@mbouchard: According to the rep I talked to they don't have a service but he personally thinks they should and probably will if the public start asking for it enough.

i moved mid-august 2007 and had to get comcast [no more fios :-( ] and these are solely my giganews stats since then, and this has been LIGHT usage. i routinely went over 500gb/mo when i had fios (sweet sweet 1.8MB/s gloriousness)

Still, our cable service here in the boonies is so throttled to hell and back I'd pay an extra ten bucks a month to get a guaranteed, uncapped 250GB/mo. But I doubt anyone from CableOne is reading this, because I'm pretty sure nobody from CableOne actually uses the Internet.

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So..... nobody is asking questions frequently?

You will be fine... they are just cutting out the 'torrent/business' type users.

I sometimes go home for lunch

I watch two or three movies a night while I write and draw. I also watch streaming HD at work on break.

That, combined with my mass upload of large-format photographs I've taken, and downloads of video projects I work on for a hobby (I edit short films for a friend who makes "arty" stuff) means that I probably use that much bandwidth in two weeks.

According to their calculations.

There's no such thing as "1200Mbps" video. That would be called 1.2Gbps video and would be 150 megabytes per second. No internet connection outside of a datacenter could ever dream of pulling down that much data per second.

You are thinking 1200Kbps. Which is 150 KB/s.

Without doing too much more math I think all your numbers are therefore off by a factor of 1,000x.

2 to 3 GB/month is typically? I probably reached that in the past 30 minutes. Bad Comcast.

Thanks for your help!

B) I deliberately only have Comcast internet and no Comcast cable - my PC is hooked directly into my TV and I rely solely on internet TV / video - as well as a web server for streaming my music library to me at work / on travel - and an ftp server for file access while on the road. Since installing DD-WRT on my router (which logs total traffic by month), my usage has been:

July - 300 GB
Aug - 216 GB
Sep (so far) - 166 GB

Aug and Sep only stayed under the limit because of work travel.

Thanks Comcast!!

Yep, read about this in The Week. I am so happy to be out from under Comcrap. My internet provider really doesn't care about what their subscribers do. No caps, no phone calls, no nothing. Of course, they have never had to deal with courts demanding they turn over their records either (at least not that I know of anyway).

So much for the joy of using IPTV....

it's lose/lose poeple, a 250GB cap and still we have throttling policies..

what a joke....

F.

But is it a limit on download, or up and down? Because downloading 250 GB will get you some *bytes in upload.

G'bye Comcast.

So, once I get streaming Netflix on my Xbox 360 this fall, this means that if I were a Comcast broadband customer, I'd be screwed since just that one service could potentially swallow up all my bandwidth for a month.

Sounds like fun.

I'd be real interested what my actual usage rates have been averaging over the last few months. I moved into a new place back in late June and got Verizon FiOS' 15/2 Mb/s service. I've never had it so good as I've had it with this, and obviously I've taken advantage of this increased bandwidth in certain ways, and I fully enjoy my bandwidth. If someone started capping my usage with this giant pipe I have in my home, I'd pitch a fit. Why offer this high speed and service if you have to curtail your use about halfway through a month.

OK Lets try this a different way. I'm willing to pay for NO CAP. Comcast are you listening?

To David: People think they should get "unlimited bandwidth" because they are selling us "unlimited bandwidth". We are not getting it for free. We pay for a service, and once they have our money, we expect them to deliver what they promise. How they accomplish that is none of our concern, and we don't want to hear complaints; they need to work that out before they complete the sale. We would rather they didn't fulfill their obligations by added a bunch of terms to their obligations (especially if those terms contradict their marketing), but if they must do so, they need to admit to it. Before, Comcast never told people what the limit is. People would just get a call telling them not to go over the limit again, but refused to say what that limit is.

Your neighbor subsidizes you because that's the nature of "all you can eat" pricing; the people who use less cover the costs of the people who use more. If he's not getting the value of what he paid for, he can use more, or cancel and/or find another service.

Also, it is physically impossible for a home to get more bandwidth than they have paid for, unless they have altered the network illegally. That's why they promise up to X MB/s for one service, and Y MB/s for another. If anyone on the X plan could get Y plan speeds, why even have the Y plan? By that logic, you would be capable of blazing speeds at 2 AM, since almost no one is online. If the network is overly congested, talk to your ISP rather than complaining about how much your neighbor is using. They are probably overselling their network.

And it's still free.

I assume you mean you are paying for the higher speed tier?

In that case, you are paying for the ability to reach your monthly cap FASTER then everyone else.

