Slashdot Mirror
Comcast Users Must Now Pay $50 Per Month Extra To Avoid Caps (dslreports.com)
Karl Bode, reporting for DSLReports: In a letter being sent to Comcast customers in usage capped markets, the company says that with the recent announcement of usage caps being bumped to 1 terabyte, the company is also capping the amount of additional charges capped users can incur -- to $200 in a single month. As it stands, customers that cross the 1 terabyte limit face overage fees of $10 per each additional 50 GB consumed. But under the revised plans, customers have to pay $50 (up from $30 to $35) extra per month to avoid usage caps entirely. "Because you are an unlimited data customer, we will maintain your current rate of $35 until the end of 2016," the letter reads. Comcast's recent decision to bump their caps to 1 terabyte weren't driven by altruism. With the FCC preventing Charter from imposing caps for seven years as a merger condition, the agency has signaled that it may start getting more serious about cracking down on usage caps in the broadband market.
Today it's Comcast, tomorrow it might be AT&T, the next day it might be some long distance company ... the list goes on, and on
All squeezing the American customers
Where is the government when we truly needs them?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
This is not about bandwidth. This is about protecting their obsolete business model. The FCC is downright useless for protecting the consumer and is letting these companies screw their customers.
They could have made the internet a wondrous thing, instead they did what they could to make sure maximum profits are to be had.
Fuck you FCC..... Fuck you.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Comcast's recent decision to bump their caps to 1 terabyte weren't driven by altruism.
Um, who cares? How about YOU start your own broadband company and you leave the gates open out of "altruism" and we'll see how long you last. I'm so sick of people interjecting their opinions into every story. If you couldn't find more facts to base your summary on then maybe it's not that big of an issue to begin with.
BTW; humble readers who haven't clicked the link, Karl is pimping his own blog here. Obviously he isn't reporting this news out of altruism either but instead to funnel traffic to his article for page clicks. Turns out that Karl is playing the same kind of games that he thumbs his nose at.
1) The ISP has to pay something like $1/10 GB, or at least true as of 3 years ago.
2) My experience is ISP meters don't work and it's hard to get any justice because neither the Bureau of Weights and Measures nor the FCC will enforce the law requiring independent meter testing.
It's the last mile problem. Sever the last mile leases from the ISP service and you won't see this problem.
Note to Comcast, you're a fucking ISP. Not a telecommunications deity.
Your job is not to censor, slow competitors, tell me where I can't browse, shoehorn me through your portal, blast me with advertising based on my browsing, cap my usage or tell me that what I want to use the internet for isn't something you're interested in. I don't give a fuck about you.
I pay you to do one fucking thing. And that is because I FUCKING HAVE NO CHOICE, REALLY, RIGHT NOW.
If you can't do this one fucking thing, which is delivering the internet? Get the fuck out of the ISP business.
Because you SUCK at it!
Holy shit, I finally understand the caps! Took me a while, but I guess these guys are smarter (dumber?) than we thought. All along, this has been the end game. When the cable revenues finally drop, replace that revenue with a similar charge for access to the medium bringing them the shows they watch online.
We need an increase in competition. That is clear. How do we do it? I know this is essentially socialist, but I don't think anyone wants to privatize all roads. Do we reclaim the last-mile infrastructure as public? Public tax dollars payed for some of it, and we've had broken promises. I learned all about the technical and economic relationships between different ASes. Do we need easier access to create last mile infrastructure? Is it regulatory capture that needs torn down? To fix the exclusivity contracts that municipalities, etc. sign with carrier, could the FCC say that exclusivity to a region is not a legitimate clause in a telecommunications contract? Do they have that kind of authority?
. . . pity we can't say, "Sorry, but when I signed, the terms were unlimited bandwidth for $X/month. I haven't signed any changes to the agreement, so deliver, bitches. . . "
But what can you say about an ISP whose Customer Service Policy is cribbed from "50 Shades of Grey" ???
Our group is using Chromebooks. but it looks like that may change.
I concur. I hate hate hate Comcast and I can prattle on about a million things they do I hate. But this seems fairly reasonable; as of this writing (2016), 1 TB per month is more than enough for 99.9% of the world. If you're a professional movie reviewer that streams 4K all day or a pirate or somebody that needs more than that, you can pay an extra $50 a month to have unlimited bandwidth--again, that's really not so bad, if your career depends on it.
... If only because it's documented and clear about pricing (at least at a glance from the summary).
