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."
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.
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!
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.
... 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.
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.
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
For a nation made up of 'We The People', Corporations have the one and only voice.
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from starting your own broadband company, and then charging a flat rate with absolutely no limits on usage. There may be some trouble with you keeping that going, though, because you'll have to charge higher than the ongoing rates to keep it alive, or will go out of business. This isn't about who has a "voice," it's about businesses providing services, and people who want higher speeds deciding whether or not that higher speed - with a usage cap - is a good fit for how they use bandwidth every month.
Constitution should read 'We The Patrons Of The Companies'
You'd prefer, "We the people who get to force each other to do whatever we tell them to do, but not me, because if I run a company myself, I don't want anyone telling me what prices to charge, only other people should be told that." ... right? Do you even understand the purpose of the Constitution? It essentially defines the things that government may not do to interfere with your life. It also outlines the manner in which the government is structured and managed. It doesn't say anything about getting involved in telling one person what to charge another person for a basket of vegetables (or what color those vegetables should be), the use of a piece of fiber attached to their network, or what it should cost to have your car waxed.
... what? The Bureau Of What All Things Should Cost? Do you understand that you, yourself, would be one of those things that has a price set on it?
... I get it now. You don't actually work for a living. You don't actually charge anyone for your time, and you don't have any patrons of your own. This explains a few things.
Just say what you mean. You want a centrally managed economy that prevents Eeeevil companies from competing with each other and trying to price things to win your business while managing to also stay in business. You consider that all to be too messy and unfair to you. So you'd rather that The People get to dictate prices by way of
Wait a minute
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
250 gigs of data is their normal cap across the board.
And that limit is very easy to approach, even on their slowest line, with moderate netflix + gaming. Their penalties for going over 250 are pretty severe.
Speed is not just about downloading more. It is also about downloading stuff quicker, believe it or not. Even if I wouldn't go anywhere near the cap, I would love that speed if I needed to download a movie or two onto my iPad to take on a long journey, because I might not think about it until it's rather late. If I can do that in 10 minutes, then grand.
And ISP have a clue, believe it or not. They know that only about 0.5% or less of their customers regularly go over the cap, and very few actually find the caps to be a problem. If they could just not take that bothersome 0.5% as customers, they would probably be better off. Here in the UK, I just signed up for a broadband deal that has a 60GB cap, but allows me unlimited downloads that don't count towards my cap between midnight and 8am. That seems a reasonable compromise to me. Downloads as much as you want but don't affect other customers who have lower needs, but who still want to watch Youtube videos in HD.
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
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!
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from starting your own broadband company, and then charging a flat rate with absolutely no limits on usage.
Wrong. Internet infrastructure still requires a wire so it has the same problem as power companies. You are not going to allow 5 different power companies to run power poles through your neighborhood. So, the company that owns the power poles can charge whatever they want. That is why we have government. To protect the consumer from abuses by companies in areas that are in natural monopolies. Same thing for internet infrastructure. I remember when my neighborhood had the infrastructure put in. They were hitting gas lines and cutting power lines every day or two. People's lawns got dug up. Were they asked for permission? No, the local municipality used their easements to give the ISP the right to dig through people's lawns without paying for it. You think people will allow that to happen 3 or 4 more times (to have true competition you need at least 4 or 5 companies competing against each other).
You want a centrally managed economy that prevents Eeeevil companies from competing with each other and trying to price things to win your business while managing to also stay in business.
No, I want companies to compete for my business. It isn't happening. Please name for me the 4 or 5 companies that are competing in your neighborhood for your business. Because if it is just Comcast and AT&T, then they are getting rich while you got slow internet. The free market provides excellent service, price, and innovation when there is a lot of competition. This is because PROFITABILITY requires good service, low prices, and innovation. When there is little or no competition (monopoly or oligopoly) then those things are no longer sources of PROFIT. The profit comes from reducing costs (bad service), increasing income (high prices), and stifling competition (preventing innovation). They are not evil. They are looking after their shareholders. It is government's job to look after the consumers (the people).
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.
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
Well, nobody here (continental europe) has a data cap for land line connections (mobile, it's a whole other thing).
There used to be. Then, the accountants figured out that collecting, consolidating, and billing the extra did cost them more than what they got back.
Out went the caps. And since then, it always cost less to upgrade the collecting backbones than to deploy a full fledged count-n-cap infrastructure.
And the clincher? It's 30euro per month (~ 43 US$). For triple-play fiber if you're in a major city, ADSL2 otherwise.
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 $5 per month, always performs beautifully) and never looked back.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
I don't know, how exactly do you use more than 250GB in a month?
I can think of a few ways:
Yes, it is certainly possible for someone to hit a 250GB cap, if they are not "just another consumer." What is the point of getting so much bandwidth if you are not going to put it to good use?
Palm trees and 8
how exactly do you use more than 250GB in a month?
Backing up a single hard drive over the internet. To The Cloud!
I pay for two meg up with Comcast, and use part of that. I've got a tor relay set for one meg and seed some open source torrents at half a meg during the day, two meg at night. Total aggregate use rarely exceeds two meg up on my mrtg graphs. These are uses compatible with my business mission and aren't going to generate any 3rd party complaints.
Now, even thought I pay for two meg up, I get about four meg up. I could push it, but that would violate my "don't be stupid, don't be greedy" rule. I assume most people who run into trouble with their providers are being stupid and/or greedy. Yeah, yeah, "you advertised that I had a right to be greedy." Since when do we listen to anything marketing people have to say?
Comcast's Internet behavior has improved quite a bit over the last decade. I think they understand that they're now an Internet company that also provides video services to their residential customers. The business side is what Internet costs, the residential side is likely subsidized by the video revenues, and each appears to be run accordingly.
They're providing many of my clients with a stable 50/10 for less than the ILEC will charge for a T1 - I've got little room for complaints.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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!
Yeah, except this isn't 250 gigs, it's 31.25 gigs, also known as 250 gigabits.
Except it's not:
"As of October 1, 2008, data usage above 250 Gigabytes ("GB") per month per Comcast High-Speed Internet residential customer account is considered excessive."
http://customer.comcast.com/Pages/FAQViewer.aspx?seoid=frequently-asked-questions-about-excessive-use
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.