Typical speed is either 6 or 8Mb/s

Higher speed is either 8 or 10Mb/s

They both have "power boost" which is a feature where the first 30 seconds of a connection will operate at up to 150% of your normal speed level or thereabouts.

I can see in the future paying for "basic internet" "extended Basic internet" and "a la carte web channels". This is just one more step against net neutrality.

Tomorrow: Unless Comcast generously raises its caps to account for the ever increasing bandwidth requirements for normal use (call it a "bandwidth inflation/creep" if you will), it'll be called an unreasonable bottleneck.

Boy, 640k is more than anyone will ever need! (Gates mentioned in an interview that he did not actually say that. But that mentality in general still lives strong today in the USA)

Next Week: America will officially be called a third world country by other countries, in part, thanks to quasi-national ISPs like Comcast, Time Warner, etc. all following suit (competition with each that actually decreases the bandwidth pool)

Care to answer to this Comcast?

My question is how can someone actually verify this. I know comcast can but they hold all the cards and their deck is stacked.

Not being a huge windows techie (linux here), is there some sort of magic program that keeps track of your broadband usage? I know Windows keeps track of the number of packets within your network settings, but you'd have to find a way to weed out the internal traffic.

I would consider ours a heavy use household and we 'only' weighed in at 60gb for the last month. This consisted of streaming video, radio, software downloads, etc. We aren't capped with our provider but I doubt we'd ever touch 250GB.

Nationwide they also locked people into 2-yr contracts with the offer of locked pricing schemes and free Wii's

Does not compute. I'm still hanging onto the recording I made when I signed up for my service here where the CSR said I have "unlimited use of bandwidth". MLB.TV, Slingbox, Hulu, mobile audio streaming, VNC, and VPN access can add up.

If in an average month you are a "typical" user taking up 50-100GB of downloads, they will roll forward a buffer of 50-100GB so that if you have a "heavy" month where you take up 300GB you won't be flagged.

Or maybe they already have unofficially planned to do something similar where they only enforce the policy if you violate it for several months in a row?

Also worth pointing out is that this is 250GB of "bandwidth"... so this is both downloads AND uploads... though that's not much of an issue they already have such low speed caps on uploads.

Assuming 30 days in a month... and a 100% saturated connection is downloading at 8Mb/s ...

You could saturate your connection for 142 minutes per day, or about 2.25-hours.

Assuming "50% duty cycle", double that time, about 4.5 hours every day.

This may seem impossible for "average" users, but in a household with 3-4 internet users it is entirely possible for the average.

As many others probably suspect, this is not REALLY about prevent bandwidth hogs from causing service disruptions... it's about restricting the development of services that directly compete with Comcast's own services like Video On Demand (Netflix, Amazon Unbox, etc) and Telephone service.

You watch... they'll start playing games with prices for higher caps, etc... none of this will affect your connection to the internet or the usage of other users... it's all designed to maximize their profits because they are a monopoly in many, many areas... DSL, with most places coming in at under 1.5Mb/s as the max available, is no longer REALLY competition for their 8-12Mb/s service... the only true competition is from rival cable companies (my last town had RCN & Comcast) or from Verizon's FIOS service.

For example, Halo 3 saves a replay of every game on your hard drive, and a 10 minute game is only a few MB. All of the data necessary to track every action taken by every user over the course of the entire match is only a few MB. So yeah, online gaming gaming won't make a dent in your 250 GB limit.

You protest about a 250 GB limit per month, how about a 20 GB limit for $50??? (which is average and what I pay)

Of course, one could also choose to pay the $75/month fee to get 100 GB.

Nevertheless, us Canucks up here would be in heaven with such draconian limits of 250GB

Isnt this a material change to the contract?

And online gamers should know that even the heaviest multi- or single-player gaming activity would not typically come close to this threshold over the course of a month.

Straight to the point...
Bullshit.

When you dam up the river, all the creeks the tributaries below that point are affected.

Question though. The letter says that only a fraction of 1 percent are going over the cap... how many customers can that possibly affect? I'm thinking very few, which makes the logic presented in the letter rather flawed.

Bandwidth is something you consume. The more you consume, the more you should have to pay. It's your choice how much bandwidth you consume, and if you consume 3x more then your neighbor, why should your neighbor subsidize you?

We are starting to come "full circle". When all of this started, you payed for how long you were connected to the internet (think AoL). Then the companies realized that you would spend more, if they went to flat rate pricing and gave you what appeared to be "unlimited" bandwidth.

Now they have to tighten up this policy mainly because people are doing illegal stuff, or they are running a business out of their home, and not paying for "business" class service.

