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Comment by sandyarmstrong | Hacker News Reader

I recently had to restore a 500GB cloud backup over Cox. I called them to ask if they could give me an exemption for one month, and not only did they refuse, but they could not honestly tell me what would happen if I went over the cap, except that I would get an email about it and my Internet "might slow down".

I work from home, and can't afford any degradation of service, so I've been doing the restore piecemeal and checking https://myaccount.cox.net/internettools/datausage/usage.cox every day. It's annoying but doable.

What happens to you when you hit the cap?

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I seemed to notice the last couple months after I get the messages my service drops on download (but not on upload). I drop to their 5M connection instead. Strangely when I check known download speed sites they work with correct numbers, when I check other means I notice the difference there. So I hope they are not nerfing me wholly except when I try to measure it with known tools i.e. speedtest.net etc. They seem to be nice about it now but who knows, this is the first time they have been as vocal about it.

Sadly the next two tiers (yep we are there) only add 50GB (300) and 150GB (400 total), with the speeds of 25Mbps and up to 50Mbps but if you have higher speeds you will download more and be on HD more, get more files, backup more and always go over.

At least Comcast got something right.

Comcast charges 20 cents per gigabyte in 50GB chunks over 300 after you use up your three "courtesy" overage months. There's a little monthly report in the billing site. The price is thousands of times the actual cost to Comcast, but at least I know the limits and the cost of going over them.

My understanding is that Comcast Business has no caps.

Nothing, so far as I can tell.

I have a 12/2 package through Cox and routinely go over the 250GB cap. Other than an automated email saying I'm over the cap, nothing happens.

A year ago, I used 750GB in a month after setting up online backup on a computer. Nary a word.

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