Comment by pstack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pstack | Hacker News Reader

That's ridiculous.

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.

Off topic but $180 is cheap. We pay $450/m for 50/15 from Time Warner for our business class cable which is a backup to our fiber which is 50/50 which we pay $1500/m which is a Time Warner owned fiber but our service is with another provider.

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.

The reason this happens is because of how ISP business models work and specifically over-subscription. I'm not defending comcast, quite the contrary, but you're going to hit this problem with every ISP, because of over-subscription.

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)

The tax-payers have subsidized massive broadband expansion that never happened. Many of the players pocketed the savings and just never followed up with their end of that deal.

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%.

> The tax-payers have subsidized massive broadband expansion that never happened. Many of the players pocketed the savings and just never followed up with their end of that deal.

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.

I looked into Business class, but wasn't willing to sign a 2-3 year contract with Comcast for it. Maybe I'd be happier with business class, but I wish that 2 years from now I'll have a different provider.

This article was the reason I checked it out: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/why-i-...

Depending on where you are the business plan might not be more expensive. I went from a Comcast standard to a Comcast business plan and pay the exact same amount per month. The only difference is that for the business plan they had me sign a two year contract.

Just out of curiosity, how much are you paying, what are you getting in return, and where are you staying?

I am located in Portland, OR. I pay $60 a month for 12 down 3 up service. Most times when I do a speed test I end up getting more like 20 down 6 up.

The package I have isn't super fast compared to what others seem to have, but it's been plenty fast for me.

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