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Comment by mherdeg | Hacker News Reader

Seems smart -- if people are going to be WFH or going to Zoom school full time, might as well get an extra $100/month from them. They can't say no.

It'll be interesting to see whether broadband competitors match the offer or just siphon off a handful of switching customers. In Massachusetts many Internet markets are a monopoly (Comcast) or a duopoly (Comcast + Verizon or RCN).

There are also a tiny handful of municipal providers (including Braintree, Norwood, Whip City Fiber for Westfield and area, and Russell). If people are still heavily working/attending school from home in March I can imagine a bit of pressure on towns and cities to do the very hard work of starting up Internet as a utility.

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Unlimited data with Comcast is only $30/month on top of your bill, having the overages upper limit be 3x the price of unlimited data though seems a little extreme.

In most states that is $50/month but you can negotiate it into a plan. The plans are sketchy too, and often subject to changes and/or are limited time plans. One must be very explicit with their support/sales person.

$50/month was the old price. When cap enforcement resumed after the temporary suspension during the first couple of COVID months they announced they changed it to $30/month (or $11/month if you are renting their $14/month modem), cut the number of months you can go over the cap without the $10/50 GB charge from 3 to 1 per year, and raised the monthly cap from 1 TB to 1.229 TB.

You don’t need 1.2 TB a month to wfh or use zoom

I’m sure someone will come here and say “well my use case for wfh involves uploading 1 TB a day”, but no, that’s not normal

> “well my use case for wfh involves uploading 1 TB a day”, but no, that’s not normal

1.2 / 30 = 40GB a day. Seems fairly low to me. Considering families with children attending online school as well, then clump in streaming services such as Netflix.

Especially considering there's multiple games out there now that are 60+ gigs. My guess based on the unifi graphs of my connection for 7 people is that our biggest consumers are Netflix, and game downloads. One roommate alone ate over 150 gigs in game downloads in the last month.

Uploading more than 1.2 TB in a month is extremely normal for anyone using any online backup service such as Crashplan, also. Especially when you first set it up. Comcast has vastly increased the cost and hassle of using such services, now, for all its customers. Customers should react accordingly: punish Comcast severely in the marketplace wherever possible. Unfortunately, a lot of customers don't have a 2nd good choice for broadband where they live, and Comcast knows it.

I have virtually no cap. But in regards to bandwidth speed. That’s about my marketed down/up anyway. It’s what they sold me, big asterisk, but I usually get 1/5 - 1/4 of that, which is still decent. However, if they have a family all working, studying, streaming, and playing games from home they may need closer to the 1 Tb. It’s their use case, why does it have to be policed and justified as “you don’t actually need that, let me tell you what you really need.” Put another way, even all current use cases do not encompass all future use cases so why promote the restrictions? All of which boils down to: the entitled gall, to dictate.

I think that less than 1.2 TB is reasonable if you are essentially the only user of that connection and do want to sacrifice 4K for 1080p for example. Once you factor video calls AND videos (this is doubly true for homeschool, you should know that presentations are usually transmitted as video in real time even though it is silly as it is), you start to eat that 40GB allocation for each day. Add two people working at home and two schoolchildren definitely surpass 40GB per day even when they sacrificed entertainment.

I work from home (and have for a few years) but have one kid doing google meet based classes daily (probably 3-4 hours per day), video chats with friends she misses, and occasional netflix for all 4 of us. I used 700GB with XFinity last month. If my wife was working from home, and Son was taking online classes, we would be well over.

WHF or Zoom only, no. But a normal household will also have streaming video and most of their phones on wifi while at home.

And that's a quick pivot from 1.2/month to 1/day. Nobody is saying 1/day is normal, but no one is arguing the cap should be 30/month

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