I know this will be an unpopular opinion here but as an Australian that has lived under data caps since forever (the first broadband cap in Aus was 300mb, raised not long after to 3gb where it sat for a while), even considering how much time has elapsed 1TB is a staggering amount of data.
The biggest problem we had in Australia (... Outside of just generally ludicrously high costs for data) was pland being offered as "unlimited *", where the * basically meant go fuck yourself. This was, fortunately, clamped down on quickly and since then we've had crystal clear (if low) data limits.
I've been in the US for the last 2 years on some vaguely defined TWC plan. Despite having netflix running nearly all day every day (I've not been working for the last year so have had lots of spare time) I could barely manage more than 300gb a month, between me and my partner.
But even so I was constantly worried that eventually someone would be all like "you're using too much data!". Knowing there was a real limit would have been awesome, because I was used to thinking like that anyway and I'm tech savvy enough to deal with it.
I have no problems with data plans, as long as "unlimited" fucking well means what it says, even if you have to pay more for it. Having vague, opaque limits is harmful for everyone. Non-tech-savvy end users can just be filtered or rate capped, but for those of us that actually give a shit about service levels, it needs to be clear what we're paying for and what we're actually getting.
In Seattle I get 1 Gbps uncapped. Thanks to the progressive city council we have multiple providers to choose from.
cable-cutters going to Netflix, Sling, etc scare the crap out of Comcast, especially as a network owner themselves. Throttling these content providers into Comcast userspace is a (vain) effort to discourage the flood of people fleeing the lousy service and exorbitant pricing offered by Comcast. Notice in the handful of towns deploying Google Fiber, the offers from Comcast suddenly become competitive (I'm in Jacksonville FL, a prospective GF site, and praying to Whatever Gods There Are it gets in here and my neighborhood has availability). I can live with torrenting my Walking Dead fix (Google TV service lacks AMC) for the chance to tell Comcast to take their pricey, lousy service and shove it.
OK so if no one hits the cap... why have a cap?
You should see the shit we have to deal with in Canada. Check out our mobile plans while you're at it. It'll make you appreciate what you guys have.
someone had to say it
at educating people on this topic, before giving up and letting people wallow in their own ignorance.
A dedicated OC3 costs about $7500/mo. 155 Mbps, 149 Mbps after you subtract overhead. That's what you need if you want 149 Mbps without any data caps. (Yes an OC3 is symmetric. Cable can be too, they just dedicate more bandwidth to downloads since people mostly download stuff. It is not an inherent limitation of the technology which makes it "different" from an OC3.)
How then are Comcast, AT&T, etc. able to offer you 50 Mbps for just $50/mo? By doing the equivalent of putting 150 customers on an OC3. $7500/mo / 150 customers = $50/mo per customer.
But this only works if none of those 150 people hogs up all the bandwidth. If one person has torrents running at 149 Mbps for the entire month, everyone else's Internet bandwidth is going to be seriously degraded. So how do you prevent someone from hogging up that much bandwidth? You implement a monthly data cap. 149 Mbps * 1 month = 49 TB. And 49 TB / 150 customers = 326 GB per customer. So if each of those 150 people used the same amount of bandwidth, you'd expect them each to use 326 GB per month.
Not everyone uses that much though, so you can make the cap a bit higher without everything falling apart. That right there is why most ISPs are setting their caps around 300-700 GB/mo. 1 TB/mo is actually pretty generous. And being able to remove the cap for an extra $50/mo ($30/mo for AT&T) is an incredibly good deal. $100/mo is a helluva lot better than the $2500/mo you'd have to pay for a partial OC3 giving you 50 Mbps.
This won't go away without competition. Yes, you have to build multiple networks. Redundancy is a cost of having a proper market economy. It's still cheaper than the alternative, as you are witnessing now.
Oh, the FTC could get off their lazy asses and do something, but seeing they are on their knees willing to do anything anyone who stuffs money into politicians' pockets they are going to get away with it.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
People should just switch to Google Fiber. They don't have data caps and the bandwidth is fairly high.
I have a 10 GB cap and have to pay 16 dollars for 2 extra GBs with my beloved satellite internet. Its my only choice (unless I want to use dial up).
I'll be sure to let the management of my apartment complex know that is an option. I'm sure they will be thrilled and will jump on that immediately. Perhaps they can even convince Google to wire up the neighborhood! Even though Google Fiber isn't available in Houston, I bet they can make it happen.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
So we all have to move to Kansas City??
