipality responsible for the roads refuses to admit they have a traffic congestion problem.
1 LoC = 10 TiB, so you get 0.0227373675443232059478759765625 Libraries of Congress per month, at a speed of 9.5238095238095238095238095238095e-9 LoC/sec.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
But it isn't that bad.I haven't come close to maxing it out and I tried. I don't know, how exactly do you use more than 250GB in a month?
I have exceeded Comcap's cap on a number of occasions. It's really quite easy. I can do it in less than a week even on their slowest tier of service. Think bitorrent. The average recompressed 1080p movie from TPB is 8-12 gigs. The average computer game is also between 8 and 12 gigs. If you assume a fair 1:1 upload:download ratio that means your real download cap is about 125 gigs which is about 10 movies/games per month. But often my UL:DL ratios are higher than 1:1. More like 2:1 which means I might just barely be able to download 7 games/moves with bittorrent. Oh wait, were you thinking in terms of just checking email and web browsing? Yeah. Paying a huge premium for higher download speeds makes a lot of sense for that. Page loads aren't even necessarily faster with higher tier service.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
And in those countries that have the caps, pricing models are very different as well. For instance, it costs roughly 27 CENTS per mbps in Japan, while even using Comcast's new service it is well over 5 times that amount (once you leave the introductory/bundled price). And several ISP's in Japan do not even have a cap on their high speed connection. For instance OCN has a 100/100 connection that is uncapped, and only costs approx $65 a month! Tiki-Tiki has a 900GB capped 100/100 connection for $36!!!! So almost 4x the cap limit AND 1/3 the price!!!!!!!!!
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
My family of five probably hits that average easily. We have different tastes, so we watch different things. There are 7 devices that could be pulling down this data in the house right now.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
so say we all.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
250GB is easy to burn through if you are single, and EVEN EASIER to burn though if you are married and have kids.
Exactly. Just like water, phone, electricity, heating fuel, food, etc.
Which just goes to show that the fix-price-with-caps model is stupid with today's technology. A low entry fee with sensible usage fees is the only pricing model that will make sense until end-to-end fiber is the norm. At that point, when we can get 20 TB plans for an ounce of silver per month, then fixed rates will probably make sense. We just don't have the technology to handle that yet, and prices most efficiently allocate scarce resources.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Just because you and your grandmother only use it for email and printing out coffee cake recipes doesn't mean the rest of us do.
Grandma would appreciate on-demand coffeecake videos, if the technology were made accessible to her.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
FUCK YES let's stand up for our rights to... what exactly? I am not totally following the source of the moral outrage - you're upset that Comcast has one specific offer you don't like? Or maybe you're pissed you have to pay for it? Clarify.
250Gigabyte cap does result in 5 hours. On the other hand, it also results in a 250Gigabyte cap.
That's not 8 BD movie tips. That's 62 BD movie rips.
Now I really don't understand what the fuss is about and I stand by my earlier statement... if you want that 24/7, no cap, get a dedicated line.
You have you ever actually ripped a bluray? The resulting mkv file is typically between 25 and 35 GB in size. If you have some way of just downloading them via the internet (like say via usenet) that would mean less than 10 movies before you hit the cap. Not 62. In the real world you would probably download the movies via p2p which typically means a commitment to 1:1 UL:DL ratios. So your 10 bluray rips become only 5. Checking back with reality again it can be seen that most movies available for download have been recompressed to half to one third size. Most 1080p rips are 8-12 GB. Assume an average of 10. If you combine that with your 125 gig effective cap (1:1 p2p) and you can download about 12 bluray movies per month or one movie every 2.5 days with comcap. That is easy to do even on the slowest tier of service. So this new offering is useless.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Fed Ex charges you more for two things: weight/size and speed of delivery.
Comcast charges you more for two things: amount of data and speed of delivery.
Confusion?
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
As long as Comcast makes the cap clear in their advertisements, I don't care what the cap is, even if it's 1GB/month.
