“In-browser and email notifications as you near the 300 GB per month limit”
customer.comcast.com
customer.comcast.com
I remember about six years ago, I got a notification from them for using too much data. When I spoke with them, I said I needed more data (we get everything over the internet, there are several of us here, and I also work from home). I needed to know what my cap was. They wouldn't say. They just said that I had gone over it and if I went over this non-specific cap again, I would be banned from service for a year.
Fine, then how can I buy more bandwidth at the same price? Can I just buy a second account and double my bandwidth? Whatever that cap might be? Nope. What options do I have? Nothing. Sorry, we can't help you.
When I moved, a Comcast person came by to offer me service and told me about their business offering. That is what I use. I have never had a problem with it. Granted, it is much more expensive, but at least I can generally do what I want.
I pay about $180/mo for 75Mbps down and 15Mbps up and generally use a couple terabytes per month.
Gosh, you're so unreasonable! Why do you need so much bandwidth?
It's ridiculous that anyone would ask that question in this day, but they do. And they ask it accusingly. How dare you use a lot of bandwidth. What kind of monster are you for wanting to use internet services? JUSTIFY YOURSELF!
First, we use Netflix. That is 2-4gb per hour per stream. With four people living here, that's an average of maybe two hours per person per day or 750gb/mo.
Second, we use a remote backup service across six machines and that comes out to between 50-500gb/mo.
Third, we consume a lot of podcasts, video podcasts (easily 1-2gb per episode), streaming music, streaming radio, youtube, live-streams on twitch.tv, two of us are constantly VPNed into work on at least one box, VOIP (often with video), video games, and countless other things. Multiplied by the several people that live here.
As more content is available over the internet and in better quality, this consumption will only increase.
To live with 75Gb/mo per person in the modern age when you get all of your entertainment and work and communication over the internet is ridiculous. And charging obscene overage charges is abusive.
Especially after we have all already dispensed with the "but bandwidth is a precious limited resource, like oil!" nonsense.
As for the bandwidth is precious, the cable loops are shared. It took over 6 months to get our fiber provisioned so we were on cable for those 6 months. We did notice a huge drop in bandwidth around 6pm at our office. We correlated to people getting home.
One thing I realized with last mile connectivity/bandwidth is that our city/neighbors were partially to blame. We talked to Verizon about FIOS, they said they would run us a line if we could get city to allow them to dig up the roads. They said they've been trying to do it but the city won't grant them permits. The city blocks them because people complain about noise and construction. Without having an alternative we have no leverage to negotiate pricing.
Consider the following:
1) you have to build out a certain type of network to provide a good experience, and this includes a minimum bandwidth allotment that is quite high.
2) because "normal" bandwidth usage is extremely bursty there is no reason (almost) to ever upgrade the bandwidth to the edge nodes.
3) bandwidth to edge nodes is constrained, even for incumbents. There's 2 cases, non-incumbents have to buy it from a monopoly, which is expensive. The other case is incumbents. They can get it cheap, until they hit a specific point (the bandwidth initial buildout that was done decades ago). When they hit that point it takes a massive investment to increase it.
4) the reason people go over bandwidth limits is peer to peer traffic. This unfortunately has two properties. Firstly, it's a consistent download, not bursty. Second it doesn't go out of their network (if it's a large network that is), meaning anyone that does this creates a constant traffic flow in TWO points of their network, and every component in between. This means that the bandwidth needed to support p2p is a factor more than the bandwidth your client actually reports to you, and exponentially more than needed to support browsing (even youtube).
5) If some ISP decides against this (they're small for example, in which case it all goes over cheap transit or even peering) that brings them extra costs, but not extra customers (because only the expensive customers like you, which can't be supported by the infrastructure, will switch over)
6) Most customers refuse to pay more. (e.g. switch to the business account)
7) Nobody is ever going to pay for a network that can support exponentially increasing bandwidth. It's not possible, for obvious reasons. When you're as big as comcast is, the investment for a 5% upgrade would require ridiculous amounts of capital, so they don't want to.
(replacing the current infrastructure with fiber MAY fix this, however the people who control the current infrastructure like Comcast have an interest in blocking that for obvious reasons. However there are problems with fiber too, the root of the problem is the constant light -> electrical -> light conversions that are necessary at lots and lots of points and make the capital investments quite high)
Also, network congestion has nothing to do with bandwidth limits (data caps, really). If you are transferring large amounts of data at 3am on a Tuesday when the rest of the network usage is almost non-existent, then you are not impacting anything. If you are doing it at 8pm on a Friday night, you probably are contributing to network congestion. So, why apply the concept of a limited resource (data) across the board?
We are done with the lie from telecoms that data is somehow a precious resource. It is an artificial constraint used to justify both lack of infrastructure investment and jacking up prices on customers. This is no longer a point of contention as it is finally known industry-wide and covered by the press (finally) as of a couple years ago.