A better analogy would be Ford announcing a new car that can achieve speeds of up to 250m/s, leases for $300/month, but you can only drive it 1,000 km/month before they start charging you $10 for every 50 km over. For the sake of argument, let's assume that it's both possible and legal to maintain those speeds. Driving at top speed, you'd hit the cap in about 66min 40sec, but even driving slower speeds you'd hit the cap before the month was out more often than not -- on average people drive ~21,700 km per year, or approximately 1,800km/month.
But what about just buying other cars without those shitty terms? Well, in this case Ford also owns the roads, and you can only drive their cars on them. Don't like it? Move to another city out of their jurisdiction (spoiler: the other cities also have the same problem, only with GM or Toyota). Think it's a monopoly that should be busted up? Pish-posh, you can always ride your bicycle on the sidewalk -- according to the regulators and legislators they bought, that's more than enough competition!
I am psychic. My psychic senses tell me that you are not planning on creating an ISP tomorrow. The non-psychic people are going to have to guess which is the greater factor in this decision:
A) Government regulations.
B) The enormous cost to enter the market.
You and I, however, know the truth.
A lot of times, there aren't many people who make unusually high demands on a system, but the few who do, do so with a vengeance. Caps are a way to keep them in line, or at least help pay for the excessive resource usage.
Unfortunately, caps are also something that are easily tightened at the whim of a bean-counter.
even if you do - just load up Civ for the rest of the month. I love it when internet is down.
Yup, because packing up and moving out of the ass end of nowhere is never an option.
A hateful, sarcastic post gets a +3, but someone posting actual facts and a screenshot gets buried down to a zero?
There isn't a cap because "no one" hits it. There is a cap because "most people" don't hit it. I realize my perspective isn't enough of a sample size to determine average internet usage, but I'd consider myself a fairly heavy user. 3 teens on youtube/netflix daily, me downloading "stuff" (yeah, let's just leave it there), and the usual basic internet browsing/e-mail/etc. I average around 300-350 GB/month pretty normally. To me, a 1TB/month cap seems 100% reasonable. I realize there are use cases where 1TB/month isn't sufficient, not gonna argue that, but if you need that much bandwidth maybe you shouldn't be on a residential internet connection.
I know, I know. "They sold me unlimited* so I should get unlimited" yadda yadda yadda. Bitch bitch bitch. Get over the fact that there is no such concept as "unlimited". It doesn't exist. Everything is limited. It's marketing speak. If you haven't figured that out yet, then I'm sorry.
I'm totally in favor of metered service. Caps are a form of that that are convenient. Basically one can plan a budget of so much for month that's correct nearly all the time but if you want more than that then you can pay incrementally. It's a fine idea that ties charges to usage.
The problem with this model is if there are certain services that escape the cap. If T-mobile can let me binge-on Hulu or if Facebook will let me watch certain parts of the internet they get payola from for free then this is just bending net neutrality over and reaming it hard.
So metered service = good but it has this slippery slope to evil.
therefore I oppose caps until all ISPs divest of content services and are regulated by public utilities. The risk of losing net neutrality is too great. it's directly analogous to the free press.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I just stay out of Washington DC, and do not watch hockey on television.
I am 6 miles from what was the fastest growing city in the state.
And this is why the fanatical push towards "cloud" storage of everything is insane nonsense. First it was cell phone data plans, now it's home internet as well.
The industry wants to have it both ways but it's not realistic. These two schools of thoughts are financially incompatible with each other.
While it sucks to live in an apt. complex...and have to get whatever one else does...
I would advise people renting or owning houses, to consider getting a business internet connection if you need unlimited broadband.
I have an older grandfathered lower limits one from Cox Cable..but I pay $69/mo...unlimited, no blocked ports (so yes, I can run servers)...and I even have a basic level SLA.
I once reported my service down about 11pm on a friday night....and by a bit after midnight they had someone on the pole fixing things.
You really don't have to show much proof of a "real business" either...I just had to give them a name, etc....
My plan isn't offered anymore, but for only a few dollars more, you get a bit faster up and down, and it is quite reasonable, I think maybe only $80/mo? I think they also have one cheaper than mine too....
But look for business ISP service to your home, often by the local cable company. Cox is a great one if you have them in your area.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
For me, it depends on the cap, a 250GB cap, and yeah, I'm probably going to hit that, a terabyte, probably won't, I think my monthly usage is a bit above 500GB from streaming twitch and youtube (sometimes multiple at once) and some nature cams usually in the background. Never gone through and figured out how much each uses, but I'm guessing it's not a trivial amount.
