Comcast’s data caps are ‘just low enough to punish streaming’

[JSt0rm]

we have fios in parts. U-verse all over and twc all over. I call every year and inform twc that I hate them and the only way they can keep me is with price. They make it so you have to renegotiate every year.

 

[OverVolt]

The networks seem to be abandoning bundling since you can order a lot of channels a la carte streaming now.

Comcast is going to be a stick in the mud in its monopoly markets meanwhile most people are seeing great benefits with cord cutting.

 

[master_shake_]

Having a "top provider" in your state means you have no options?

On that map, GA is listed as "Comcast."

My area has been Charter for decades. Before that, it was something like "CableVision."

I work for a small cableco that exists only within my county.
We have areas that overlap with Charter and parts that overlap with comcast.
AT&T U-verse services all over town. Lots of overlap in our coverage areas...especially at apartment complexes.

I'm sure a major metropolis like Atlanta has LOTS of options for TV+Inet.
FIOS is in Atlanta.
Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta.

https://youtu.be/fpbOEoRrHyU?t=7m10s

except this.

 

[Svnla]

One provider, AT&T. 6mb @ $65/month. No cap at least, but at that speed how could I hit it?

Wow, $65 a month? I used to have ATT Uverse 12Mb (max out for my place) for $40/month and I thought it was expensive.

Now I am paying $40/month for 50 Mb from a local cable company with 250 Gb cap.

 

[local]

Wow, $65 a month? I used to have ATT Uverse 12Mb (max out for my place) for $40/month and I thought it was expensive.

Now I am paying $40/month for 50 Mb from a local cable company with 250 Mb cap.

Yes. I refuse to "upgrade" to 18mb uverse because it has a 250gb cap with $1/gb overage charge ($50 minimum charge) for the same price. So I stick with my unlimited DSL and hope for a better tomorrow.

Some of my neighbors have had over $200 bills because of that.

 

[EOM]

Wow, $65 a month? I used to have ATT Uverse 12Mb (max out for my place) for $40/month and I thought it was expensive.

Now I am paying $40/month for 50 Mb from a local cable company with 250 Mb cap.

woah a 250mb cap @ 50mbps? you're getting like 6 seconds per month max before they notice and start throttling ()

 

[sontakke]

how much of stuff a typical PC pulls up during its daily/weekly maintenance? how about "free Win10 upgrade" package? how many gigabytes are we talking about here?

 

[thomsbrain]

No caps for us in CA yet, though I suspect they are coming and I'm not sure what we will do as 300 GB is a regular month for us. We're a single family home doing 100% legal/paid streaming.

Let's keep in mind that while Comcast's target is TV cord-cutters, it also affects anyone who wants to use the cloud for any purpose, including back-ups. Want to back up your home photo collection? Better space that out over a year!

 

[BxgJ]

No caps for us in CA yet, though I suspect they are coming and I'm not sure what we will do as 300 GB is a regular month for us. We're a single family home doing 100% legal/paid streaming.

Let's keep in mind that while Comcast's target is TV cord-cutters, it also affects anyone who wants to use the cloud for any purpose, including back-ups. Want to back up your home photo collection? Better space that out over a year!

Yeah I've wondered about this. I only back-up some stuff online like photos, music, and some files, the rest is local. What about those people who use one of the whole drive(pc) back-up services? Guess you better hope your drive doesn't die, might take a few months to get your data back :|

Now that I think of it, comcast can effectively keep out any service that uses larger amounts of data, only to provide it themselves, with the data not counting toward the cap. Comcast online back-up! I'm sure it'll be awesome /s

 

[Aikouka]

What bothers me is Comcast's smarmy attitude about the whole thing. They love to tout that it's about "fairness" and that "people who use more pay more". The biggest problem with the latter is that they certainly charge heavy users more money, but one would expect that in a system where "fairness" is taken into account, people that use less would pay less. However, they don't. The only way to get a reduction in your bill on Comcast for lower usage is to go from 250GB or 300GB to 5GB, and for that hefty reduction in usage, you get a discount of $5. But you better not go over that 5GB, or instead of being charged $10 per 50GB, you're charge $1/GB (i.e. it would be $50 per 50GB).

That outlines another problem. Through all of Comcast's policies, they provide inconsistent representations of the value of data. As I mentioned above, in a reduced usage plan, data is valued at $5 for 245GB/295GB (depending on whether you're on the old or new plan respectively), and the same plan's overages then value data at $1 for 1GB. In other words, you're getting a $5 discount, but to get the same data back, you'd have to pay $245/$295! D: If you go back to the 300GB plan, you see that 50GB of data is then rated at $10, but then, Comcast also has a plan where unlimited is available for a $30 flat fee every month.

