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Comcast cuts off customer for going over 250GB of legitimate use

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Re: Comcast cuts off customer for going over 250GB of legitimate use

#141

Post by jrockway »

This is why I pay $130 a month for Speakeasy broadband. They give me 6M and I can use 6M 24/7 with no complaint.

Bandwidth costs money. So consumer "ISPs" (and I use that term in a very loose sense) tell you what the burst bandwidth is, and then hope that you don't burst very often. When you do, they drop you, because you cost them money. The solution is to just get a real Internet connection. "Business" is the magic word.

The alternative to Comcast's cap strategy is that everyone would be paying $500 a month for Internet access, or you'd be limited to 768kbps with no burst.

Re: Comcast cuts off customer for going over 250GB of legitimate use

#142

Post by seanp2k »

matwood wrote: post #83
dkl wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no analogy to internet use. It's not a scarce resource.

Bandwidth certainly is a scarce resource as is the equipment needed to support it. Fiber doesn't just magically appear in the ground. Switches don't grow on your street corner. These things have to be paid for and maintained. It only makes sense that the highest users pay for more for the infrastructure. It's the current pricing schemes that I have a problem with.

Bandwidth isn't like other resources; when you stop using it, it's (near) instantly available again for someone else to use, and doesn't cost anything to produce.

Yes, it routes via other Tier-1 ISPs, but comcast undoubtedly has route-exchange arrangements with them so that it ends up costing them a net of nothing.

Re: Comcast cuts off customer for going over 250GB of legitimate use

#143

Post by beatpanda »

This is only going to get worse, and claiming that internet is a "right" or a "utility" will evnetually invite government regulation, which will amplify the pervasive and inevitable problem of corporate malfeasance.

We need to build an internet without ISPs if we want to keep what we have.

Re: Comcast cuts off customer for going over 250GB of legitimate use

#144

Post by daimyoyo »

I have cellular Internet and while the speed is not ideal (about 2Mb/s during the day and 7Mb/s at night) I have unlimited data. I even asked their customer service "so I could run 100Tb of data a month and that would be ok?" And they told me it would be. Granted it's not ideal, but I can stream 360p video on it(my laptop resolution isn't enough for anything higher to make a difference) and since I use it at night most of the time I never have a problem with slow download rates.

Re: Comcast cuts off customer for going over 250GB of legitimate use

#145

Post by timmaah »

someone13 wrote: post #125
bryanlarsen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in Canada, there are rules governing when the electricity company can cut you off. To oversimplify, you cannot be cut off during winter.

Really? Can you point to a link about this? I'd love to see what the rules actually say. NOTE: What I wrote above sounds kind of confrontational - it's not. Badly worded, yes, but I believe you and am actually interested in seeing the rules.

Turn to google my friend..

http://liheap.ncat.org/Disconnect/disconnect.htm

Re: Comcast cuts off customer for going over 250GB of legitimate use

#146

Post by bryanlarsen »

someone13 wrote: post #125
bryanlarsen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in Canada, there are rules governing when the electricity company can cut you off. To oversimplify, you cannot be cut off during winter.

Really? Can you point to a link about this? I'd love to see what the rules actually say. NOTE: What I wrote above sounds kind of confrontational - it's not. Badly worded, yes, but I believe you and am actually interested in seeing the rules.

It looks like you were right to be confrontational. According to Google, that was a temporary moratorium that has expired: http://www.ontariotenants.ca/electricity/articles/2004/ltw04...

It's certainly a common misconception. I certainly know that people in the "which bill do I pay this month" scenario often choose to hold off on paying Hydro during the winter. It's also quite likely that Hydro is less likely to disconnect during the Winter. Frozen water pipes can cause a lot of damage...

Re: Comcast cuts off customer for going over 250GB of legitimate use

#147

Post by ryannielsen »

fr0sty wrote: post #50
ryannielsen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably you're also paying a fixed monthly fee for "unlimited" broadband. It's likely you're paying per amount used for electricity and water. I'd bet your insurance is a fixed periodic fee with coverage capped at a certain amount. If my assumptions are correct, then your broadband services is already treated very much like your insurance service. How do you propose things change?

The analogy only holds if there was only one insurance company you could buy from who only offered a very small range of policies (none of which fits your needs).

Comcast doesn't have a monopoly in Seattle. There are multiple providers from which he could procure service.

Regardless, I'm curious what models people advocate. After all, there appears to be only one electric provider in Seattle. If we were, as proposed, to follow that model, then Comcast could negotiate to be the single service provider and then charge per usage. Is that more desirable than what we have now, where there are multiple providers offering different services at different rates?

If we're to argue for something different, we should be aware of what we're arguing for.

Re: Comcast cuts off customer for going over 250GB of legitimate use

#148

Post by DanielBMarkham »

bradleyland wrote: post #24

The author had me up until the moment he claimed that internet access is a "right". Ok, so let's say internet access is a "right". Rights often come within a framework. You have many rights that are yours for the losing. Your freedom to come and go freely, for example. If you break a law, you lose your freedom by being put in jail. To say something is a "right" is to say that it ought to be available, or that the gov…

Agreed.

A better way of putting this would be "electronic access to the world web of information and services is becoming an extension of our brains, and as such some degree of connectivity should be considered a public commons that the government is required to provide to each citizen, much the same as parkland, airspace, or waterways."

This implies that some parts of infrastructure are private (personal access devices), some parts are public (perhaps a limited amount of bandwidth donated to the public in return for use of the airwaves), and some are commercial (the infrastructure from the ISP to the rest of the net).

Each segment in this scheme has special needs, responsibilities, and privileges. Using the word "right" as a blanket statement doesn't cut it -- it begins to substitute ranting for reasoning. I sympathize with the author, but their problem is lack of competition, not abuse of their rights.

Re: Comcast cuts off customer for going over 250GB of legitimate use

#149

Post by seanp2k »

naner wrote: post #22
crs wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually if you read his post from a day ago, you will see him state he stopped the open access point. He took steps to stop what he thought was the issue. It was not until the cap was broken a second time that he realized it was his backup system uploading to a 3rd party service. That is not entitlement at all. If anything it was ignorance of the fact that your upload data is also measured against the cap. I agree w…

Perhaps if he was more civil with the service reps and just explained the mistake he would have been given a reprieve. Regardless, it doesn't sound like he's willing to cut back his data use.

Dude, have you ever talked to a comcast rep? One dude told me that I needed to get access to my apartment telco room because it was MY fault that the apartments were mislabelled (presumably done by one of THEIR techs). The problem was that they unplugged my internet when my neghibor didn't pay. No credit given to me for the time I was down or anything either, and dood wouldn't let me talk to a supervisor. Supervisor called back 5 hours later in the middle of the night (~3AM) and I was sleeping. WTF.

Re: Comcast cuts off customer for going over 250GB of legitimate use

#150

Post by nestlequ1k »

I posted 1.2TB of usage last month. I love the little graph on their comcast.com homepage. Nice big and red bar way way over the 250GB limit. No one contacted me about it.

But I'm paying for the super extreme 50mb/sec burst plan for 120/mo so I'm guessing that's the reason they leave me alone

"what are you downloading" -> starcraft replays, also downloading video backups to S3

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