Think of data caps in relation to a freeway. That freeway can carry a certain number of cars at one time. That is the only constraint. Cars that are driving at 2am when the freeway is empty are not eating into tomorrow's rush-hour-drive freeway traffic capacity. It is a constant. Likewise, it is not your 300gb of data per month that is impacting the network. It is when you are transferring that data.
And, finally, since the telecoms claim that "only two percent of users use a lot of bandwidth" and that something like 95% of users do nothing but check their email and watch one or two youtube videos a week, then there should be PLENTY of bandwidth left over for these bandwidth hogs. The solution is simple if that is the reality (which it isn't): Make email the highest priority in your traffic shaping. That way, those horrible people consuming a ton of bandwidth are not impacting the flow of those 12 kilobyte messages passing by here and there.
Oh, and finally, people do not go over their bandwidth limits because of p2p traffic. They go over it because it is 2014 and Netflix movies run several gigabytes per hour and people consume a lot of movies/tv shows every month and multiple people live in a single home. They go over it because they listen to lots of podcasts or watch video podcasts which run a gigabyte an hour. They watch streaming online networks, listen to streaming music, use remote online backup services, use VOIP, watch youtube, watch twitch.tv, stream to twitch.tv.
Youtube and Netflix account for just over 50% of traffic. P2P accounts for 10%.
All I can say is that subsidies -believe it or not- do not exempt anyone from mathematics. If you are unable to see that packets travel more than one "freeway" there is nothing to say at all.
Hell, even freeways don't work like that. Believe it or not, cars on a freeway come from somewhere and go somewhere. This affects the capacity of the freeway for obvious reasons. If people did on freeways what they do with p2p, random any-to-any travelling, there would be no possible way to keep freeways uncongested, and yet there'd be loads and loads of "free" space. And yes, we would all be talking about making more intense users pay more, or get them off the roads alltogether. Hell, we're doing that now.
This article was the reason I checked it out: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/why-i-...
The package I have isn't super fast compared to what others seem to have, but it's been plenty fast for me.
As an aside, check out the "Flexible Data Option" linked from that page for some other laughs - a $5 discount to drop your quota from 300 GB to 5, and also your overages suddenly become five times more expensive ($1/GB vs. $.20/GB). That's some nice math.
Is your point that 300GB/month is not enough for your needs? Well, I agree, which is why I haven't signed up for 300GB/month service. If I had signed up for a service like that, I think I'd really appreciate that they offer flexible and customizable notifications and are up front about where the limit is and what happens if you cross it (you pay $10/50GB overage, no additional throttling). You hear so many horror stories about folks being suddenly threatened with nebulous consequences for crossing invisible lines, and apparently XFINITY doesn't do that, so good on them!
There's nothing, therefore, for people to do in this thread beyond devise their own discussions around what element of the old-news that they are most interested in.
In fact, I could have gotten 40mbps DSL for $35 (special deal) but they had a 250GB/month cap and the only option to have no cap was a $175/mo for the same speed (but a dedicated link).
So I'm using Comcast specifically because the lack of a limit on bandwidth.
These are the only markets with caps right now. Which is up from 2012, when there were only two.
ISP = Rogers in Toronto.
Up here in Northern Canada, a 100Mbps plan has a 250GB cap for $140/mo and a 50Mbps plan has a 150GB cap for $110/mo.
Overage charges? $5/GB !
People up here that are getting multi-thousand dollar overage bills are thinking about a class action lawsuit against the sole telco because they believe it's intentionally over-counting data used to drive up revenue....
btw if you are with Rogers, I believe they can give you unlimited data for $30/month, or $10 if you are also using their TV and home phone.
The great North.
This is why commercial services need regulation. Intercepting and tampering with your data should be illegal, and not just a little bit.
A country where mail fraud is a major crime but this is considered normal business has completely forgotten its fundamental values and principles.
It's kind of crazy that there isn't more competition between ISPs in the u.s.
35 mbps / 3 mbps - http://teksavvy.com/en/residential/internet/cable/cable-35
Want more?
$90 bux for 150 mbps / 10 mbps:
I feel sorry for my friends that have a Rogers/Bell/Telus connection. But then again I don't: because they're too lazy to switch but keep complaining about their huge bill.
If the topic here is HTML injection, that's pretty creepy. What else are they using that technology for? Surely the cost isn't justifiable purely for excess usage notifications.
So you are allowed 3 hits of 50GB or in excess of 50GB a year?
Is that what you meant? 3 violations?
Stop patronizing the cable monopolies. They sell only the illusion of bandwidth.
The power companies are only selling the illusion of electricity!
No one would be complaining if Comcast had a 5TB/mo limit on 100Mbit lines.
The problem is that Comcast (and many other ISPs) haven't actually build networks that can supply internet at the levels people want, and they charge overly high rates for services which can't provide what people are told they can.