It's also worthwhile to note that Comcast is also taking another play from wireless carriers. They're starting to rope people in on two-year contracts for reduced prices. It's kind of like when you go to JCPenney... the sale prices are pretty much the price that you expect to pay, and in Comcast's case, their contract prices are the prices that you expect to pay compared to other ISPs.

In my case, I find that there are times when I won't download things like games (legally through Steam), because it's just too much. A game or two that's about 20-30GB, which isn't unheard of for a big-budget, AAA game, takes a good chunk out of what's available.

 

[Brian Stirling]

I'm not sure why they need hard CAPS on there in the first place. They could simply use soft caps with QoS. Everyone gets full priority up to the determined "cap" at which point their traffic is marked down to Best-Effort. If someone over their cap tries to use it during peak hours, they're likely to get somewhat degraded service, but other times of the day they can expect full speed since the non-capped people aren't using it anyway. Comcast has already paid for those routers/switches to be put in place and powered on; bandwidth not used is bandwidth wasted... as a resource.

Sounds nice, but I never get near caps but I frequently have bad internet performance! They're not throttling me -- the network is being pushed and when that happens performance suffers.

People seem to think the providers have all kind of capacity they're sitting on but the truth is at certain times of the day the network can't keep up and it doesn't matter if you are above the cap or not. Video streaming is a huge bandwidth consumer and 4K is way more than HD.

We have these bitching contests all the time and too many believe the network has infinite capacity so everyone should be able to eat all they want whenever they want. The trend line for data usage is insane and 4K will drive stupid increases in data use.

OTH, the providers have pushed for and been granted near monopolies almost everywhere and we need to increase competition. I don't see competition lowering cost all that much but it could spur expansion of capacity and that's what we need.


Brian

 

[Phoenix86]

One provider, AT&T. 6mb @ $65/month. No cap at least, but at that speed how could I hit it?

Sounds like you're out in the sticks a bit, that's DSL. You don't even have u-verse, hell I was able to get fiber at my last job and it was just south of Mansfield in Alvarado.

Even out in Midlothian we had u-verse.

South DFW might be stretching it a bit, sounds more like South of DFW.

 

[Homerboy]

Sounds nice, but I never get near caps but I frequently have bad internet performance! They're not throttling me -- the network is being pushed and when that happens performance suffers.

People seem to think the providers have all kind of capacity they're sitting on but the truth is at certain times of the day the network can't keep up and it doesn't matter if you are above the cap or not. Video streaming is a huge bandwidth consumer and 4K is way more than HD.

We have these bitching contests all the time and too many believe the network has infinite capacity so everyone should be able to eat all they want whenever they want. The trend line for data usage is insane and 4K will drive stupid increases in data use.

OTH, the providers have pushed for and been granted near monopolies almost everywhere and we need to increase competition. I don't see competition lowering cost all that much but it could spur expansion of capacity and that's what we need.


Brian

They are sitting on TONS of backbone capacity.

Where they are limited is last-mile runs to the doorstep. But even that is up-gradable but it will cost them a large amount of money to do that. And without direct competition, why take on that large expenditure if you can MAKE money by putting caps in place so you dont have to spend money allowing people to use the service freely.

 

[local]

Sounds like you're out in the sticks a bit, that's DSL. You don't even have u-verse, hell I was able to get fiber at my last job and it was just south of Mansfield in Alvarado.

Even out in Midlothian we had u-verse.

South DFW might be stretching it a bit, sounds more like South of DFW.

Alvarado. Hey it is on some maps of DFW. We are in the new part of town where they decided to only run phone lines, no cable and no fiber. About half my neighborhood can get uverse and they won't sell DSL to anyone new in the last 3 years. So some of the people that moved here in the last year have 0 providers available.

 

[TwiceOver]

Sounds nice, but I never get near caps but I frequently have bad internet performance! They're not throttling me -- the network is being pushed and when that happens performance suffers.

People seem to think the providers have all kind of capacity they're sitting on but the truth is at certain times of the day the network can't keep up and it doesn't matter if you are above the cap or not. Video streaming is a huge bandwidth consumer and 4K is way more than HD.

We have these bitching contests all the time and too many believe the network has infinite capacity so everyone should be able to eat all they want whenever they want. The trend line for data usage is insane and 4K will drive stupid increases in data use.

OTH, the providers have pushed for and been granted near monopolies almost everywhere and we need to increase competition. I don't see competition lowering cost all that much but it could spur expansion of capacity and that's what we need.


Brian

I've worked with ISPs in the past and agree. The pipe is only so big. The problem with caps is they only work if it persuades someone not to use the service during peak usage. "I'm not going to watch Netflix before bed because I might go over my cap", said no one ever.

