Leaked Comcast docs prove 300GB cap has nothing to do with network congestion
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For instance, grocery store scales, gas pumps, power meter manufacturers, etc.
If we're going to lose the fight with Comcast over metered bandwidth, then perhaps we need to push for laws regarding inspection and validation of their metering systems themselves.
If they're limiting consumers to a certain amount of traffic, I want the definition of traffic to be clearly delineated and for the measurement systems to be properly inspected and regulated.
For instance, do they measure at the modem? At the local node? At the edge of the network?
Does local traffic within Comcast's city-wide network count?
If someone sends an IP traffic that their computer never requested and is filtered out, does it add to the traffic usage?
Does a UDP broadcast in a subnet count towards everyone's bandwidth, even if the cable modem filters it out?
Does this cover ICMP and UDP?
Does Comcast's own "Are you there?" packets to cable modems count towards traffic allotments? Does Comcast's cable modem traffic to the registration and DHCP servers count?
If they're going to screw-over customers, then there needs to be clear rules they have to follow so they can't just make up numbers. There also needs to be a way to make sure that DDOS attacks can't attack the bills of customers.
I plugged my cable modem into a dumb switch. It had a link, but there was nothing else attached; there was no router to act as a DHCP client, no frames being sent to the cable modem at all. In six days, my usage meter incremented by 0.5 GB. Plugging in a protocol analyzer revealed a constant stream of ARP requests for other subscribers' IPs. These were apparently counted against my cap, and presumably they were counted against everyone's caps, making 250 GB/month 1% smaller than advertised.
Comcast sent me to a document describing their metering methodology:
http://www.netforecast.com/documents/NFR5101_Comcast_Usage_M...
Their reps defended the practice of counting Comcast-generated broadcast traffic against everyone, even though there's no way for subscribers to prevent it.
Our ISP has recently enacted data caps. The first time they threatened to disable our account for going over, I pointed out to them that:
- My firewall has logged tens of gigabytes of dropped/rejected traffic.
- That if I ran a TCPDump on our WAN interface, could see management and broadcast traffic for neighboring CPEs (modem).
- That I know for a fact (I used to work for them in a previous iteration) that their network isn't built in a way that would allow them differentiate their management and monitoring traffic from individual customer traffic.
- And finally, that the Layer 2 & 3 statistics of that WAN interface were nowhere close to their own statistics for the account.
They have yet to respond to that complaint, despite going to the FCC. I really wonder what would happen if one were to take their ISP to court with the proper documentation.
Am I understanding correctly that you want Comcast examining the content you are downloading and deciding whether it counts towards your usage or not? This sounds like the complete opposite of net neutrality.
The point of my comment is partially tongue-in-cheek, because this is a problem Comcast can't solve, and they're setting themselves up for a rampage of angry people, as the amount of bandwidth being used for advertising increases every year.
But, since you brought it up, Comcast already examines your content. You are mistaken that net neutrality is broken if they filter advertising from your meter. Net neutrality is about not prioritizing or throttling responses to your request, not how Comcast bills you. And, for that matter, auto-play advertising is already worse for net neutrality than it would be for Comcast to categorize your surfing for billing purposes. Your internets are already being jammed and throttled by advertising video that in many cases is much larger than what you asked for.
If they are injecting ads (which I have seen through other providers, but I believe it wasn't related to Comcast) then your point is valid. At that point you are being delivered packets (large video-laden amounts) were not requested, and being charged for them. As a side note, I believe Verizon was doing this to mobile customers, not sure how it ended though.
So if Comcast bills you at double the rate for going to Facebook instead of Google+, that's consistent with net neutrality?
On the first point: Congestion is problem during peak hours, not during the whole month. You could download a few terabytes over the course of a month and not cause a problem for anyone else, if you avoided peak hours. Data caps only work for congestion management if they discourage you from using services during peak hours.
There's not a grand conspiracy by the cable or mobile companies about this, though - it's mostly a failure to understand this concept, or an unwillingness to go back to peak load pricing (e.g. different night/weekend rates like phone plans have/had).
