Comcast has announced that beginning October 1st, it will limit customers to a maximum of 250Gb of downloads per month.
The largest cable provider in the US said that users who exceed this limit twice in a six month period could face a ban for up to a year.
Some consumer groups have criticized the move, but Comcast said that less than 1% of its 14 million subscribers would be affected by the policy change.
Why doesn't Comcast simply create a more expensive 'high usage' rate and charge these people more? What's with the one year ban idea?
Over 140,000 people will be be affected by this, and banning them seems a little unreasonable. That's like banning cable customers who watch too much TV!
Cable internet is on a shared line with your neighbors. When someone uses huge amounts of bandwidth, everyone else in the area can suffer.
The reason you can't solve the problem by charging a 'high usage' rate is because the problem isn't that Comcast doesn't have enough internet to send to the guy--it's that Comcast can't send that much to the guy without choking off a greater number of customers surrounding him. Thus the limit makes the most sense, as it lets them keep the greatest number of customers happy.
As I said to ZCT, the issue is the shared line. This has nothing to do with the RIAA--you really think they're just fine with 250GB of piracy a month, but not more? A general bandwidth limit does not accomplish any goal of the RIAA.
We have a limit of a 100go, max overcharge of 50$. And your depicted scenario, even if possible, would be reality if Comcast infrastucture was age old. I live in the area where Vidéotron (Provider) has the highest concentration of high end user, and I have never witnessed any problem with BW availability.
Videotron, owned by Québécor, made the move in order to counter MP3/Movie downloading, or rather make money out of it. Because Québécor is also the owner of a music/movie distribution network here. If they cant make money distributing, they sure will make it with the downloading, and very indirectly at it.
There are multiple high usage plans. They are listed as business plans.
@Rv3 another reason people think they'd do it is to compete with netflix and other streaming video services so people will use their OnDemand and PPV services.
What *I* am concerned with is if they don't raise it after a while. Right now I'm using about 35GB / month with video and other stuff. If I had access to more video, I would probably use it. Since more people seem to be putting more video on the internet, I can see this rising.
They say the average user uses like 2-3GB per month. I'm wondering if they took the average from their market with the highest average subscriber range. My parents, who are not big internet users at all, use around 5 - 7GB. Most of my friends in the 18 - 25 range use a lot more than that.
I understand that, I am just questioning why they need to threaten people with a one year ban, when they could just tell them they need to upgrade to a more expensive plan.
There are multiple users in my household and we have a home network. Will that maximum be for everyone on my network combined or for each of us on the network? That could make a huge difference right there.
I have a feeling we'll be changing providers soon.
Then after wards says that it needs to punish you for using what you thought you were buying. If Comcast says that it can not continue to supply what it advertised it needs to stop selling until it can. After it shaves off the one in one-hundred customers do you suppose it will raise rates and then shave off another one in one-hundred rather than upgrading its equipment.
To me this is another fraud on the public.
What is a good alternative to Comcast? I think it is time to punish them by finding a decent provider.
Comcast has nothing to offer if it can not honor its advertised commitment.
It's for all users, which is probably why they decided to go with such a high (compared to other ISPs who cap) limit. It's totally possible to legally go over the limit, but most people won't. It seems that most people just THINK they're going to go over the limit, which could help curb downloading. I thought I might be coming close to the limit, until I checked my router and noticed I use like 35GB on a heavy month and most people consider ME a heavy user. That's for 5 computers, an xbox360 and a wii. And I do download / stream HD video to my HTPC. HD video is going to be the biggest problem, but only if you watch a lot. If you watched 40 movies at about 5GB each, you'd still have 50GB left for other stuff.
It seems a lot of people are worried about gaming, too. Don't be. I used to analyze network traffic at the ISP I worked for. Gaming does NOT use a lot of traffic. It requires low latency, but not a lot of bandwidth. I'm pretty sure game makers try to get their games to use as little bandwidth as possible. I hear Halo 2 uses a lot more than others though.
If you max out your connection 24/7 with BitTorrent though, yeah, you're ****ed.
I don't like that Comcast has decided to do this, but I don't think that everybody should be all afraid until they realize what their actual usage is.
@ZCT again - I don't think they will ban people, just throttle and / or charge overage fees. From a business standpoint, would you rather kick off a user and lose their income, or charge them more and throttle them back?
Buy two or more service plans.. (Put in your name, Wife's name.. kids name etc..) Get 4 of them and you have 1 Terabyte.
Build your self a machine to do the load balancing and you'll never hit that magic terabyte number (At current prices 4 cable modems would run you a little over $125 a month.)
A nice email from them would be nice if your getting close to the cap too.
("Aye sir, the more they overtech the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain." -- Scotty, Star Trek III: The Search For Spock)
I guess I really should look and see how much we're using a month right now. We do a lot of gaming here, every day. My Gran and my Mother both watch a show online about once a week. I watch old cartoons occasionally. I do stream music constantly and download a lot, though. I honestly don't know what we're using a month between all the computers, the Xbox, the Wii and whatever else my son has up there in College Boy Land. (I'm a bit afraid to look, honestly.)
