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Comcast Tells Government That Its Data Caps Aren't Actually "Data Caps"
mpicpp (3454017) writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica about Comcast's data caps that aren't data caps:Customers must pay more if they exceed limits — but it's not a cap, Comcast says. For the past couple of years, Comcast has been trying to convince journalists and the general public that it doesn't impose any "data caps" on its Internet service. ... That's despite the fact that Comcast in some cities enforces limits on the amount of data customers can use and issues financial penalties for using more than the allotment. Comcast has said this type of billing will probably roll out to its entire national footprint within five years, perhaps alongside a pricier option to buy unlimited data. ... Comcast's then-new approach was touted to "effectively offer unlimited usage of our services because customers will have the ability to buy as much data as they want."
I have no faith that the government won't fall for this blatant lie.
I have access to unlimited amounts of petrol because I am allowed to purchase as many tanks as I need.
signature is pants
first post courtesy of my high speed comscat connection!
We need the government to build fiber to every residence in America and lease the glass to anyone that wants it.
everywhere Google Fiber has set up shop has completely changed the landscape of what these legacy internet providers offer. Google's rollout cannot happen fast enough and even if comcast matches it people will still dump them due to these types of policies.
So, what will Netflix do when a customer can't get access to the data that they paid Comcast to deliver to said customer?
Yes, it's technically not a cap because you can exceed it. No, this argument didn't work for cellular carriers. Bill shock was invented by AT&T first.
And in most areas, how "full" is the coax line between my house and the fiber node? Ie, how much of the usable coax bandwidth has been allocated to cable channels, on-demand viewing, phone service, alarm monitoring, and Internet access?
Has switching from NTSC analog to all those HD channels (even though they are compressed, etc) been a net gain in usable bandwidth on the coax or just a wash?
I always just wonder if Comcast isn't just trying to keep that coax cable capable of handing TV and Internet by various means of suppressing bandwidth consumption on Internet usage.
The suck for Comcast is when that coax cable "runs out" of bandwidth and there's no room to cram yet another HD sports channel on. A project to migrate from coax to fiber would be a total nightmare for them.
I'm not trying to defend or justify anything they do, I'm sure it's at least half oriented towards nickle and diming and profiting off of manufactured scarcity but coax cable shared by many dwellings seems like a major bottleneck that will eventually have to be addressed and it will not be cheap.
cap/burka/asshat...whatever.
Right.. in their world, that's perfectly reasonable to call it an unlimited plan...
Like it or not Comcast is correct. They don't have caps, they don't shut the people who go over their allotted bandwidth. They make them pay for going over the allotment. Word games but Comcast in this point they are right. But they are doing so much more wrong, like steal peoples electricity and make them pay for the privilege everything they do is bad lol.
Jack of all trades,master of none
I suspect the plan is to get these "Caps" in place prior to broader adoption of 4K TV services. Once 4K catches on the users will have a choice of routinely exceeding their 300GB/month limit or buying their 4K content from Comcast who will likely not count their content toward the monthly data limit. Might be a nice way to tilt business away from other content providers such as Amazon, Vudu, etc.
Regarding these "Caps" I had quite the conversation with Comcast before I dropped them and had to settle for DSL without a cap. First of all, the cap kicks in at 300GB/month, after that you are charged $10 for each subsequent 50GB allotment. This rate is higher than the $/GB before you exceed their limit. There is no rollover for unused GB's. So, if you go on vacation and only use 100GB in August you can not carry the unused amount into July or subsequent months.
The plan is like cell phone plans years ago. Higher, 'gotcha' rates if you go over. No rollover minutes. You can buy business service from Comcast at a higher rate, a 2 year obligation, and they must own the modem. This effectively doubles your monthly rate before they started the unlimited plan you used to have before the limits were imposed.
I think it is fare to charge for higher usage. However, the overage fees are prohibitive and will subsequently block the open adoption of future bandwidth intensive services for vendors other than Comcast. I am hoping a new wireless standard will jump past Comcast's copper infrastructure.
So Comcast won't mind refunding all those fees for over data use. Hello class action lawsuit and government sanctions!
