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Comcast Rolls Out Nationwide 1TB Data Cap (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Comcast's home internet data caps are going live for a majority of customers starting November 1st, the company announced today. Called the "Xfinity Terabyte Internet Data Usage Plan," the cap restricts the amount of data you consume in your home to 1TB per month regardless of the speed of your plan. Comcast claims 99 percent of customers use less than 1TB per month, but it does now offer an unlimited option for $50 more per month. Back in April, Comcast bumped its data cap from 300GB to 1TB after consumer backlash and renewed regulatory concern from the FCC. And until today, the plan has been active in select markets for 16 states. But starting November 1st, the list will add 18 new markets, bringing the total number of states with the terabyte data cap to around 30. Notable exceptions include New York and nearly the entire northeast. For a full list of included markets, check Comcast's online FAQ.
No cap for me, I'm using the neighbor's open xfinitywifi for free. Thanks, Comcast is fuckin awesome!
The chocolate ration has gone up to 20 grams a week!
I use about half that now every month. I use Netflix and MLB.tv daily, among other things. I see this as future-proofing for when 4K becomes the standard.
Of course not. 2GB of data on mobile is virtually the same price (if not more) on AT&T and the like as it was 10 years ago.
How much congestion can these people be causing if it only costs at extra $50 to "fix" it?
Courage
...movies per month. That's assuming that each 4K movie is compressed to around 100GB each on average. So on top of paying for your movies, you'll also have to pay a $50 per month surcharge.
Unfortunately it is true, Comcast is the only ISP in my area with speed over 25Mbps i get 75Mbps + basic cable for around $90 a month US through comcast.
Now i have to worry about Data caps???
At my fucking house???
THAT WAS THE WHOLE POINT OF PAYING FOR THE FUCKING CABLE!
I have 5 people in the house who all use Youtube/Netflix/Hulu/Steam/Origin/Xbox/Playstation/Wii/+ 5 cell phones and 5 desktops 1 laptop 1 tablet 2 smart TV's ect...
Plus i contribute to a open source project that requires me to regularly perform large git-pull's.
And my flight simulator that downloads world scenery on the fly.
So WTF! Comcast.
We already know for a fact that there is no point beyond Greed and $ for you to implement Data caps on your network.
Fuck you Comcast.
Sincerely, a pissed off customer.
Perhaps your usage is in that top percentile of users that will go over 1tb. If you are really in the top 1% of users, I think paying another $50 a month is justified. (Also, doesn't git have some kind of rsync type capability?)
I do believe you are correct sir or madam. (If you are an AI, please go jump in the bitbucket.)
Sign up for business Internet.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
To be honest, a 1 TB data cap should probably be enough for the average cord cutter unless they're watching more than 5 hours of 4K content a day. You might be hard pressed to even find 5 hours worth of new 4K content that's worth watching daily at this point.
I like hating on Comcast as much as the next guy, but these caps seem reasonable for now.
Live [cap] Free or Die! I consider 1 TB a massive amount of bandwidth and can't imagine getting anywhere near to that; or even 1/3rd of that. BTW $50/month seems reasonable. BTW, I do use Xfinity WiFi a lot - in terms of availability; not the amount of bandwidth use.
I got an email that said my data usage has been 639 GB average over the last three months, and my new cap was 1TB. I'm a little worried about this, as that's 639 GB average over the three months that I've been deployed (USAF) and my family is the one getting me there. I wonder where I'll be sitting on usage when I get home!
but these caps seem reasonable for now.
Oh please.
I'm on a 25Mbps DSL and I can easily hit 2TB in a month. Thank goodness Comcast doesn't operate in this area.
We use about 350g/month. Switching to 4K video might blow 1TB out.
Since I don't have any caps currently, guess it's in my best interest to download all the shit I want now.
Be seeing you...
If only that were true: http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
And the ruling that blocked the FCC from mandating competition? It was a suit filed by NC and TN.
Terabit or TeraByte
Fortunately the area I live in has Charter
If 99% of the users use less than 1TB per month, then why have a cap at all?
I am now blocking ALL ads.
Your adverts now cost me money.
I am also going back to ripping BluRays and storing them on a NAS. Screw Netflix and other services if I am now being punished for using it by the ISP.
Comcast is forcing me to do all this, so if Anyone is angry, please call 1-800-COMCAST and complain.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And your proof is where exactly?
but that would require our gov't stepping in, and nobody likes doing that.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'm not really sure what 4K is but I'm guess that I don't have any hardware that could usefully display that. Maybe Comcast can come out with a "4K" package.
and if you get TV U-verse or DTV then no cap.