I don't know if it would be cheapest for us to have more than one account or not. I make the house payments and pay for the gardener and housekeeper, and the rest of the family divides up the bills and pays those. We all pitch in for food but otherwise - I couldn't tell you how much it costs to even cool this place in the summer or what we pay for water.
I guess I'll have my son check how much bandwidth we're using per month on average before we panic or anything. This may not effect us as much as we thought.
Glad I have roadrunner...well at least for the time being until they try to implement the usage rates...
I like though how not too long ago Comcast bought out Suscom located in central PA who had offered unlimited broadband and as soon as they take them over they cap daily and monthly usage.
A lot of the things Comcast does seems kind of shifty as of late, they already lost one lawsuit for unlawfully blocking bittorrent ports, and recently said they are limiting daily usage, and now there is a monthly cap. What exactly are you paying for anymore? They want to cater to the soccer mom who only uses the internet to forward her kids cheesy emails and use ebay because it costs them less in the end. Screw the people who actually use the service and heaven forbid Comcast upgrades their aging equipment.
I've been banned from Comcast before for using 1.3TBs down and 600GBs up in one month...legitimately.
No P2P apps or any sort of illegal file transfers. Just using a distributed web crawler program called Majestic-12 that I'm a part of.
Some guy from India called and threatened to shut off my service if I didn't cut my bandwidth down to 200GBs total a month (up and down). I told him that they advertised unlimited so unlimited I would use. I continued on and got banned from them for a year (this is back in late 2006).
I'm not with AT&T U-Verse and LOVE it. I let the rep. know that I was taping the conversation for my safety later on. I made her state that there were absolutely no bandwidth restrictions in place with the AT&T U-Verse network, and that I was free to use the connection at 100% capacity 24/7 365. I love my dedicated 10mbps/1.5mbps connection now and it's sooooo worth the extra. :)
"If a customer exceeds more than 250 GB and is one of the heaviest data users who consume the most data on our high-speed Internet service, he or she may receive a call from Comcast's Customer Security Assurance (CSA) group to notify them of excessive use," according to the company's updated Frequently Asked Questions on Excessive Use.
Customers who top 250 GB in a month twice in a six-month timeframe could have service terminated for a year.
...sucks if you're using that much legitimately but seriously how many people will be using 250 gig a month without downloading illegally from torrents? Very few I would think.
Well that may be true today, perhaps only 140,000 or so customers by Comcast's estimation.
Of course like Moore's Law, data usage increases over time. I remember days of 3.5" floppy disks, with a maximum of 800Kb per disk. But as technology advances, and images, video, games, and sound require more bandwidth, this may become more restrictive.
The question is, will this limit be revised as technology advances, or be used as a tool to charge people more or kick people off if they are not making them enough profit.
If Comcast will not provide the services that its users and the market want, then these people should switch providers. Either Comcast with give in or go under...and it is their own doing. Don't let Comcast do whatever they want just because they are the biggest in their market (just like Walmart).
In many cities Comcast is the only broadband provider available. The only other available company in my town is AT&T DSL (crap). Our local power company is running fiber all over town, but it will be some time before that is available. Comcast has fought AT&T and the power company tooth and nail. So far Comcast has lost.
Hope you have Verizon Fios or AT&T U-Verse in your area! I get my internet from a dedicated AT&T service (not U-Verse) right now over sbcglobal, but I would pick AT&T U-Verse over comcast if I had to and I'd pick Verizon Fios over that if we had it in Houston. Comcast just went to absolute garbage with this move. Lets break this down.
It would cost me $54.95/month to run Comcast 6.0Mbit service since I don't have Comcast Cable or Voice. At 250GB your monthly 95th percentile commitment is only about 0.76Mbit/s! That's $72.30 per megabit 95th percentile comittment!!! This is insane!!! I could get $4/Mbit from Cogent right now and any business could get $20/mbit or less from AT&T or Cogent easily without buying massive amounts of bandwidth. For $72.30 I could get just over 18Mbit monthly commitment from Cogent (at $4/mbit) on a 100Mbit line which is more than 16 times faster than Comcast's shitty 6.0Mbit service. 18Mbit at 95th percentile a month is just under 5.9 Terabytes of bandwidth a month not some measly 250GB!
Also I've found that Comcast does not know how to do math since they claim 6Mbit is 5 times more than 1.5mbit and not 4.......
I can make an assumption that the RIAA had a say in this. The cap will limit pirated copyrighted material and it will also slow down the development of online music and video sales.
The wave of the future is all media being sold and downloaded online. All this does is make it so Comcast don't have to updated their equipment as often to keep up with demand.
If I was a Comcast customer, I wouldn't be one now. People need to switch providers as soon as possible to show that this is not acceptable.