I was thinking the same thing. 1TB seems like an awfully high cap to be worried about. Windows Updates are now peering on the LAN, so five computers will end up downloading their updates once. Business accounts (i.e. the ones actually running servers) aren't subject to the caps. If you're hitting a terabyte a month with torrenting, a rented seedbox will give you better stats and cost less than what Comcast wants for the overage cap. If you're hitting a terabyte a month in video streaming...that's a LOT of video streaming - maybe not quite my place, but is buying the movies off iTunes or good old fashioned Blu-Ray discs, along with an internal streaming server, not a worthwhile project to look at? What about using an Untangle box with their web caching and ad blocking?
Now, the obvious problem is that it was 1TB, and at first I did not speak out because I didn't use 1TB, then it was 500GB...I definitely get that. Sea level is rising, and even though 1TB is incredibly high right now, Comcast is finding fewer and fewer grandmas who are still paying for AOL and use a gig a month, because even she has a Kindle Fire now and is watching streaming video on occasion. Comcast's likely strategy is that going from no-caps to very-high-caps will make it easier to get caps passed at all, and from there squeeze the next fifth percentile, and the next fifth, and so on until they've unilaterally raised rates on everyone who isn't incredibly careful.
In the same vein, I'm not sure if "requiring very heavy users to pony up for their fair share" is the correct place to make a call to arms, but really, how low must they go before they do? Because if it hits 100GB, it means there were dozens of missed opportunities in the past, and there will be no one left to speak for me.
The average slashdot user cannot comprehend that more than 60% of the u.s. landmass has no more internet access options than what you described for service.
I know what you mean about the service and the prices. You probably pay close to $80 for the 10G cap, and that is even more limited based on the time of day you user the data.
I wish that all the internet sheep could understand that once you get within the last 5 miles of a city, there is nothing available other than data caps until you hit the next major city.
It really is 2 out of 3 homes in the u.s. that only have options with data caps, and most usually only have one option.
Automagically capped to 1TB!
I pay about $100 a month for 40/40 (could switch and get better) and TV.
If my provider jacks my rates, I can choose from 11 other fiber provider, 2 cable providers, 4 wireless providers, 9 DSL providers.
Life is good!!!
When FIOS came into my town my connection with TWC suddenly went from 20mbps to 200 without any additional charges. They were just like "Umm yeah we're gonna up the speed across the board." It's hard to support the idea that they need to meter my internet usage when they can do this big of bump just because fiber MIGHT be coming to town. (BTW... that fiber rollout stalled.)
I am cutting the cord on my next move. TWC could have avoided this by doing the following:
1. Cut down on commercials. Every commercial I see is an encouragement to purchase shows commercial-free from iTunes.
2. Limit rate increases to once a year. No, seriously, ONCE a year, none of this random "oh we're adding $2/mo. to your modem rental." My income, at most, goes up once a year IF I get a raise.
3. Pick a rate, make it consistent for everybody. I do not want to negotiate. When I got my last rate increase I got a letter that read something like this: "Congratulations, your rate is going up! But not as much as it could! We're giving you $200 worth of services but you'll only be paying $140 of that instead of the $130 you were paying for the last 3 months." TWC is the *only* company that I have to talk to more than once a year because of this nonsense.
Yes, I know we're talking about Comcast, but it's hard to imagine TWC taking the "no-caps" road, especially since a good deal of their revenue comes from advertising. Here's the problem with that approach, though: They're opening the door for competition and they're daring their customers to leave in droves. At least they're keeping me as an internet customer, don't poison that well.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
People should just switch to Google Fiber. They don't have data caps and the bandwidth is fairly high.
True, but their pricing is roughly inline wit cable's prices. AFAICT they no longer offer the $300 lifetime unlimited lower speed class of service, which would have been a good deal for many users.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
For the usage period of 04/26/16 - 05/25/16, I used 58.88gb of my 350gb allocation. My wife and I both connect our phones to the wifi whenever we are home and don't stream on our phones if we aren't on a wifi, so we share 2gbs there. Clearly we don't consume a lot of our data. Only 17% actually.
Where is my refund for using significantly less then the cap if other people are paying more for a 1tb cap? It almost makes me want to leave my computer on all night downloading huge files just to turn around and delete them because who cares how much of their bandwidth I waste. I paid for it and can use it however.
Of course I won't do this because leaving my computer on night just waste electricity.
I am 6 miles from what was the fastest growing city in the state.
In 1812?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
fair meter is needed as well.
Most IPS's seem to have ones that error alot and they change you for data sent if your system is off. As well changing for stuff like there own management traffic.