Comcast wants to do what AT&T does -- pressure 3rd party service providers, such as Netflix, to pay a "fee" in exchange for their traffic being exempted from monthly usage limits.
I once run the IT department of an ISP, and data caps were a substancial source of the revenue. Lets say it could reach to 1/3 of our Internet net revenue, some months exceeding it. To be fair, at the time the international bandwidth was severely constrained, and in a post p2p world, you would have a change without some form of control. However, we were very clear about it, those were data caps, period.What I should call it nowadays then? Voluntary taxes? Net speeding fine? Tax for changing to the competition? One is always learning...
Cable tv is a leaking ship and losing subscribers by the day. In a few years most content will be streamed. If you are losing money on the television end of the business, you have to make it up on the streaming end. Satellite is the same except they don't have the kind of internet end that comcast has. This is why Dish is doing the 'over the top' offering later this year. They're going to offer 'basic cable' as a streaming, non satellite option. This is why comcast is buying time warner. They'll basically own the pipe and will jack up the price to offset declining tv revenues and the more you 'watch', the more you'll pay.
We don't have the 300M cap here yet, but we will and comcast is the only high speed provider anywhere in my county. They also charge more here than they do where uverse/verizon/dsl is available.
I had considered cutting the cord this year and going with a big antenna I have in my attic (83 channels), netflix/hulu/amazon and some specific channel streaming (TNT, Disney) to save some $$$. But then I saw what comcast was doing with the caps and extra charges in other areas and realized I'd just be paying $120+ for internet instead of $60 for internet and $60 for tv.
Since the head of the FCC is the former head of the cable lobby and the head of the cable lobby is the former head of comcast, it looks like the political revolving door will assure that this will come to fruition.
Google will never run fiber to anywhere near a majority of homes. The phone company doesn't even offer DSL in that broad a manner.
...and the mafia will tell you that "extortion" is "protection" and that "murder" is "cleaning up the mess".
The main question is how many channels are allocated for DOCSIS. Each channel gets you about 38mbps of bandwidth, though more can be had on newer standards with 4096QAM (if the SNR is good enough to support it). So if there's 4 downstream channels then a max of about 152mbps total down (upstream is separate).
How many channels can they add? Not sure with current DOCSIS specs, but the wire limits are either 600mhz for old systems, or 1ghz for most new ones. So you cold probably get in the range of 166 total channels or 6gbps or so. Of course in reality, some of those channels have to go to TV and so on.
Now DOCSIS 3.1 is adding new methods for operation and supposedly will pull 10gbps down. Not sure how much of that is tested and how much of that is pipe dream but it is what the spec claims.
Otherwise I think they got themselves all confuzzled. Cable modems and the such are unlimited. I guess alongside that award winning customer support recently documented and here and here, folks might want to seriously consider their Cox business.
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
The money was just as dirty afterwards.
When you're arrogant to stand in the face of government and call a data cap anything but, there's no need for laundering.
Right.
The way Slashdot hid a -1 comment made it appear as if the post I was responding to was intended as a "the government would be worse" post, while in truth it was in response to such a post.
#DeleteChrome
A speed limit, with the 50GB for $10 penalties being repeated speeding tickets.
I come here for the love
So our unlimited isn't unlimited, and our caps aren't caps.
This is like saying you have an all you can eat restaurant, where you pay for everything you eat individually under the notion that you can buy all you want.
This is lying to consumers, deceptive marketing, and just plain bullshit.
If the FTC or someone isn't giving them the smack down on this, then we can pretty much expect corporations to start making up their own meanings for words and getting away with it.
Greedy bastards.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
What competition?
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
That's fine with me, if they'll also give me a refund if I don't reach my limit. After all, fair's fair, right? They estimate how much data I'll use when I sign up, and if I exceed it they charge me extra, if I don't reach it they charge me less.
What realistically would have happened had one party said "this call may be recorded to ensure quality of service"? Then both parties would be on notice for the remainder of the call.
This is precisely why I go with the lesser of the evils, Verizon FiOS. I wouldn't give Comcast my money if they were the last ISP in the United States. I would simply just go with mobile broadband and stop streaming altogether if I had no alternative to Comcast. Really, all telecom companies are crooks but Comcast takes it to entirely new lows.