I do believe that this current trend is simply a money grab to get over cable sub losses, but eventually it will truly be about capacity. We are already seeing metered connections that are cheaper during off-peak hours, it's only a matter of time before something similar is pushed to home users.

I don't know what the answer is, caps don't work but the dam will burst some day.

 

[mnewsham]

Sounds like they have decent peering as your bandwidth to and from the upstream providers is obviously available... sounds more like they were throttling the services and not VPN traffic...? Unless I'm misunderstanding your setup..

No, peering between specifically netflix & youtube and verizon at the backbone level.

Verizon refused for several months to upgrade their peering infrastructure with level 3 communications, this meant traffic to pretty much anywhere besides netflix or youtube was 100% unaffected. But during peek hours, it would fully saturate their link between netflix/youtube traffic and L3. Verizon simply wouldn't pay to put in more infrastructure, even after L3 offered to essentially pay for it.


Has nothing to do with them SPECIFICALLY throttling those services, but the end result was essentially the same.


https://www.techdirt.com/articles/2...flix-congestion-using-verizons-own-data.shtml

 

[Svnla]

woah a 250mb cap @ 50mbps? you're getting like 6 seconds per month max before they notice and start throttling ()

Hehehehe, I don't do streaming and no heavy download/gaming for me. I used about 50 Gb per month for the last 5 months or so. So far, so good. I mean 250 Gb, not Mb.

I may sing a different tune if/when I have Netflix/gaming/downloading.

 

[BxgJ]

Why do some keep mentioning 'gaming' as a high use application? Unless you are streaming games, it uses very little compared to most other uses. I guess downloading some games can count for a good bit, though I usually back up the game files to the nas so I don't need to download them again every time I want to reinstall a game.

 

[mnewsham]

Why do some keep mentioning 'gaming' as a high use application? Unless you are streaming games, it uses very little compared to most other uses. I guess downloading some games can count for a good bit, though I usually back up the game files to the nas so I don't need to download them again every time I want to reinstall a game.

Gaming is mentioned because "gaming" these days is done on steam, or on xbox one/PS4.

All of these platforms provide digital distribution. A single game can be upwards of 50GB now. Even 2 games per month plus netflix and youtube will get you close to your cap, if not over.

 

[soulcougher73]

When we moved recently we only had 2 choices. Suddenlink or Centurylink. Centrylink was really bad speed wise for the price. So Suddenlink it is.

 

[Anubis]

TWC has no caps I'm aware of, but I don't use over 150GB a month. Usually around 100GB and most of that is thanks to big game update files and youtube.
Interesting thing about Youtube is in the evenings I'll notice I sometimes have trouble streaming it in any reasonable resolution (it'll jump down to 360 or less and still buffer a lot). Check my router and the data is only trickling in. Run a speed test, and I measure at 30Mbit no sweat. So I'll go to something like keepvid to download the youtube video to my PC and it'll download the full 20 minute video at 720p in just a couple minutes. What's up with that???

It only happens on occasion, but when it does it is irritating.

I think they are experimenting with them someplace but yea in general don't have them

150 is nothing to worry about, I think I average 300 ish and they never say anything to me about it

 

[Phoenix86]

Alvarado. Hey it is on some maps of DFW. We are in the new part of town where they decided to only run phone lines, no cable and no fiber. About half my neighborhood can get uverse and they won't sell DSL to anyone new in the last 3 years. So some of the people that moved here in the last year have 0 providers available.

If I scroll out enough Mexico is on the same map.

They are pushing fiber lines slowly down 917, I think they are about half way to Alvarado, so... "soon" ™

edit: u-verse can do fiber to the node, copper to the house with decent speeds. They won't have to rewire the whole neighborhood.

 

[local]

If I scroll out enough Mexico is on the same map.

They are pushing fiber lines slowly down 917, I think they are about half way to Alvarado, so... "soon" ™

edit: u-verse can do fiber to the node, copper to the house with decent speeds. They won't have to rewire the whole neighborhood.

Yeah they started that process here and got about half way done. Then they bought direct tv and cancelled the rest of the project. The next phase is supposed to have fiber but I doubt it at this point.

 

[shortylickens]

change companies.

Oh wait.

it's like they carved out a map of who can have what territory.

Kinda like a cartel.

WOOT! Virginia!!

 

[lxskllr]

I have suddenlink 50Gb down and we now have a 250GB cap. Here is the real reason companies are implementing caps. http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/...Have-Become-Significant-Revenue-Stream-135586

Perfect! That means you can get 50GB of high speed internet for $10/month, so people like my mother don't get ripped off, right? Right???