Comcast Internet throttling is up and running
theinquirer.net
theinquirer.net
Two months ago, Comcast's fraud department left me a breathless voicemail asking to call them back urgently regarding an "important matter of security."
When I called back, I was told, "We have a bandwidth limit of 250 gigabytes a month. Our records show that in August, you used 710 gigabytes." They told me that if I exceeded 250gb again, they'd cut me off for a year.
Since then, I've started tracking my bandwidth to make sure I don't go over. If Comcast cuts me off, my only alternative is 5Mbps DSL through AT&T, and I wouldn't wish that upon anybody. So, Comcast has successfully used their monopoly position in my area to strong-arm me into lowering my bandwidth usage.
I really hope Verizon FIOS shakes things up soon. It's somewhat depressing that FIOS is available in the boonies of Indiana but not in most of the Silicon Valley.
But I refuse to be ok with the lesser of two evils.
This madness must stop.
Not a great solution, but better than being cut off :S
Look, I hate Comcast as much as the next guy, but they appear to have competition in your area, even if the competitive product isn't as good. You have a choice, but refuse to exercise it.
The reason they can get away with this is because, like most other people, you won't cancel your service over it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not judging, and I would be paying Comcast too if they would let me, but it really doesn't seem they they are abusing a monopoly in this case.
What? You don't think dialup and cable are competing, but dialup and DSL are (despite the huge speed differences in both cases)?
Dial-up is not considered broadband by even the lame FCC definition, therefore I do not consider it competition.
That's because there are government subsidies to bring broadband to rural areas, but none to bring fiber to Silicon Valley. Verizon is just following the money.
If that happens, just keep basic cable service and get a hacked cable modem with a random MAC address that asks for their top-of-the-line config file. Hell, you might as well do it before they cut you off -- it will pay for itself in a month.
They are never going to do that. The only people who've been convicted have been either paying subscribers that uncapped their authorized modem, or people building businesses around cable modem modification. Both are eminently traceable, and simple service piracy is not in the slightest.
Granted, there are issues of whether they are actually delivering the pipe they promised you (as raised by dcurtis), but at least the network is neutral.
I didn't pay for 16mbits for 15 minutes. This is false advertising.
(A download from a single server probably isn't being hurt, but if you connect to multiple servers then you need more upload to handle each download stream.)
Thanks,
B Consumer Affairs Manager Qwest Communications www.socialmedia.qwest.com
Because the resulting pricing would be crazy high, like 512 kbps for $50/month and you really want bursty Internet service anyway because your usage is probably bursty.
I don't see that as a problem. It's just an education issue. Besides, better products thrive in a marketplace with educated consumers.
If broadband providers were required to advertise their offerings in a consistent way (as they are here in Australia, although not in the way I describe upthread) choice for consumers would be a lot easier. The only people that lose are the big companies with big marketing budgets and inferior products.
Wholesale bandwidth pricing isn't anywhere near that high, and back haul costs at most double it.
$10 per mbs per month isn't uncommon for wholesale bandwith pricing from "on-net" buildings (and now days $2 to $4 isn't unheard of). The back haul cost to your local C.O. is probably roughly around $10 per mbs as well (admitedly I'm going of backhaul costs from Toronto to Waterloo up in Canada) and then your down to the local loop. We will assume the cost of the local loop is allready covered in the existing price paid, so if the user wanted N dedicated mbbits it should cost N[margin][12 to 20 dollars] per month more. Now are most users may not be willing to pay for this.
A frequent way of dealing with the "bursty" nature for servers is 95th percentile billing where by you pay for the max of what you use, dropping the top 5%.
Admittedly these numbers are very back of the envelope, but I think its a bit more realistic than $50/month for 512kbs.
Or if you start with 7 Mbps for $50 at ~20:1 oversubscription and then divide by 20 to get down to 1:1 oversubscription you can get some scary numbers.
I cannot guarantee that there will never be a month that I don't exceed 250GB. I used to think that sounded like an insane amount, but it really isn't when you are dealing with legitimate large downloads and viewing media and that is just for business purposes.
How about someone with Netflix? If you watch ONE standard definition movie a night, that is approximately 60GB/mo. of usage (estimate is from here: http://www.hackingnetflix.com/2008/09/comcast-to-cap.html) or about 24% gone right there.
I've never noticed if Comcast tells you how much bandwidth you use on your statement... anyone know if Comcast shares bandwidth usage with the customer?
So the throttled queue is called "Best Effort." The sweet irony.