You just suckered me in to a 2 year contract a couple months ago. You can't change the terms on me now.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
How much more does it cost than the home plans, out of curiosity? At like-for-like speeds and data caps, obviously.
Perhaps your usage is in that top percentile of users that will go over 1tb. If you are really in the top 1% of users, I think paying another $50 a month is justified.
The truth is that the marginal cost of a 1TB of data is on the order of a few dollars. In which case $50 is massive overkill considering that the average bandwidth usage is just 190GB/month.
Here's what wholesale bandwidth costs today:
Bulk IP transit costs:
10Gbps: $0.85 -- $1.10 Mbps
20Gbps: $0.75 -- $0.95 Mbps
40Gbps: $0.62 -- $0.80 Mbps
75Gbps: $0.55 -- $0.70 Mbps
100Gbps: $0.45 -- $0.60 Mbps
1mbps, running flat-out 24 hours per day for 30 days is just a tad under 1TB.
So multiply by 10 to more than compensate for peak usage and all other overhead.
That works out to $6/TB or less at the kind of wholesale prices that big ISPs pay.
Lets say your internet bill is roughly $60/month. Even with all the fixed overhead for hardware and support staff, that leaves a ton of margin since most customers are only doing 190GB/month.
Data caps are nothing more than abuse of monopoly status.
The argument to make H.265 mainstream just got a lot stronger.
Nice upgrade from 300GB/month. 1 TB is much more reasonable. I wonder if the cap will still be hidden deeply in the ToS.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Not only is my market far from any Comcast territory, they don't do any caps.
That, and having Business Class as an insurance policy is kind of nice too.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That's assuming transit costs too, big ISPs will have local caching for many things as well as various peering links, not to mention the fact that a lot of p2p traffic will remain internal to the ISP.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Even now, after adding most of the USA to this data cap -- they've avoided the entire Washington DC metro area (Northern Virginia and Maryland included). I'm very thankful for that as a MD resident stuck using Comcast for broadband .... but am I the only one who suspects this is on purpose? Comcast probably figures they won't get push-back from angry legislators as long as they make sure all of THOSE folks aren't affected by the changes.
I think you're latching on to the wrong correlation. To me it looks more like Comcast is avoiding data caps in states that are reasonably covered by a competitive high speed provider such as FIOS.
I know the first thing I thought of was that I could switch to FIOS for less than an extra $50 per month.
One thing Comcast's plan doesn't cover is that based on current internet usage and popular applications (Netflix, Pandora, etc.) their research suggests 1TB is a reasonable cap for 99% of customers. But what happens when more rich applications come out, video resolution goes up and don't forget that new fangled Internet of Things (IoT). Are they going to adjust the caps based on what "reasonable" is on an ongoing basis? I bet not. That in and of itself is not reasonable. Comcast's PR firm has gone to great lengths to present this in agreeable terms on the basis of reasonableness and they did somewhat of a good job but it still looks like there is an opportunity for an unethical cash grab it's just it will be in the future not in the present.
Fortunately, we have a system that deals with this called free market competition. On that note, Google Fiber/Verizon FioS where you at? I'm ready to switch if you want to become a competitive force in this market space. Get your game on.
We'll make great pets
And do they actually face any extra costs from the %1 this affects?
What does mobile data pricing have to do with residential wired
The fact that when forced to make the choice in order to make ends meet, people are canceling the latter and relying on the former.
and how is your response relevant to my OP?
It's a guess, extrapolating the rate of change over time of monthly data usage allowance of cable Internet based on the historic rate of change over time of monthly data usage allowance of cellular Internet.
That is nice for you, but the vast majority of the country does not and will not be covered by FIOS as verizon has completed their roll out.
http://gizmodo.com/after-billi...
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Except almost nobody is actually using H.265 for two reasons. One is devices without hardware acceleration for H.265 decoding. The other is the larger royalty associated with H.265 payable to multiple patent pools.
Imposing a monthly data transfer allowance does not meet the legal definition of extortion because subscribers are not coerced to purchase service from Comcast. They still retain the legal right to cancel Comcast service and either subscribe to a competing service or subscribe to no service at all. Saying this is extortion is like saying file sharing is larceny.
big ISPs will have local caching for many things
Not if the ISP overcharges the "local caching" company. Netflix offered to colo its Open Connect Appliance at Comcast to alleviate Comcast's transit burden, but Comcast refused it on grounds that it could make more money by leasing 4U of space, power, and cooling to another colo customer.
Why people use residential service, I'll never know. Comcast Business is awesome.
