Comcast Cap coming?

[Evadman]

Originally posted by: BurnItDwn
Caps suck.
That said, a visible cap is far better than an invisible cap.

Its about time they were honest about their cap.

:thumbsup:

Originally posted by: DrPizza
250GB a month of legitimate downloads? Sure, maybe for one month. But month after month, regularly? You're either a pirate else you're hoarding. (Else, you've gotta learn that hard drives are for storing data; you really shouldn't be downloading the same 25GB file every other day.)

My ~5 TB on 3 NAS's (currently, will be going to 1 large 20 disk NAS and 1 smaller one) disagree with your statement. It is very easy to have gigantic amounts of data.

By the way, I will be selling a NORCO 5 disk NAS decently soon when I upgrade. I went though 750GB of space in ~6 months. And yes, comcast yelled at me in april or june (I forget which) for going over their unadvertised limit. I even offered to pay more for more bandwith, but they won't let me. I want to give them money, and they said no. I am so confused. So now I work from home much less.

@Home was so much better. Comeon Verizon! Run that last mile of cable please!

 

[Fritzo]

Originally posted by: ric1287
Too lazy to copy past the article. Comunestcast

So they're proposing a 250gb cap per month. $15 for every 10gb over that.

I think comcrap is the only company going the complete opposite direction technology wise. With streaming media (movies, tv, music,) and online gaming becoming more popular, this stupid cap will cripple all of it. Absolutely ass backwards.

LOL- I have 4 peolple in my house that watch Youtube and videos all day long- they highest we've EVER had is 32GB in a month.

If you can use 250GB, you're either addicted to porn or need to go outside once in a while.

 

[Fritzo]

Originally posted by: frostedflakes

Originally posted by: skace
This cap doesn't affect me per say but it does annoy me. There is 3 issues here that I find significant.

1 - Nearly every single person in this thread made a judgment call on how much bandwidth they used solely based on how much they think they download. This is such flawed reasoning and yet it is going to be the basis of every person's metric for how much they think they use. When someone thinks "bandwidth" they always immediately go to "that's how much I can download". But this isn't a 1 way street, you use bandwidth to read this forum and you use bandwidth to post your replies. You use bandwidth to download and you use bandwidth to send back your acks, you use bandwidth to send to the peers while you leech from the seeds. Fact is, most don't have a clue what they use because they don't have commercial grade performance monitoring running on their little router.

2 - Any sort of capping when it comes to Computing is retarded. Computing is a very fast moving industry and by the time you can fully implement and realize a cap of 250GB, your top 1% is at 300GB. So now you might be hitting the top 5% and within time that will be the top 10%. Spidey will be quick to tell you that Comcast is ready to raise this limit at a heartbeat but that honestly doesn't seem feasible. All this time could have been better spent trying to figure out how to improve their network speeds.

3 - A lot of people seem to think that the highest bandwidth task anyone can do is illegal. While illegal downloads is probably pretty high up, the highest bandwidth items are most often legal - such as a webserver - check how much bandwidth pics.bbzzdd.com uses and this isn't any sort of revenue generating website. Comcast would want that running on their "$1500" a month service, despite the fact that it doesn't generate revenue. I don't actually know what kind of service bbzzdd runs on, however I personally believe sites should be runnable by home users, that was the entire principle of the internet when it started and in the 90s it was very easy to come across home grown websites being run by people with 0 ad revenue. These days, bandwidth costs have driven that right into the ground. It's a problem that needs to be resolved and bandwidth caps with massive pricing over the limit aren't the resolution.

Imagine this scenario. You've got a little home run website, it does OK, maybe you get 1,000 hits a month. It's modest and you are learning quite a bit in the process. One day you write something uniquely interesting on your site, and it gets dug and slashdotted, next thing you know, your shit deep in comcast bills for the month because your site got hammered and you are not sure you can even afford to keep it online now. Fun times.

Well first of all, using a residential connection for web hosting is against most ToS. Obviously businesses tends to use more bandwidth, so you're expected to purchase a more expensive business class connection. As spidey has pointed out many times, bandwidth is expensive. The only way residential ISPs can offer it at below market rates is because they oversell and bank on the fact that most users will not take full advantage of the connection. Kind of a messed up system I guess, but it's better than paying a few hundred a month for a T1.

Exactly. I work for a large ISP. Out of our 100's of 1000's of customers, about 20 abuse bandwidth each month. Of those, about 2 are businesses or someone hosting something they're not supposed to.

All of the others are caused by torrents. It's a pretty clear pattern.

 

[Sphexi]

I have a 60GB limit, never even come close, and I download a bit. The only people who will whine about this are those who are abusing the hell out of their $50/mth "unlimited" internet.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: Xavier434

Originally posted by: Jeff7181

Originally posted by: Xavier434
I'm on the phone with Comcast right now because I want to know my bandwidth usage history over the past 6 months to see where I stand. They have transferred me to one of their "higher" internet tech departments. They have absolutely no access to this information and on top of that they didn't even know that this was going to be happening starting Oct. 1 of 2008. This guy's supervisor wasn't even aware. I am basically sitting here reading the FAQ and article directly from their site teaching their employees about their new policies.

I have requested that I would like to be able to constantly monitor my usage by being able to directly access their data through a an online web application which shows me my usage history. Basically, I want what cellular companies provide on their websites. The guy agrees with me and seems pretty pissed off that his department was not even informed of any of this stuff. I have also requested that the idea of roll over bandwidth to be considered because we are all basically paying for 250GB a month whether we use it or not. I don't necessarily expect these changes to happen over the next 30 days but I feel it is good that they are getting feedback.

