Comcast makes caps official at 250GB/month
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You want to prevent people from over-using. Fair enough. Put in the 250GB cap, but rather than making it a violation of TOS, do something more creative. You sell 6Mbps cable (as the standard). If someone goes over 250GB in a month, reduce their speed to 5Mbps. If they're under 250GB by 10%, up them back up. Tell them what they can do to lessen their bandwidth consumption (like turning of P2P when they aren't using it). This serves two purposes. First, it encourages people not to be wasteful of bandwidth. Second, when you lower speed, you lower the amount that someone can physically push through in a month.
Oh, and don't forget, if someone is paying for a higher speed connection from you, they deserve a proportionally higher cap. So an 18Mbps user would deserve a 750GB cap if a 6Mbps user gets a 250GB cap.
P2P or server hosting is really the only thing that will put you over the 250GB level - even high-quality Hulu won't push you over the limit. As such, people can control it as long as they remember to shut off their P2P programs. Bandwidth is a utility just like electricity. Leave the lights on 24/7 with inefficient bulbs and you'll pay for it.
I've never understood the comcast hating. I've been using their cable modems since the beginning and its easily been one of the best consumer experiences of my life.
Mosty likely they set it this high to frustrate the real hardcore users, the people using enough bandwidth to be their own ISP.
Even if you share an internet connection with 3 other people, how much video can one watch? All four of you would each have to watch about 8 hours per day of Hulu to hit the cap. That's tough to do.
It's more against file-sharers. File-sharing is what really sucks bandwidth because people leave it on perpetually. It's also against people who should really be buying a fractional T1. At 809Kbps, you're using more than half a T1.
Plus, video is only going to become better compressed. H.264 is a great codec, but I'm sure we'll do better in another decade. So it isn't like it even hedges against higher definition video in the future.
edit: source of Hulu info: http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=blog&blog_id=4000000...
Moving 100kB/sec (when adding both upstream and downstream) all the time is pretty easy. Seeding legal torrents on the "unlimited" line I signed up for, could easily exceed that. If you're doing VOIP, running a couple legal torrents, and watching HD content from unbox, etc....
In fact, it's impossible to be unlimited since that would imply infinite bandwidth per second. Once it isn't infinite bandwidth per second, you can interpret "unlimited" in a number of ways. You want it to be unlimited in terms of bandwidth transfer. Comcast could argue (if they ever used the term unlimited) that it is referring to how long you are allowed to be online and not how much you can transfer.
There are lots of legal things that cost money. Running your computer 24/7 costs more money (in electricity) than running it 8 hours a day. Go yell at the electric company! This isn't a matter of legality vs. illegality or proper use vs. improper use. The fact is that resources (whether it be bandwidth, electricity, or food) is limited. With bandwidth, it's easy to accommodate heavy users which is awesome (unlike electricity and food which generally scale up linearly in costs). That's great! It doesn't make bandwidth magic and there are still limitations. Yeah, limitations suck whether it be the fact that bandwidth needs some sort of metering or the fact that I can't transport myself across the country Star-Trek style. To be successful, one needs to understand, accept, and work within limitations to create and act in ways that work.
You'll see that they have lawsuits against them for falsely advertising unlimited internet access, as well as many reports of them advertising "unlimited" services.
Sure, feel free to argue that unlimited would really be infinite bandwidth, infinite transfer speed, etc.. That's fine.
I'm also fine to pay more money. Maybe I get 250GB for my base rate, and then a reasonable fee for overages, providing there's a way to monitor my usage (like my cell phone). I'm happy to pay for what I use. Just don't cut me off:)
Wait, bandwidth isn't magic!? :)
edit-----
Imagine if the water company said "for a flat $50 per month, you'll get our great 6 gallon/minute water service!", and then, 4 years later changed the deal to say "only up to 2,500 gallons per month, then we cut you off", that's a big change, and not one for the better.
Hopefully, Comcast will keep the cap high and offer rates scaling up linearly (or preferable logarithmically).
I guess I'm a bit luckier than most people since I have the option of FiOS, Comcast or RCN and both Verizon and RCN offer service at 20Mbps (with Comcast being the slow-poke at 8Mbps). Most are limited to cable or DSL. So, I don't have the same concern on a personal level that Comcast will decide in 6 months to move the cap down to 150GB or 100GB or 75GB. I just have other options.
If Comcast tries to pull that, I hope the government steps in since they do have monopolies in most areas they serve (because who would use DSL). Maybe a nice formula specifying norms and standard deviations could be created that would automatically set and raise levels as people's bandwidth consumption increased? That sounds like a good plan? This way providers have to keep up with the times (so they can't just start offering crap service hiding behind caps), but it still deals with the issue that there are some people who just use, use, use way outside the norm.
250gb is also sort of generous now, but consider that bandwidth usage can only go up from here as doing things like renting HD movies from iTunes becomes more popular. Also that a lot of people don't have a choice over who they can get service with.
Right now on my 10/1 cable (thankfully not comcast) connection, my router tells me I've used up about 195gb down and 40gb up for a total of 235gb since August 1st. I don't think we've even come close to 60 DVDs..
Its obvious we keep consuming more bandwidth, more disk space. 250GB of bandwidth is good enough for anyone is like that quote "no one will ever use more than 640k of RAM." It may be valid today, but not tomorrow.