If you want unlimited data, you can get it elsewhere, but you've gotta pay. In many cities, you can get metro ethernet for around $3500/month for 100Mbit - and this is with true unlimited bandwidth, you can stream 100Mbit downstream *and* upstream all day long and they don't care.
99% of comcast customers are never going to hit their 250GB cap, and that's who they want to sell to. If you want to download 5 TB of data every month, they don't want you or your money.
Terrible analogy. When you are leasing a car what you are really paying for is the depreciation value of that car for the length of the lease. If you add more measurable wear and tear on the car (mileage) the value drops so you end up paying more to make up for it. Not the same thing at all.
Good-bye
Because when a service is advertised as unlimited, we tend to think that it is truly unlimited. Honestly shame on the FTC for allowing caps on features advertised as unlimited.
Good-bye
As far as dedicated lines go, this service is meant to compete with FIOS and bring the USA up to speed with China, Japan and Europe.
If that's true then they have failed miserably. FIOS is uncapped. With my FIOS connection I can download and upload at around 4.3 megabytes per second all day every day for as long as I want.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I don't think that's good news at all. Apart from the data cap, $105/mo is a LOT of money. And, that is bundled with other services which means even more money. Where is our 45 Mbps bi-directional for $40/mo that we ALREADY PAID for? http://www.newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm I'd much rather have that than 105/10.
You're retarded if you can't cap it out.
Sure, I could scp example.com:/dev/urandom /dev/null and let it sit, but in terms of useful transfers, I only download an OS ISO once every 6 months at most, and since this is Comcast service we're talking about, Comcast assumes you'll be watching their content, not downloading pirated videos. If you download the top five Linux distros, even assuming they're DVD ISOs, that's just 20GB.
Let's look at the more realistic transfer problem: Let's say someone has paid for one of those online backup services, and the have 251GB of data (compressed) on their drive. When they start the backup service, they'll need to upload 250GB or less the first month, then start their incremental backups to catch the rest (and any changes from the previous month).
It's clear you don't live in a city. Probably in the suburbs.
OTOH, you are definitely right about it being a cause of overweight. But "outside" makes assumptions about what outside is like. On the street that I live on, ball is impossible, because it's mainly up and down, but at least the traffic is low. Other areas nearby have other problems...traffic being a common one, and everybody has a small yard. (Ours is larger than most, mainly because it's largely up and down. There's a park down the street and around the corner, and it's actually pretty good. But occasionally there are gangs there. It's been around a decade since there was a shooting. But parents might want to think a few times before letting there kids go there unescorted. (Depending on their age, of course. Most 12 year olds would have enough sense to leave if things started to get unpleasant...but can you say the same about either 8 year olds or 14 year olds?)
Suburbia is really a very different country. Or at least it was a few decades ago. The parks are fewer, but the yards are a lot bigger, and it's generally safer. (Even there, though, it seems to me that the average speeds at which cars are driven have increased, the traffic has gotten denser, and it's become more dangerous to ride a bicycle.) Suburbs seem to be in the process of turning into rather unpleasant cities. New dwellings either have no yards or have much smaller ones, and parks aren't getting any closer together. However the one's I'm familiar with are still nicer places than cities. Also lots more expensive...and not just in the initial purchase, but in the upkeep. Once you buy there, you probably need to resign yourself to a long commute in dense traffic. And gas prices aren't likely to get any cheaper. So it's going to cost you a couple of hours every work day and the fuel for your vehicle while you sit in traffic. Still, if you can get an older house, it's worth a lot to be able to say to your kids "Go play in the yard!". But don't presume that everyone lives in that same situation, as most people don't.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Colossal ignorance should not be excused as a typo. The author of the article has no clue what a gigabit is, and neither does the poster of the story. The slashdot editors do, but they like to let such errors go so as to generate heat.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Many here have servers hosted in datacenters; I have several at Linode.com. $30 per month gets you 300GB transfer per months in addition to the actual server access. I don't know what the data rate is, but I usually get about 30 Mbps. Note that this service, in a data center, does NOT have unlimited transfer. And I don't expect ISPs to offer unlimited transfer, but I do expect value for my dollar.
