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Comcast Users Must Now Pay $50 Per Month Extra To Avoid Caps (dslreports.com)

Posted by msmash on from the whatever-happened-to-pay-less-promise? dept.

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.

11 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Pay up ! by zenlessyank · · Score: 4, Informative

    AT&T already announced caps for DSL and U-Verse the other day. So, you are right, except it looks to be already decided. They are just releasing the info every couple of days so we wont notice. Mooooo

  2. In Seattle... by 110010001000 · · Score: 4, Informative

    In Seattle I get 1 Gbps uncapped. Thanks to the progressive city council we have multiple providers to choose from.

    1. Re:In Seattle... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      In Seattle I get 1 Gbps uncapped. Thanks to the progressive city council we have multiple providers to choose from.

      That is a damn lie, and you know it. I've lived here since before the Internet and don't know anyone with a connection fast enough to stream Netflix. Gigabit is available from CenturyLink on a couple of streets and in about fifty expensive condo buildings, but that's it. Here's my house:

      http://imgur.com/WgSvnA5

      That proves you a liar. CenturyLink only provides 1.5 Mbps max to much of the U District (neighborhood just north of the University of Washington). You're lying by almost a factor of a thousand-fold, but of course you're just trolling. You know damn well what you posted isn't true. Seattle sucks for Internet.

  3. Re:Thank the FCC. by DogDude · · Score: 3, Informative

    Why are you saying "Fuck you" to the FCC? Do you understand that they're trying to get the Cable Company to REMOVE the caps?

    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.

    --
    I don't respond to AC's.
  4. Re:Pay up ! by QuietLagoon · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...Where is the government when we truly needs them?...

    GOP budget bill would kill net neutrality and FCC’s set-top box plan

    .
    It looks like the Republicans that control Congress are firmly in the grip of the cable and ISP lobbyists.

  5. One last try by Solandri · · Score: 1, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:One last try by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      On the backbone, assuming you buy at big ISP scale, 100Mbps dedicated and symmetric costs less than $50 per month. The last mile costs roughly the same whether you use it for 1Mbps or 100Mbps. Volume caps have no effect on congestion (because they reduce off-peak usage, not peak usage.) This is a shakedown, money-grab, market failure.

    2. Re:One last try by wwalker · · Score: 5, Informative

      Really, this is voted as +5 Informative here on *Slashdot*?! Comcast are not going to be laying OC3 lines all over the place. OC3 costs so much because it is strung directly to your office building or whereever. When you are talking about the cost of bandwidth to Comcast, it is the cost of IP transit. Right now you can get a 1Gbps (with a full cabinet for your equipment) for $400/month: https://he.net/special.pdf (I have nothing to do with them other than that I used to be happy customer for a long while). If you need just IP transit (no cabinet), it goes down to $0.32/Mbps per month. To transfer 1 Tb of data per month (i.e. their current cap), you need about 4 Mbps of bandwidth. So the data cost to Comcast is roughly $1.28 for each 1Tb. So please, let's stop with the bullshit indeed.

  6. Re:Pay up ! by Jason+Levine · · Score: 5, Informative

    The cable companies have already admitted that caps aren't due to network congestion. They are because of two factors:

    1) The cable companies want more money.

    and

    2) Streaming video cuts into their traditional TV profits. Caps and overages help limit how much people can stream. (And give the cable companies more money if you do stream.)

    --
    My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
  7. Re:Pay up ! by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Informative

    So... something this important is better dictated by the likes of Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner. Gotcha.

    Hint: Governments at least PRETEND they give a shit about you. Corporations don't even have to do that.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  8. Data caps versus the cloud-storage craze by sremick · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.