Comcast's (or any ISP's) backbone does not cost $7500/mo per 155Mbps. Not even close to that. Otherwise in places where competition is actually allowed the packages would not be so different (e.g. 1Gbps uncapped / $80 in some places in the US, or even cheaper outside the US).
Oh sure, we win one World Series and now you're our friend again? Come for the Fiber, stay for the barbecue...
Many managers of apartment complexes here were more than eager to get hooked up to fiber. They would then boldly advertise that they have Google Fiber.
Yes. I'm surprised you're not already in KC. It has a little bit of everything without the insanity of the coasts.
I live in Longmont, Colorado. The city government is running fiber to the entire city. A guy just strung a piece of glass into a box on the side of my house the other day. Next Monday they come to install the inside port and give me my fiber modem. I'll be paying $50/month for 1Gbps and I can't wait to give Comcast the boot.
So HA! Suck it all you capped mofos. Looks like your big commercial ISPs have put a cap in your arse, so to speak.
There's a house down the street from me for sale if anyone's interested. ;)
FTC did a great thing by declaring ISPs utilities. They were trying to get approval for fast lanes (so they get charge you for Internet access AND then they charge Netflix, Facebook, etc. again to send that data to you expediently while exempting their own services from that charge to give themselves an edge), and the chairman, who was a industry insider, just totally surprised them by letting his conscience guide his actions.
However, he didn't invoke price controls on them, and I think we're either going to need that. ISPs have been merging and buying each other out at a alarming rate such that there are only a few players in the market (and only one choice in many neighborhoods). They are making billions easily, and they are trying to make billlions more by squeezing every dollar they can out of consumers who need this vital resource. How much can they raise the water rate and you'd still pay it? That's what they are trying to do with Internet service. They have plenty of capacity. They are not decreasing the rate of low-bandwidth users. In fact, rates have doubled in just the last few years, when you used to be able to get $30/month if you called retention whenever your promo period was up. They are just trying to make more money off of high-bandwidth users. I'm not against metered service, but low-bandwidth users aren't getting a break. If you look worldwide, everyone else pays much less for much higher capacity Internet and cellular service. We're getting screwed.
- we need 10x the ISP competition, and not just everyone leasing the line from a company already in control.
- Last Mile Monopoly: This is easily beat with analog TV spectrum which solved this problem way back in the 1950s. Reuse it openly for digital last-mile internet and watch the competition soar
- Peering Routers: I want to share through my neighbor's devices. They can be far more capable over the 1/4mile range than we allow them to be.
- These things will not-only stabilize prices, it'll stabilize communication and end kill-switch scenarios.
- Then eventually there's no ISP to kick you off of. Sharing will be standard exposing strict copyright for the farce it is.
Before you say corruption & special-interests stop progress, look how horse-stable monopolies lost to Ford's combustion-engine workshop. Technology enables progress. There are still laws forcing car drivers have carrots for horses, but nobody cares anymore.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
That's true. It's $70/month for just gigabit cable and $50/month for 100 Mbit cable.But you don't get datacaps and throttling. I've had it for about a year and hardly notice it. And that's how Internet service should work. To work so well, that their customers don't think about it.
APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit http://www.bing.com/search?q=%...
Less power/cpu/ram + IO use vs. DNS/routers/addons/antivirus (slows you) + less security issues/complexity. Compliments firewalls (w/ layered drivers blocking less used IP addys vs. hosts blocking more used domains) & DNS (lightens dns load). Gets data via 10 security sites.
Ads rob bandwidth/speed, security (malvertising), privacy (tracking) + anonymity.
Hosts add speed (hardcodes/adblocks), security (bad sites/poisoned dns), reliability (dns down), & anonymity (dns requestlogs/trackers) natively. Hosts != ClarityRay blockable (vs. souled-out to admen inferior wasteful redundant slow usermode addons)
Works vs. caps & HTTP PUSH ads w/ firewalls.
Avg. webpage = big as Doom http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... & ads = 40% of the size.
APK
P.S. - Safe https://www.virustotal.com/en/... (Verified by Malwarebytes' S. Burn "I've seen the code & it's safe" http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... )
Is there some kind of petition we can all sign or anything that helps to voice our dismay! Wtf
Tell me bright boy how can I switch to Goog when Goog doesn't have any fiber near my house for a 1000 miles?
Besides maybe Goog doesn't have data caps but Goog does spy on everything going down its pipes and sells your data usage. There is no need for data caps when your users use is your product.
Game boy give up the games for a bit. Go outside and check out reality for a while.