That said, the caps should not be the same for every plan. It doesn't make sense to offer the same cap for the slowest and fastest data rate plans. At the very least, they should increase with the tiers. If I had my rathers, you could choose the balance of data rate and cap for a certain price point. And even more so (probably not feasible with the tech), you could configure the download and UPLOAD data rates.
100 Mbit costs 30 EUR ($43) here in Germany - KabelBW. Where does horrendous rate of $105 come from?
Unless the summary is mistaken, it's 250 gigabyte cap, not 250 gigabit. That is the same as my standard cable. I use what I think to be unlimited internet, and usually use less than 100 gb a month.
That is a pretty big mistake to say, is it 250 Gbit or Gbyte?
But it isn't that bad.I haven't come close to maxing it out and I tried. I don't know, how exactly do you use more than 250GB in a month?
There is no speed cap and its the fastest internet available in my area so why not use it? It's not perfect but it beats DSL.
I disagree.
I had comcast, and I gladly switch to qwest dsl.
Sure, my speed is lower, but I do NOT get stupid fishing notices saying I download copyrighted materials. I do not get hassles over the fact that I used a lot of bandwidth every month.
250gb cap? Ya. I can download more then that in a month.
I liked 720p & 1080p movies. Easy 5-10gb each there. Games? Good 5-10gb each there, usually about 5-6gb though. I play eq2, have 3 account, play 5 accounts alot, so boom, got info coming down the line for 5 accounts, probably not a whole huge amount, but i play every day.
Oh, shit, is that copyrighted crap I am downloading? Yes. Do I care? No.
Not sure if you noticed, but the studio's get richer, they used what is morally wrong accounting to justify ripping peeps off. They do not pay their actors/musicians decently, and all the huff and puff about copyright is stealing is the biggest bunch of bullshit around.
Fuck them, and anyone who pays for their bullshit. At least, thats my take on it.
And that being said, I have peeps who trade me $5 worth of goods for each AVCHD copy of a Bluray movie I do for them. Which is funny, seeing as if the movies were like $10 each, the person already told me he wouldn't have a problem buying them, but pay $20 each for something he might watch once? Fuck that. And thank you for giving me something to barter with.
The point is, I pay for my internet, I use it how i want, and the ISP can fuck off regarding that.
Bad enough you took away usenet, dumbass's. Honestly, I would of left usenet, put it on a seperate pipe and let peeps use it to their hearts content without it affecting other users. But it's not about how much data is being downloaded as it's about how much extra money can we get out of our suckers, er, customers.
Be seeing you...
> 250 gigs of data is their normal cap across the board.
250 GigaBYTES of data is their normal cap.
250 GigaBITS of data is 1/8th of that.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
These usage caps are a devolution of the internet here in the US plain and simple. The ISP's did this shit with dial up until competitors came along and said here's all the usage you can have. Of course with dial up you don't need to have your own infrastructure other than having the connection going out. Now these larger ISP's know they have people by the balls because building new infrastructure takes a ridiculous amount of money. If I were google I would wire the country with fiber to the premises and then offer unlimited usage. If they could do that then you would be looking at the first company to have a market cap over $1 Trillion dollars. In this day and age there is no reason to cap usage. For example I have AT&T DSL (Fuck them, and it's the only option here for high speed. Time Warners line terminates 1/4 of a mile from my house go figure...) and I currently have the 6 Mbps Down/1Mbps Up plan and on a monthly average right now I'm always pushing close to the 150Gb cap. I download maybe 2-3 movies a month if that...I spend most of my time surfing and watching SC2 cast's and that alone is almost enough to bust the cap. Believe me the first day that there is another option I'm going to take it. Fuck these greedy companies.
That's the problem I have - except I'm backing up ~2TB of media. I luckily haven't received any sort of rude notes from Comcast and I've uploaded way more than 250GB this month (I started about three weeks ago and I'm almost halfway done!) - presumably because it's all going over port 443 instead of some random bittorrent port. The biggest problem for me right now is upload speed. Even if I were caught up, I can easily create 5-10+GB of content in a day through photography and that alone will usually take a couple days up upload.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
To sell high-speed service with a data cap you can blow through is a total fraking (BSG reference) joke!