Or, in the rare case, have umpteen people in a house consuming much much more bandwidth then they should be ... which comes back to me (the average user) subsidizing the person with 18 children living at home, all with computers, and all of them surfing youtube.

- Oh, and what does it take to have posts actually posted around her?

@matuszek:

There are 8 megabits in 1 megabyte, if you get 1200 megabits per second, you are streaming 150 megabytes a second, it will take you 1666 seconds to hit the cap, or 27.76 minutes.

COMCAST HAS ALWAYS HAD LIMITS IN PLACE

So now that they are actually admitting the limits so users CAN watch their own usage is a good thing.

Bottom line: If you never received a call from Comcast to talk to you about your internet usage before - you will will most likely not start to receive them now.

I agree it would be nice for them to make available some sort of tool to help user keep track of usage - but again, the limit is not new... it is just newly mad public.

But make no mistake, this is the first nail in the coffin for ever increasing bandwidth. The companies want to lower their expenses (ie. amount of bandwidth they allow for people within a certain plan range) and increase their revenue (new pricing tiers, blocking certain types of content that they can then charge you access for). THAT is the future of the internet if you don't vote with your dollars.

You could go ahead and install a software solution on your computer to monitor these statistics. Unfortunately this is not a solution for multi-computer homes. (Unless it's at your gateway, i.e. router WAN port or Cable modem WAN port) There are solutions that allow you to monitor the WAN router port, DD-WRT, OpenWRT, etc. But these are customer solutions that must be setup/installed by the customer.

As for Comcast, this is a policy that 1.) Forces higher usage customers to go to their "Business" plan (read money grab) 2.) Embrace a policy that lowers bandwidth usage across the board with at no costs to Comcast(read money grab) 3.) Forces off the network those won't pay for a "Business" plan. (read money grab)

does this have the same impact as lets say a wireless provider upping their text messaging rates? Does this give you a legal way to leave comcast?

Wow, people in the rest of the world are getting higher speeds for cheaper every month, while here in America we are going backwards.

How long till we are paying through the noses for dialup speeds?

I'm with the previous posters. How can an individual monitor their bandwidth useage?

I'd be calling Comcast every week to find out how close I am to my limit.

Broadband in the US is pretty much a joke when compared to Europe. IPTV et al will never take off if companies continue to pull shenanigans like this.

When I'm home the family uses between 4 and 8 gigs per day. My wife does a bit of browsing and email. My elder son is always watching youtube, hulu, or downloading mods for Halflife 2. My younger son is dowloading and playing things on gametap. I'm usually streaming something from netflix or downloading from usenet to catch up on shows hulu and netflix don't carry. (and playing World of warcraft) Weekday use is a bit lower at 0 to 4 gigs.

We seem to come out a bit higher than their "average user" but still haven't drawn their ire since they say the cap has been silently in place for a while. I think 250gigs per month is ok for now.

That is Comcastic. So 2-3 GB is the norm? Is this the days and age of dial-up where web sites aren't filled with ads and graphics and you tube doesn't exist?
Is clinton still in office?
I must be from the future where GB of data can be gone through within an hour.

I don't like limits - but at least they are telling users what the limits are. (since they have always had limits, but would never tell anyone what they were)

It was like driving down a road with a speed limit sign, getting a ticket from a cop for speeding... but never telling you what the speed limit is or how much you were speeding by. Now Comcast is doing the smart thing and putting up those speed limit signs so users will know.

Again, thank you Comcast.

50 million emails in 30 days from a bot is not a far stretch at all.

You're not gonna address your throttling policies, either? Whatever Comcast-opoly.

verizon if you can hear me HELP! fios is like 5 minutes down i95 please hurry!

250GB is most likely sufficient for the majority of their users, however, when you get more HD content online, it wont take long to reach that cap. Something that would make more sense to me would be to have usage pricing, where the more you use, the more you pay, but that will never get adopted because then their revenues would most likely plummet.

@thinkliberty: You hit the nail on the head. If you watch HDTV online, you can avoid the commercials, and you aren't paying subscription fees.

Bad customer! (for wanting to view programs on any media you want to)

How much longer before Time-Warner and Cablevision do this too? Or are they doing it already? I don't know, as I have Verizon DSL here in NYC.

This directly competes with HDTV over the Internet. It's nice how they have a local monopoly on broadband and can lock out companies that may want to offer HDTV or HD movies over the Internet.

This is anti competitive action from a monopoly and should be illegal.

Way to keep killing ways to innovate in the US!

See, now was that hard?