The way Slashdot hid a -1 comment made it appear as if
If you're replying to a post with a low score, especially Anonymous Coward, it may be a good idea to take a page from e-mail standard practice and state the nickname of the poster to whom you're replying. To fully avoid confusion, it might help to add multiple levels of quoting to provide enough context to interpret your post correctly even in isolation.
customers have unlimited money. Which I don't. You can't squeeze blood from a stone, Comcast... I'll just have to get new hobbies.
It was an experiment. One that was successful enough that they've decided to do 38 cities for the next phase. Gmail was an experiment. So was [insert long forgotten Google project here ]. Some of their experiments don't turn out, and Google shuts it down. Others take off, like Gmail. At this stage, Google has invested a couple hundred million dollars or so, so that shows a significant level of commitment- they're probably not going to shut it down tomorrow.
One of the criteria Google uses to decide where to go next is the local competition. Comcast can probably convince Google to stay out of Milwaukee by offering 100 Mbps for $80. If Comcast is offering 10 Mbps for $80, Google knows they can get all of those customers. For consumers, we win if Comcast and AT&T keep Google at bay by offering a decent service at a different price, which is in fact happening in cities that Google is considering. Google wins by scaring the ISPs into offering faster service too - that means Comcast is providing a faster connection to YouTube, Gmail,and Google Docs.
Because taken at face value, that comment means that they should be offering customers as much money as they need to get all of the data that their customers want. After all, if a customer don't have enough money to pay for it, then they don't really have the ability to buy it, do they?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Right.
The way Slashdot hid a -1 comment made it appear as if the post I was responding to was intended as a "the government would be worse" post, while in truth it was in response to such a post.
Thats why I always try to remember to quote the person I am responding to because people will mode you down when they read you post out of context. I wish /. would force mods to browse at -1 while they have points.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Where providers are free to gouge and customers are free to... well... complain on Slashdot, but that's about it.
It's only actually free when there's freedom. Freedom to choose between genuinely different providers is a start. If they go to the same tier 2 provider, then the that will define the prices and services, so isn't a choice at all. If they ARE the tier 2, then they're the ultimate source of services and pricetag for all the tier 3s out there.
But there has to be more, since bandwidth throttling dictates bandwidth availability downstream. You can't sell what isn't there - unless you're Time-Warner or Comcast, of course. Try that with a physical product ("It'll cost you $elebenty, payable now, no refund, and if it doesn't do what we claim, that's not a lemon, that's the fault of some unidentified someone doing something somewhere somehow and we'd rather screw you than bother them"). So, freedom to know what you're actually buying and freedom to use statuary rights to obtain that product or a refund.
This is actually one reason I'm a little unhappy with free software. It has been telling vendors that it's ok to not provide what is offered. Not so much by actually doing that - free software has been, in general, superb about being up-front about what it can and cannot do, known defects and limitations, etc. More by saying in the license that the producer is entitled to lie through his teeth without consequence. A quick look at Oracle's conduct shows that vendors have paid very close attention to that clause.
Free Software relies on there being a viable alternative, that users can go elsewhere if dissatisfied. The resilience to fixing bugs in GCC and GLibC, in present and prior administrations, demonstrate that when viable alternatives are scant, such software is too complex to fork or replace unless it gets really, really bad. Which it has occasionally done.
When it comes to cable companies, it's infinitely worse. You're not in a position to run fibre from your home to an alternative tier 2 in another State. Partly because of expense, partly because laws governing interstate activities make it impossible for private individuals, and partly because the cable companies would raise all hell, three quarters of bloody murder and a dash of pint of high water to stop you. Which would not be hard for them, all they need to do is to persuade the tier 2 provider to not sell the capacity. If that failed, they could keep you tied up in knots with the FCC over whether you were an unlicensed telecom operator or not. Mind you, some of you might like knots. I dunno. If all else failed, they could SWAT the people running the cable, get you listed for suspected terrorist ties, or just repeatedly run a backhoe through your cable until you got the message.
You have no choice. You have no freedom. The cable operators have been redefining "monopoly" and "telecommunications" to whatever serves their purpose, not yours, and on multiple occasions. They have been free to do so because everyone likes simplified services and nobody in the States is going to vehemently oppose the "market at work". Even when it clearly doesn't. Not until it is far, far too late to stop things happening.
