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Comment by nhance | Hacker News Reader

Every so often a company will make a move that is so smart that it boggles your mind. To me, this is one of those moves.

For a company so evil in so many ways, this really surprised me.

Think about this, if this works, low-income households can increase their earning power through learning skills that will allow them to make more money. Once they're making enough, they'll be more stable customers for Comcast and having used the internet to improve their lives, the internet will be one of the last things to cut. (If I was in the position to benefit from this, I'd never "bite the hand that feeds me" if I can avoid it.)

If they don't screw this up, Comcast stands to win hundreds to thousands of new lifetime loyal customers (assuming they don't screw up retention).

Low income families increase their earning power.Comcast wins more business. Khan is more successful. There are no losers.

This is absolutely brilliant. Good job Comcast!

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Isn't comcast charging something like $10 for each 50 gigs over their transfer cap?

Next thing you know, the electric company will give the manufacturer of electric space heaters for poor people a grant so they can sell more and cheaper space heaters to poor people, or perhaps a for profit water company will give away free lawn watering sprinklers to poor people.

That really doesn't sound like that bad of a price at all for going over the limit you agreed to.

$10 for 50GB? At 4 hours a day, every day a month, 50GB is only 1Mbps. 1Mbps of transit costs < $1/month. So in a way, it's only 10x markup, which isn't _terrible_ given the industry.

OTOH, people that exceed may be more likely to perform large transfers. If you're downloading at non-peak hours, there's zero extra cost to the ISP.

This kind of problem is unavoidable when the cost and price structures vary.

It's 50GB over 300GB - it's a VERY rare customer that uses 300GB in one month. And even then this is only in a few cities, most places have no cap.

Its not that rare to exceed the 300GB datacap if you're not using cable as your primary means of video distribution.

Netflix uses 2.8GB/Hour of streaming on its highest quality setting [1]. That's only 107 hours of video per 300GB. Now include four family members, and normal internet traffic...and voila you're over 300GB in one moth.

[1] https://support.netflix.com/en/node/87

As an Australian it's an insanely good price.

Outside of a few test markets Comcast doesn't currently have a(n enforced) usage cap, and hasn't since ~May 2012. Prior to suspending the 250 GB/month cap they would warn you if you went over it (I believe they only actually warned a certain percentage of the highest usage users. I had gone over it before and never received a warning.) and if you continued to exceed the cap then they would suspend your account.

They are charging $10 per 50GB blocks in some of the test markets, with the base cap now at 300 GB. Details: http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/data-u...

How is it possible to go over 250GB in a month? Do you lie in bed streaming video all day, every day?

1080p streams pretty much, especially tv. Not even every day

I live in an apartment with 5 other computer science students. We move over 100gb/per week easily.

- WFH (syncing toolchains or source repos over VPN, or downloading VM images)

- Dropbox, or syncing disks to backup services

- Constant streaming of music from Spotify/Pandora/Soundcloud

- 1080p video

- Gaming

- Youtube

With a 120 mbps internet connection, it's pretty easy to rack up usage quickly.

fag

In most places (that don't have Google Fiber) Comcast is the best ISP in terms of speed for the money. Once you experience high speed internet, it's hard to go back to anything slower. This is a good strategy.

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