Comcast Business Internet cannot be combined in a bundle with Xfinity (home) TV service. I've read that Comcast Business TV service is more expensive than Xfinity TV service and lacks on demand, both presumably due to public performance licensing.
1TB/month is way out the need for a average costumer, here on Brazil (up to now... Netflix is a game changer)
2GB data for mobile plan not existed here (in Brazil) ten years ago (today it still a big data plan...)
Will be interesting to see what they do in markets with actual competition, like Chattanooga, TN, which has fiber service: http://chattanoogagig.com/
Yes you can. I've been using my own router on a business connection for almost 6 years now. For the first year or 2 they forced me to rent the modem from them though, but eventually I got them to let me activate my own modem and return the rented one.
However, I do believe they still require you to use their modem/router combo if you're getting a static IP for some reason... I have a dynamic IP, and at least it doesn't change very often (i use namecheap's DDNS service to keep it updated). With my home connection with Fios, the IP changes literally every time I reboot the router.
Legal definitions and common usage often differ. That's why lawyers have specialist dictionaries of legal terms.
I'm an immature kid, you insensitive clod!
and you are a millennial, I think...
are useless for average home users. Netflix (and othe VOD providers) should charge a premium price for such features [that even use large amounts of internet bandwidth...] - problem solved.
> and you are a millennial, I think... No. But I put a couple of them through college. I'm studying up on Medicare these days.
Its bad for media streaming companies like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, etc. It's also horrible for us cord cutters out there and is basically just a 'cord cutter tax'. If you aren't going to pay for their awful/expensive cable TV service now they are just gonna bleed you for it. If I had an alternative in my neighborhood like Verizon FIOS or Google Fiber I'd switch immediately. Another aspect of this could encourage certain consumers to steal a neighbors WiFi to avoid usage charges.
My next-wall neighbour and I were always kidding around about sharing a subscription. (Because of the layout of his place, the placement of his router gives better signal in my living-room than in his.)
I just talked to him, and ... I closed my account and switched my main router to be a client to his router. I was on a lower tier than he, so now I am saving $$ and getting batter service for only $50/month.
So, I, for one, thank our dark ComCast overlords.
Probably to keep people from running file servers (legal or otherwise) with a Residential service account.
The future is coming.
That's the unique thing about patents among the disparate areas of law sometimes referred to as "intellectual property": the future is always 2 decades away.
Good luck explaining that to opinionated commenters who insist on being technically correct ("the best kind of correct"). See this thread where John Willkie maintains that the legal definition of "extortion" is the only one that matters, and anyone bringing a colloquial definition into the discussion "sound[s] very immature".
We are nine in our home, and we have 5 users on Netflix, one user downloading Linux ISO's and others watching/listening to youtube stuff.
Yes we exceed 20 gigs, but not 1000 gigs. I think Comcast is being reasonable.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
You appear to have been sidetracked by the analogy, as the implied workarounds don't apply so well to Internet access.
What would they substitute for (1) driving
What alternative to driving were you considering, and what would its Internet counterpart be?
(2) alone
What's the Internet counterpart to carpooling? Visiting a public library that offers Wi-Fi access to patrons and uses aggressive caching proxy to aggregate cookieless retrievals of the same resource?
the only single lane road from place a to place b
(3) on that particular road
The stipulation in this analogy was that no other practical road exists.
(4) during rush hour when the congestion toll is highest?
Comcast does not vary the factor at which data transfer affects your quota based on time of day. As far as I'm aware, only satellite ISPs such as Exede do that.
And Australia. They also have lousy internet service. Both countries have relatively poor service for the same reason: low population density.
Something "driving adoption and demand" solely among mass copyright infringers may lack the "substantial noninfringing use" needed for a defense to contributory copyright infringement.
Marginal costs don't really matter though. It takes money and labor to build out an infrastructure to get to the point when you can even calculate a marginal cost. And that infrastructure has only so much capacity. There will come a point where more infrastructure is needed. Data caps and tiered pricing do two things to help solve that problem: encourage people to use only as much as they need, so that upgrade time takes a little longer to come; and to fund those improvements from the people who are causing the need to upgrade. Those 1% of users are using WAY more than 1% of the network's capacity, and their bills should be higher. We can argue about what that price is, but it is ridiculous that anyone should expect flat pricing.
So put yours downstream of theirs. Problem solved. Very few people need a static address at home.
For FiOS, the difference is $10, but I can't speak for Comcast. That was for me to move 75/75 to a business line ($90/mo already, $100/mo as commercial).
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?