And we're way past it being too far. It was too far when telecos started replacing copper for fibre at select spots. Supposedly to improve service (which never improved). The reality was that DSL companies competing with the teleco all went out of business where this happened. No great surprise, you can't run DSL over fibre and everyone knew it. It was too late when telephonic "service of last resort" stopped being mandatory in many States. It was too late when ADSL was all private users could buy, SDSL was only sold to select businesses.
It was too late when rival multistate networks got bought up by the Big Telecos with not a murmur from anyone.
It was not because these were fatal in themselves, it's because people had become too stupid and too utterly dependent on being spoonfed by corporate giants (wh
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If the tragedy of the commons applies only to finite resources then the above network should be a lot more efficient than the current one. Remember now, Verizon, et al. It's just an experiment. You guys are engineers too, right?
I don't know about Canada, but here in the States they have the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine that evidence from a constitutionally impermissible chain of investigation is inadmissible in court.
Comcast: "The dunce-caps we are wearing are not really dunce-caps, but rather dandruff routing devices."
Table-ized A.I.
That's essentially what this is.
Sure, you get an allotment up front.
And for someone who does nothing but e-mail, it's overkill.
But for anyone who uses an internet connection beyond that, it's basically a way to infinitely pad the bill.
People aren't paying them $50-100 a month for a glorified e-mail connection.
They're paying them $50-100 a month for an unlimited connection.
And selling someone a 100MBit connection, then telling them you're going to start charging them MORE once they exceed 250GB (which is basically less than 1% total possible throughput), and oh yeah, watching more than a couple HD movies a month will put them over? Oh, and did they mention? They'll be playing with your connection to drop some of your traffic and de-prioritize others (that just happen to belong to direct competitors) so the performance sucks.
You ARE limiting their connection. Because damn few working-class people can afford internet bills in the multiple hundreds of dollars every month.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Other utilities like electricity and water are billed based on usage. Comcast apparently only bills by usage once it goes over a certain amount, otherwise it's a fixed fee each month. A cap to me implies a hard limit, over which they would completely cut off service.
A lot of bandwidth meters seems to be off / charge overhead data / control data and even change for resend / people trying to hit your modem even if it is trued off.
I get the "bought" part, that is after all how lobbying works (it's not a secret), but how does one "sell" a politician? Do you mean that political parties are pimping out their people?
It's called 'bundling'., where existing wealthy donors who have already contributed the legal maximum 'sell' the candidate to their friends and business associates, effectively leveraging their personal connections and access to shepherd more funds to the campaign.
What has more political clout than one maxed-out contributor when it comes time to make policy? A fucking cartel of maxed-out contributors.
Given that your average congresscritter spends ~20% of their working hours trolling for contributions just to have a decent shot at getting re-elected, you can imagine how influential successful bundlers are.
Makes you wonder just how much we'd save by spending a couple billion a year on public financing of elections.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
I thought a "cap" is when you were simply cut off over a certain amount of data, and "metering" is when you can use as much as you want, but get charged per byte. By these definitions, Comcast isn't using caps, but metering.
Nosir, these are Data Hoodies.
No wait, they’re Data Mufflers. That’s right, Data Mufflers.
Not the same thing at all. In fact we offer them free to our customers. They love them! They aren’t canceling the service (and we know they have a choice) — in fact they call and add new services!
Here’s $50,000, half for you and half for ALEC. Now go run off and get re-elected. I’m off to play golf with Obama.
I'm so glad for not living in a third-world-internet country like US. Here there's only caps and limits on celluar/UMTS/3G networks.
So, in China, a 20mbit fibre package can cost you approx. $12 USD (varies by city). Electricity, for me, in Chengdu, costs about $20-$30 per month for a family of 3 in a reasonable size place with a lot of appliances, computers, and gratuitous 24/7 air purifiers running. Water is far less at maybe $15/month, and gas is also quite low around $15/month.
Internet is extremely cheap. There is an option to bump it up to a 100mbit fibre connection in most areas, which runs a whopping $45 or so per month.