I'm Swedish and we get un-metered 24mbit up/down for $40/month. Many of my friends have 100mbit down at home. A large chunk of the population also have 5mbit usb-cards of over 3G network in their laptops. You can get it for $30/month.
The crappy Internet infrastructure in the US is one of those things that I really don't understand. What is the reason for this? Failure of market forces?
- Gustaf
He said that the population distribution in Sweden is vastly more favorable for setting up networking infrastructure than in the US (more urbanized), and that, several years ago, when the government was digging up cables for some other utility infrastructure (power lines?), they decided it was a good idea to also lay inexpensive optical fiber while the holes were already dug.
Such an initiative would almost certainly be politically infeasible in the US, except at a local level. Tax dollars, you know. It's probably somewhat comparable to public transit systems. Subways systems take a lot of work upfront, so many cities only have buses, if anything. City wi-fi initiatives have had rather mixed results, too, and those don't even involve digging to lay cables.
Uhgh 250gb for a cap is a little bleh. I have 20gb website backups I make every week. Thats already 80gb used in what, 4 days worth of downloads?
Maybe I'll move to Sweden ;)
Well, don't use your private cable-line for that. You could push it to Amazon S3 instead?
Give us 10 potential ISPs to choose from and watch what happens.
In my area, I get to choose between: AT&T DSL at less than 1500/256 (although that is what I would be "paying" for) more realistically 1000/200 or so...Time Warner cable at cheaper than the AT&T price at 10/1 (megabits). That's not a choice. And I live in Los Angeles proper, not even some neighboring suburb or anything.
That's..it. Excluding dialup, excluding wireless services, excluding ridiculously expensive alternatives (e.g. speakeasy).
If I had 10 potential ISPs to choose from that all charged a reasonable price for fast speeds, it would be amazing.
While I've never had horrible internet service with comcast, I've almost always had bad customer service experiences with them. They hire awful people to answer their phone lines, and I always feel like the person on the other side does not understand anything that I say.
Ultimately, this lies in Comcast's best interest for customers to use their cable VOD services as opposed to online streaming services. Their profit margins on a $5 movie that you stream off their servers to your cable box is much much higher than you streaming a movie off netflix using their internet connection.
Alright, so almost all of of us know how much Bandwidth costs. Amazon as low as 10 cents per GB when you are over 250GB. They are going to charge $15 per 10 GB this is ridiculous.
This all seems like it could only get worse.
Consider my situation: I attend a research-intensive university, and I get 1 GB a DAY. And no, you don't get a warning, or throttled. You get shut off. Completely disconnected after your cap.
Connectivity U is the name of the provider, and I tried to ask them to provide me with additional bandwidth for an extra price. I'm hearing even students at dorms are getting the 1gb raised to 2gb a day.
I'll take 250GB a month any day over my petty 30. And I probably pay the same.
You still get a nice router for your cable connection, and as well you get a nice AJAX-y GUI to set things up, plus, it tracks bandwidth used per-day, per-week, and per-month - automatically.
http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato (just a happy user of this free software)
In the old days, they'd just cancel your account. When you called to ask why, they'd tell you that you used to much bandwidth. They would not tell you how much was too much.
it's a slippery slope to get people used to tiered pricing
How do you know they don't gouge? There is no competition in 99% of US cities (there are two cities I know of with competing electric companies), so it's pretty much impossible to say they aren't gouging.
And yes, pricing is regulated, even in the cities with competing companies...they can only compete on service (naturally, consumers in those cities report higher satisfaction than average with their power companies). Consumer energy is very similar to the telcos before deregulation.
It's actually pretty interesting how the regulation of power pricing effects business decisions in the industry. It has occasionally led to pathologically bad decisions. Nuclear power, for example, was more expensive than coal until very recently...but there was a time when many power companies in the US were building a nuclear plant because it would allow them to raise prices (because pricing is based on the amount it costs to produce the power, and nuclear was, for a time, something that the powers that be wanted to happen). It's really quite unfortunate that it shook out that way, because it gave nuclear a really bad name and so we're still several years away from nuclear being considered a politically viable alternative energy source, despite the fact that it is economically and environmentally the best option many locations have available (compared to coal it's downright miraculous).
to clarify, my point was that verizon will kill comcast with FIOS. and the more traffic shaping/caps/etc they put out the sooner it will happen.
Waiting 60ms each for a dozen or so dns lookups may not feel slow if you're used to dsl, but FIOS is just a whole different animal. Even the neophytes in my family get it instantly when they use it.
I try, but it's hard to get across that it's a monopolized and generally awful situation where apathetic people aren't helping just because they don't perceive a need for better bandwidth anytime soon.
At the least, what an increase of bandwidth will do for those really apathetic people is to lower the prices of what they have now. So you should consider FIOS to be "sweet" because it means you can pay less for whatever speeds you have now, not just because it's way faster.
On a less snarky note, FiOS is fat enough to give instant HD movie playback. That's a big advantage right there.
Shouldn't a service be priced to reflect usage?
Morally, nothing. Business-wise, it's stupid, because a fiber provider (Verizon) will kick your ass, as their per-byte last-mile maintenance costs are a magnitude lower than with cable.
In a week comcast will have thousends of customers complainig their connection has been terminated and they'll have to remove that stupid cap.
Yes, it's an improvement from the nonsensical stealth limits. It's more realistic than what, say, the Canadians generally have to deal with. But it sucks if you are willing to pay for better but you don't have a choice and you're stuck with this awful ISP.