The punchline of this fraking joke is that while they complain that Data Hogs destroy the experience for everyone else on your shared cable loop, all of those problems just magically disappear the moment you are willing to pay a 2X to 3X higher monthly amount. No changes to the hardware at all - just a bigger check to the cable company. Like I said - Fraking Joke!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Be honest. What are you spending hundreds of dollars a month on Comcast that you couldn't get for a fraction of the cost somewhere else.
Comcast is raping it's customers, and don't even add anything to the service. There no technical innovation at Comcast whatsoever. All Comcast brings to the table is a few NHL and NBA teams games. That's it.
Comcast is nothing but legalize theft from consumers.
Let me guess - you are from Australia, NZ or SAR. My condolences about your Internet.
Almost three years ago I contracted with Comcast for business class high speed internet here in the home. I was forced to go business class to get fixed IP numbers, even as few as five. The service has been so miserable I can't even stomach describing it. But the only alternative in my subdivision to comcast is verizon, who did't bother to lay fiber here and still want $39 per month for 1.5Mb Downward 384Kb upward DSL. I have been paying about $105/mo for a fraction of 105Mbit service all this time, and my anus is sore from the experience. Getting into that contract with them was a mistake I will never forget. I am starting to look at taking my notebook to an internet cafe if I need to download something. You can buy a lot of coffee for $100 a month.
dunno, the point of having ultra fast is that then you can find more uses for it, like streaming high fps hd?
but the 105mbit sounds just like a number pulled out of somebodys a, and with the cap it's meaningless, you'd have the same experience with 50, does it ever even max out? can you turn a bandwidth test on it? you can't even test it for a day if it's what they're saying they're delivering to you, because you would max out
and actually you can be made to use that quite easily(unless it's nat, which would suck even more), don't piss off any teens off in cs..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
What is your Newegg link supposed to be? Is it a referral link?
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
Please tell me where in the Comcast footprint there is FIOS 25/25 for 5$ month? And who provides that service.
Or is that 5$ more than you were paying? In which case, what is the FIOS price?
Those who can, do.
That's great if you happen to live in Verizon territory, moreover one that Verizon hasn't abandoned.
Here's my thing. I pay for 50/10, but I only get 3-4Mbit up at the absolute best, and that's in a speed test to Comcast's own servers in the same city. Uploading to a friend's 25/25 FiOS? About 75KB/s.
I had a tech come out to troubleshoot, and he agreed that getting 30-40% of the service I pay for sounds broken to him, but Comcast hides behind their "based on network conditions" clause. It would be interesting if I could prove that I *never* get the advertised speeds, but testing that consistently would exceed my network cap.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I average 280GB per month. The vast majority of it comes from netflix streaming to my xbox attached to the TV in my living room. I have no TV reception and don't want to pay 60+ for cable. Maybe 60 GB combined comes from other sources such as file transfers between work and home or the like.
I had a tech come out to troubleshoot, and he agreed that getting 30-40% of the service I pay for sounds broken to him, but Comcast hides behind their "based on network conditions" clause. It would be interesting if I could prove that I *never* get the advertised speeds, but testing that consistently would exceed my network cap.
Did the tech take readings on your cable with his meter? He should be able to tell you how much signal you're getting. Could be a crappy modem too.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Yeah, the tech said the signal levels were fine (I work with RF -- they were fine), and I replaced the modem (SB6120) while he was there. The speeds used to be good when I first got service, so there's basically 3 (non-mutually exclusive) possibilities:
1) Their node has degraded in the interim.
2) They're throttling me.
3) Usage has surpassed capacity.
Not that the specifics are important; I'm paying *them* to sort out that stuff, not the other way around.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Agreed on all counts. If you're curious, pingtest.net might help you narrow down some of those possibilities.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)