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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

#281

Post by nfriedly »

xenophanes wrote: post #233
res0nat0r wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying $100/month for 22 megabits is terrible, it doesn't have to be this expensive.

Terrible compared to what? Go back 10 years and it's great. Go forward 10 years and it's terrible. Today, there's nothing better.

Cincinnati Bell offers 30mb down / 10mb up fiber-optic for $60/month and a 50/20 plan for $80. I'm pretty sure there's no data cap either, I've hit several terabytes some months without any issues. I've had this service for about 2 years now, and there was a $10/month discount when I first signed up.

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

#282

Post by CamperBob »

fr0sty wrote: post #98
bradleyland wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your electric utility service is capped, but they use a different method because electric utilities are metered. You have a fixed capacity feed to your house. For example, our home has 150 amp service. I cannot exceed that draw or the main feed breaker trips and everything goes dark. I can request installation of a larger feed, but I have to pay the build-out, and there are hard limits based on my local zoning. One t…

> If you go outside that, you get business service, Actually in this case you get banned for a year without recourse. It baffles me why they didn't just try to upsell the guy.

Possibly because their business service has a lot more competition than their residential service, hence lower margins.

Comcast business service is actually a bargain, at least around here. You pay maybe $15-$20/month more than you would for bare-bones residential service, you get to run servers if you want, suck down all the Netflix you can watch, and you get instant access to US-based tech support. Also, my understanding is that the various MAFIAA BitTorrent enforcers avoid targeting business-class IP ranges because unlike Grandma in her basement, businesses tend to put up a fight.

I wouldn't even think about going back to a residential account at this point. Given my household's usage patterns, I can't imagine Comcast makes any more money off of me than they would if I had a residential account, so I wouldn't expect them to upsell me aggressively if they were otherwise trying to get rid of me.

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

#283

Post by gamble »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #146
someone13 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disc…

I used to work for the gas company (ATCO) in Alberta. It was an informal rule, but they wouldn't shut you off during the winter for an unpaid bill. I don't believe there was any law to compel them, but it's bad PR to destroy homes and potentially kill people over a few hundred dollars. They know you're ultimately going to have to pay the bill come summertime.

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

#284

Post by keenerd »

keenerd wrote: post #272
jerf wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Instead, it is all you can eat , until Comcast says that is all you can eat." No. A year or two ago, Comcast clarified their position on bandwidth usage as allowing you to use 250GB a month. This is now visible on their account, although I always have to poke around to get it: After logging in at comcast.com, go to the Users and Settings tab and look in the middle column. There's a link there to click that will let…

But it is very very easy to go over 250GB in a DAY, let alone a month. 250GB ÷ 15MB/sec = 4 hours 36 minutes Doesn't it seem a little odd that you can blow through an entire month's service in less than a day?

Other comment - 250GB/month is less than 800Kb/sec. Cheap DSL is faster. Hulu uses 1Mb/sec. If you are one of those people who like a TV playing in the background, you can go over your cap just from running free television 24x7.

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

#285

Post by jsz0 »

nitrogen wrote: post #266
jsz0 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of cable Internet you're dealing with a shared medium. Your ISP may have a 10Gbit uplink in their headend but that does not extend to your home. In reality with 4 channel DOCSIS 3 bonding the speed available "on-the-wire" is about ~150Mbit/sec and it's shared between about 200 customers at minimum. (in reality it's usually a lot closer to 300-500 customers) So if 15 customers out of the 200 want to use 10…

In the case of cable Internet you're dealing with a shared medium. Your ISP may have a 10Gbit uplink in their headend but that does not extend to your home. In reality with 4 channel DOCSIS 3 bonding the speed available "on-the-wire" is about ~150Mbit/sec and it's shared between about 200 customers at minimum. (in reality it's usually a lot closer to 300-500 customers) So if 15 customers out of the 200 want to use 10…

I agree the flat cap isn't going to be the end of this. It just happens to be the easiest solution right now and the heavy users are low hanging fruit.

As for the 50Mbit on a 150Mbit bonding group -- that's he magic of oversubscription. It's amazing how little bandwidth people actually use. The number of heavy users who are doing 50Mbit/sec non-stop are really the fringe cases. It's actually quite hard to figure out how to max out a 50 or 100mbit/sec for long periods of time. The traffic patterns are extremely bursty. For example a single uncapped modem's traffic. (in MB/sec)

http://i.imgur.com/KL1YD.png

(120Mbit/sec is the bottleneck of my router)

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

#286

Post by dspillett »

_b8r0 wrote: post #274
dspillett wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Unlimited usage for a flat, monthly fee" this would suggest The weasely way around that, used certainly by UK ISPs in defending their use of the word "unlimited" is that you have unlimited access (24/7/365.25) rather than unlimited bandwidth use . While they meant "use as much bandwidth as you like" they never specifically said that, so they no claim they didn't mean that and noone can proove otherwise. The claim…

I pay about £20/month for BE Unlimited and routinely burn through 500gb-1TB a month (like TFA I use multiple lossless codecs for media I've bought or produced, as well as using a series of permanently nailed up VPN connections for various things) without any problems. YMMV, but it's fine over here.

Yeah, I should have mentioned Be... I used them myself until a couple of weeks ago. I never pulled your 500G+ but I can say I never noticed any shaping or other artificial limits or significant congestion on those occasions I did pull many Gbs around in one go).

I've shifted over to an FTTC provider - 10Mbit upstream is nice to have especially coupled with as many IPv4 addresses as you can justify for nowt extra (only a /29 for me (all I need) but people get more - you just have to ask and promise to follow RIPE's allocation & use rules) and native IPv6, the upstream is unmetered like Be but not downstream.

Rumour has it Be will need some significant infrastructure updates to keep with that policy when they join the FTTC roll-out unless they make their FTTC based products uncompetitively expensive which they may not be able to afford to do.

The reason I picked Sky is that they are advertising the "unlimited" thing pretty aggressively on TV right now, and I know their network is shaped to buggery as are any other ISPs other than Be (that I know of) who offer "unlimited".

For people interested in Be (I'm happy to recommend them, even though I can no longer get a "referral" discount for doing so!) nip over to https://www.bethere.co.uk/

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

#287

Post by aeontech »

yid wrote: post #174
aeontech wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$6/Gb on mobile? That would be wonderful compared to, let me check... $20/Mb that I just paid for checking google maps over AT&T roaming when lost in another country. Sigh.

On an iphone at least, I cache the maps for the area I'm going to be in, then switch to airplane mode with location services turned on. Free, international GPS.

Cache them using what app? Because google maps won't cache a whole city for me, certainly not at street level zoom.

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

#288

Post by yid »

aeontech wrote: post #287
yid wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On an iphone at least, I cache the maps for the area I'm going to be in, then switch to airplane mode with location services turned on. Free, international GPS.

Cache them using what app? Because google maps won't cache a whole city for me, certainly not at street level zoom.

No, definitely not the whole city. I can usually cache strategic bits between wifi hotspots though, which gets me by.
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