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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."
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.
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.
Clearly they mean bytes, not bits. 5 hours of full bandwidth usage would be about 1890 Gbit, or roughly 235 GB of usage, so there is a mistake in the summary and the story itself.
So yeah, it's annoying, but not as bad as they made it sound.
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!
... 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.
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.
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.
I'll take the French ISP Free. No traffic shaping, no bandwidth cap, no traffic management, oh, and 100MBit down and 50Mbit up fiber connection delivered to your home – not shared by the street as it is with Virgin in the UK.
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 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
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
how exactly do you use more than 250GB in a month?
Backing up a single hard drive over the internet. To The Cloud!
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.