An example would be some provider like Disney saying that in order for Comcast (or some smaller operator) to be able to carry their TV channels they must also zero-rate streaming from their sites. Or Hulu and Verizon do a deal in which Hulu content doesn't count toward a cap on Verizon phones. These things are becoming more common, and I think the difficulty of figuring out which bits count and which ones don't (especially when they all come from the same CDNs) will prove to be more trouble than it's worth.
It's actually a decent system - for eg. one local mobile operators provides unmetered/uncapped 4G between 22-6 for a small premium - if you don't have access to a landline it's a great deal.
it used to be backhauling access traffic was expensive (think T1s to cell phone towers). well, those days are long behind us. a little less profit taking and a little more infrastructure investment would solve bandwidth problems in duopolist markets.
Obviously they could be using very old equipment that can't, but whose fault is that?
Also a large amount of coax spectrum is for video tv service.
The real curiousity is why Verizon fios can't deliver near 1gbps. It's already has a fiberoptic network. I'm guessing it's the hardware at the nodes.
And that's just the "assume they are not acting in bad faith" stance; we know they are willingly not upgrading the interconnects to (eventually) Netflix and others, who their customers are requesting more and more data from.
I understand that this is because the one is more marketable than the other, but that isn't really very comforting.
So the pipe is normally shared equally between requests, but a heavy user might get only half a normal share. That way, they optimize against the real scarcity (in peak time usage, not total downloaded) but no one has to worry about overage charges, and any throttling is to the benefit of other users.
I am the 2% !!!
Date Download Upload Total
2015-10 419.63 GB 50.89 GB 470.52 GB
2015-09 601.49 GB 129.11 GB 730.60 GB
2015-08 1,011.83 GB 196.79 GB 1,208.62 GB
2015-07 504.28 GB 56.33 GB 560.61 GB
2015-06 398.04 GB 43.94 GB 441.98 GB
2015-05 305.05 GB 42.20 GB 347.25 GB
2015-04 375.06 GB 81.83 GB 456.89 GB
2015-03 215.10 GB 65.89 GB 280.99 GB
2015-02 316.11 GB 180.48 GB 496.59 GB
2015-01 413.11 GB 135.68 GB 548.78 GB
2014-12 457.10 GB 56.55 GB 513.65 GB
2014-11 270.25 GB 76.81 GB 347.05 GB
2014-10 311.27 GB 86.75 GB 398.03 GB
2014-09 381.53 GB 119.21 GB 500.74 GB
2014-08 237.63 GB 271.40 GB 509.03 GB
2014-07 277.23 GB 388.38 GB 665.61 GB
2014-06 213.32 GB 162.85 GB 376.17 GB
2014-05 223.88 GB 67.49 GB 291.37 GB
2014-04 258.21 GB 124.38 GB 382.60 GB
2014-03 205.78 GB 77.03 GB 282.81 GB
2014-02 315.23 GB 448.78 GB 764.01 GB
2014-01 342.07 GB 279.32 GB 621.38 GB
2013-12 128.54 GB 114.93 GB 243.47 GBPersonally I just watch an unhealthy amount of anime, which probably accounts for the majority of DL/UL traffic. My monthly offsite backup to Amazon Glacier accounts for ~30GiB UL.
I don't think my household is that extraordinary: we're just three average millennials who all work first-shift.
Something to point out is that we don't get any sort of regular broadcast television -- so all our media consumption is done either online or w/ physical media.
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A funny thing to note: AT&T has been trying to get my business for a while now, as they just installed fiber (to the node) in my neighborhood. I had to turn them down as the contract included a 300GiB bandwidth cap.
The guy seemed genuinely floored when I actually produced logs showing I routinely exceed that cap. He claimed the caps are unlikely to be enforced, but I'm not willing to have it in writing that I agreed to such a thing.
Doing something daring like watching 4k content for one hour a day can blow past a 300GB cap all by itself.
I think it's streaming video, more than anything else. Netflix seems to use somewhere between 600 to 1000 kb a second, depending on the available quality and connection (I just checked a couple of shows that we watch regularly). Assuming 0.7 MB/sec, you'd hit 27 GB a day with only 11 hours of Netflix streaming.
My GF usually works from home, and generally keeps a streaming show on a secondary monitor as background noise. With a bit of overlap in viewing, it really doesn't take much to hit big numbers.
Here's the link to the original reporting: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Leaked-Comcast-Talking-Po...