Those are fixed prices, because traffic is unlimited - and speed tests from everyone I know who runs the various speeds actually come in at close to the advertised speeds for downstream traffic (although upstream is usually like, 2mbit in comparison).
Unlimited. Oh, and no DMCA, nobody gives a FUCK what you download - as long as you don't need a VPN to connect to the content (which is like 99.9% of the torrents in the world) in which case make sure you get a VPN provider that ignores DMCA :D
Ignorance.
As long as they can Watch their TV and squint their beady little eyes at their Phones; they don't care what's happening.
I signed up with them, asking directly if there was a cap. They said, "no". Five months later, I got an email announcing the good news that the cap would be raised to 300gigs/month from 250. (I doubled that the first week I had service)
So I called them. They said the cap had always been there, but they hadn't been enforcing it. I made several suggestions involving the rectal insertion of a chainsaw. Something I have done again several times.
And as people "in the know", I think we can all call bullshit on them when they say streaming video uses too much bandwidth. Netflix streams H.264, TV streams are uncompressed MPEG-2. If you watch Netflix, you're using less bandwidth than if you were watching Fox.
If you exceed your 'cap', does service stop until you okay that you want to pay more or does it automatically start charging you?
I would rather have a real cap that stops service than the latter, incurring unknown and probably unlimited additional cost.
Also, it seems that comcast is a right shit company and if I were in the US I would just avoid buying from them altogether.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
So I am guess the letters than Comcast is sending out to customers telling them they are being disconnected because they went over the data cap to many times is not Actually Real and is a figment of peoples minds they are holding in there hands, typed out in black and white with the letter head of Comcast on paper..
Comcast: this animal which walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, fucks like a duck is actually not a duck.
US gov: we see your point.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
" cough cough BullS**T "
http://www.comcastissue.blogsp...
Sure feels like one to me and my family when they terminated our internet in 2007. And yes we used it for all sorts of services including Hulu and other streaming services. Not a data cap? Yeah right. Tell that to the other 6 people in my neighborhood who were ALSO disconnected within a couple months of us!
7 years Concast free. And loving it!
(Currently using CenturyLink with 40 Meg + package which includes 20 meg up)
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Ignorance of what? I have a choice between a single crappy dsl provider, and a single crappy cable internet provider. They're both terrible, and at this point, no matter what awful crap Verizon puts me through, I feel stuck with them because I know if I cancel, I'll probably be days to weeks without internet again as Charter screws up installation and turn-on just as badly as Verizon did (necessitating taking what was supposed to be a couple hours, and ended up being an entire day, off work trying to find someone, anyone who could actually fix the completely-their-fault issue that resulted in the installation guy basically throwing his hands up in confusion and leaving. After which day I still didn't have internet for about a week and a half.)
So what ignorance exactly? I have exactly 0 power to change any of that, without about 20 gajillion dollars and some senators in my pocket.
When comcast forced me to use a cable box (I was watching hd programming fine without it) I dropped my extended basic package with blast + and reduced to blast + and the old legacy package. I get most of my HD network programming over the air now. I really only have comcast now for internet access. when I get capped I will look for another provider.
Nothing you stated is rational or logical. If a member of congress can make a vote for a contract, then go purchase stock on the company right after the vote (or sell if the vote was "no"), that is an abuse of power. Period, end of statement, and there is no possible way you can justify that abuse of power. This is a regular habit for certain members of congress who increase personal wealth at incredible rates while in office.
That you don't want the President to go after them completely misses the concept of having judicial oversight for people holding offices. That complacency is why we have rampant abuse today by nearly every government office, including the GAO which is supposed to stop fraud and abuses.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
All you can eat pizza.... ...only $1.00 per slice.
Sounds good to me.
Perhaps someone older than me remembers this, for all who believe their guy is "innocent" In the 1977s a bill was crafted in such a way that if a lawmaker voted against it, the Congress still got their far above average "cost of living" raise for "serving" in Congress, meanwhile told the masses back home "I voted against that huge raise..." of course the bill was "defeated" soundly and Congress got their raise. http://library.cqpress.com/cqa... As an aside, look at your own guy/gal, there's a good chance they were serving then, that was about 37 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
"If stupid things work...then they are not stupid."