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Comment by peapicker | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, this is a technology company? If they mean to cap at 250GB per month, just halt service during the month when 250GB is hit. Don't let the customer go over, warn, go over, and then suspend them for a year. Seriously, if they are metering it, they can implement a technology solution to halt when the cap is hit that month and not even have this ridiculous abuse of customers having to 'self monitor' the behavior of all the software they have running.

If they want to cap, they need to cap customers with a technical solution.

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I completely agree. Use over 250GB? Your internet gets slowed down to molasses until the start of the next month. Customers will notice and adjust.

Here, Comcast is saying "we don't want you as a customer", which they're allowed to do, but doesn't generate very much goodwill. Having a clear cap and predictable consequences would be much preferred.

I don't know why they also couldn't put a little meter on your comcast.net homepage, showing how much you've used.

> Use over 250GB? Your internet gets slowed down to molasses until the start of the next month. Customers will notice and adjust.

This is how most sane ISPs deal with it. I really cannot see how disconnecting your customers completely is a better solution - there's certainly no technical reason for it, given that (IIRC) Comcast already have throttling measures for BitTorrent users.

There is a meter, but it takes some poking around to find it. Go to your account page and click on "Users and Settings".

Better yet, charge for overages. I don't know why Comcast wants to dump these customers when instead they could be charging them an extra $40 (or whatever might be reasonable) for each extra 250GB they use.

Or at least choke you way way down. But even more important than the "cut off at cutoff point" solution is the "let me know my usage" solution. They couldn't (or wouldn't) tell him anything about the shape of his bandwidth usage, or how much he was actually consuming, and there is no way (!) to find out how much has been consumed "so far this month". Even if that way to check was to phone Comcast, but especially if there were a website you could go to, I think Comcast would have a much better case here.

I've used 40GB so far this month. Last month, my usage was 117GB. This is all pretty easy to view on comcast.com.

I actually went well over the cap last month, 315GB according to both Comcast's metering and Tomato on my router (I'd rebuilt the server that runs my Tor relay, but hadn't cranked the bandwidth settings back down, and it ran for a while flat-out). I was sweating bullets, but they never said a thing to me. Most months I do get into the 200GB range, so it doesn't take much to get close to the cap.

That's standard practice for the mobile plans here in Chile. Such bandwidth for the first xxx Mb, 32kbps after that.

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