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Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

Comcast has uncapped speeds like most other residential ISPs in states with stronger consumer protection laws

They will still have caps somewhere because they have to protect against network abuse. It may be in some fine print that says something about abuse, or it may just be that "all customers in this area share a cap" - you can't make an upstream connection go faster than it can go.

Are you saying Comcast has neglected to keep their network infrastructure up-to-date? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.

I have ATT fiber and they don't seem to mind of it running at 1Gbps both up and downstream continually 24/7.

It’s great right after a new tier is installed because they over provision at the beginning.

It’s hell at the end of the lifecycle because they reaallly don’t want to provision anything new.

Reminds me fiber just dropped maybe I should switch. But I love my tiny little ISP.

> I have ATT fiber and they don't seem to mind of it running at 1Gbps both up and downstream continually 24/7.

Would they still not mind if all the rest of their customers also were doing 1 Gbps continuously 24/7?

Depends how they architected the network.. maybe the design can scale and tolerate it up to a higher point compared to Comcast's ancient steaming pile.

Bandwidth hogs occur at a predictable rate.

It's amazing when a telco company actually delivers a product customers want. AT&T is somehow pulling it off despite their organizational dysfunction.

Somewhere at some point bandwidth runs out, though I suspect that it’s rarer now than it used to be (since capacities have increased but things to download really haven’t).

I see slowing down during peak hours as different from a data cap.

But if 2% of your users max out the connection all day every day, and you bundle a couple hundred users onto an upstream connection, it shouldn't be hard to keep the upstream from maxing out despite tons of oversubscription.

IIRC, they suspended to bandwidth caps around the beginning of the pando but a year or so ago reinstituted then.

Edit: Looks like Comcast threatened to reinstitute the restrictions, then rescinded the action temporarily, but only through the end of 2022 [0].

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/16/22840165/comcast-data-ca...

They must have capped some people in between "threatening to reinstitute" and "rescinding", because I suddenly started having to pay more for going over 1TB about a year ago, mid-pandemic.

I've really only heard of it in areas that actually have a competitor

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