If corporate documents are instructing reps to tell customers it's about congestion when there is no congestion, that doesn't look good at all when the government starts asking about these plans and policies.
It's also probably not a good idea to be telling customers that the network you spend hundreds of millions of dollars marketing as super modern and awesome just can't handle their traffic.
I'm not a fan of caps, either, but aggregate home bandwidth usage is going to go up and up, while more and more customers are going to have everything they need from IP services and thus want to cancel traditional TV. Should you charge an IP customer who uses 4TB/month streaming 4K the same as one who uses 200GB? How else do you discriminate?
One place where I worked studied a model with peak-load throttling. If you're trying to stream 4K video and the network isn't congested, you get full speed. If the network is congested, the subscribers who have been less active during previous peaks get priority and others get throttled. (Actually this was some years ago, before 4K video was a thing, but it's same idea)
Another model I remember studying involved charging for "time using the service" and not "number of bits transferred." This is similar to how voice plans have "anytime" and "off peak" allocations of "minutes."
So there are people thinking about this (or at least there were several years ago), but I'm a little surprised to not see any trials of alternative arrangements.
If you're not offering a competitive streaming option, you're not really eligible to receive that revenue anymore. You can't just invent a new way to monitize it with existing customers who have existing agreements for your services without offering them something to agree to, then allowing for their choice.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/fiber-its-not-all...
The Comcast cap has nothing to do with technical decisions, it is purely there to discourage video streaming in favor of Comcast's own options.
Seriously if you still have a local DSL provider, patronize them before it's too late. National policy is explicitly based around competition between DSL and cable, so when you ignore DSL because cable advertises fraudulent peak-rate speeds, you're saying that competition does not matter to you.
Telco infrastructure is even still regulated such that smaller companies can be ISPs, leading to great customer service and even pro-privacy attitudes such as these: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/06/22/ceo-of-...
Granted, I live in Chicago which actually has something resembling competition (AT&T is rolling out GigaPower and as far as I know we're a test market for DOCSIS 3.1) so the Internet metering on the Comcast website just straight up doesn't work and throws up an error.
Hopefully your competitive market continues.
I think they should goto a connection + volume model. $10 a month just to be connected, maybe 500MB free download or whatever. And then you pay per GB, variable rates based on time of day. $1 per GB at 7pm, $0.01 at 3am. Like how industrial electricity rates work (if i understand correctly).
Pricing models will screw consumers over until the pricing model matches the economics of the situation. If I were a startup this is the issue I'd fix; Pricing models that do not match the economics.
Current policy: Don't say "unlimited data," say "250 GB data, but not enforced."
New policy: Don't say "300 GB data," say "we gave you 50 GB more data for free!"
Cable companies know that they can sell you data twice unless you convert your internet data to be your TV.
They don't want to give their customers the means to free themselves from half of their monthly bill.
They have every incentive to make their internet service not work for video.
Someone who ran a local ISP said that bandwidth is becoming basically free. People can only consume so much. Even with a fast connection no one is going to be using it all the time.
It's a measure to prevent customers from watching video on-line and stopping their TV service.
9am-6pm Mon-Friday is charged at 1.25-10x (ratio depending on the technology/broadband type) the price of bandwidth outside of this peak time.
Granted, AAISP customers tend to be more technical and are willing to pay more for an clueful ISP.
I already pay ~$1500/m/rack in bandwidth (5Gbps, 95th percentile, mixed transit product + interconnect fees for an exchange). I'll happily pay $100/m for 100mbit 95th percentile bw at home, with the same throughput guarantees. .
There were enough anecdotal reports that if I had Comcast I'd put my own router in front of theirs to have an independent measure.
Unrelated: my experience with Comcast business over the last few months has been the worst customer service I've experienced in the last decade. Completely unreliable.
So it's really no question that any cap that doesn't double at least every few years is a business case and has nothing to do with technological constraints.
I'm using their base plan (15Mbps) and can stream HD movies with no problem
I also get 2gb/s. Pretty happy im not being gouged by those conpabies over there.
Why would they even have to come up with an excuse? They are in a position of monopoly almost everywhere, what do they care? "If you're not happy you can go to another internet company. Oh wait, there is none! Now suck my d*ck and pay up!"