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 !
. . . 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" ???
... 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.
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.
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.