I am just appalled that their department had no clue what I was talking about with exception of being aware that something might happen based on some talk 6 months ago. After this guy started reading through the article he also told me that what appears to be happening is nothing like any bits and pieces of the details they were given 6 months. He said they were not expecting any changes until at least late 2009.

In the end, the guy was nice, helpful, and seemed pretty competent. His supervisor is also learning about this now and reading their own websites. I asked them to call me back on my cell once they get caught up to speed and can give me feedback about how I am going to be able to look up my usage history. I realize there are web tools out there which do such things, but considering the strict penalties in place I don't want to use them. I want to be able to get my data from the source so I know my account will be safe. After all, it doesn't make sense to enforce rules that your customers are unable to properly follow due to lack of information which should be made available to them.

You have absolutely no idea how a help desk works, do you?

Other than the fact that I worked at one for over a year? No, I guess I don't. :roll:

Then why in the hell would you think the help desk staff or even management would know something like this before it's released to the press?

 

[Agentbolt]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181

Originally posted by: Xavier434

Originally posted by: Jeff7181

Originally posted by: Xavier434
I'm on the phone with Comcast right now because I want to know my bandwidth usage history over the past 6 months to see where I stand. They have transferred me to one of their "higher" internet tech departments. They have absolutely no access to this information and on top of that they didn't even know that this was going to be happening starting Oct. 1 of 2008. This guy's supervisor wasn't even aware. I am basically sitting here reading the FAQ and article directly from their site teaching their employees about their new policies.

I have requested that I would like to be able to constantly monitor my usage by being able to directly access their data through a an online web application which shows me my usage history. Basically, I want what cellular companies provide on their websites. The guy agrees with me and seems pretty pissed off that his department was not even informed of any of this stuff. I have also requested that the idea of roll over bandwidth to be considered because we are all basically paying for 250GB a month whether we use it or not. I don't necessarily expect these changes to happen over the next 30 days but I feel it is good that they are getting feedback.

I am just appalled that their department had no clue what I was talking about with exception of being aware that something might happen based on some talk 6 months ago. After this guy started reading through the article he also told me that what appears to be happening is nothing like any bits and pieces of the details they were given 6 months. He said they were not expecting any changes until at least late 2009.

In the end, the guy was nice, helpful, and seemed pretty competent. His supervisor is also learning about this now and reading their own websites. I asked them to call me back on my cell once they get caught up to speed and can give me feedback about how I am going to be able to look up my usage history. I realize there are web tools out there which do such things, but considering the strict penalties in place I don't want to use them. I want to be able to get my data from the source so I know my account will be safe. After all, it doesn't make sense to enforce rules that your customers are unable to properly follow due to lack of information which should be made available to them.

You have absolutely no idea how a help desk works, do you?

Other than the fact that I worked at one for over a year? No, I guess I don't. :roll:

Then why in the hell would you think the help desk staff or even management would know something like this before it's released to the press?

Dude.... you're an idiot.

Even when I worked at AOL, as the LOWEST of low tech support grunts, we knew about massive changes like this before it was "officially" announced, usually at least 2 months beforehand. We had to, if suddenly you can keep your AOL email address even after you quit the service, or if the "unlimited" dialup service is suddenly going to start getting cut off after 350 hours in a month, the people on the front lines need to know about it immediately to start being trained on how to handle the inevitable influx of angry callers

Any even marginally self respecting company will let its floor know about stuff like this as soon as possible, and if it gets leaked beforehand like this did, you at the VERY least send out a fucking memo. Do YOU know anything about help desks? :roll:

 

[DrPizza]

Originally posted by: Agentbolt
Dude.... you're an idiot.

Even when I worked at AOL, as the LOWEST of low tech support grunts, we knew about massive changes like this before it was "officially" announced, usually at least 2 months beforehand. We had to, if suddenly you can keep your AOL email address even after you quit the service, or if the "unlimited" dialup service is suddenly going to start getting cut off after 350 hours in a month, the people on the front lines need to know about it immediately to start being trained on how to handle the inevitable influx of angry callers

Any even marginally self respecting company will let its floor know about stuff like this as soon as possible, and if it gets leaked beforehand like this did, you at the VERY least send out a fucking memo. Do YOU know anything about help desks? :roll:

Well, gee, if you would have read the thread, you would have discovered that a lot of the Comcast employees didn't have a clue about the caps. Apparently not every company behaves exactly the same way you expect them to.

 

[Muadib]

Originally posted by: mugs

Originally posted by: Muadib
Sure, this cap is a way to stop the torrent abusers, but they could have stopped it long ago, by stopping the ads telling people they had unlimited data.

They did!

Heh, yeah thinking about it I guess they did. The only commercial I've seen from them in the last year, is a collaboration with the other 2 cable companies in this area. I guess that will be ending soon.

 

[Muadib]

Originally posted by: classy

Originally posted by: OdiN
Anyone using over 250GB/month is pirating stuff illegally.

Yep. No question

That's not true. I've hit that a couple of months, just downloading stuff to my DVR.

 

[nismotigerwvu]

Well it is done, and I switched to Dish Network for my television (saved a ton and have way more stations) and went to verizon dsl for my internet. I know I'm not the only one who will do this. Comcast can eat a dick.

 

[her209]

Originally posted by: Sphexi
I have a 60GB limit, never even come close, and I download a bit. The only people who will whine about this are those who are abusing the hell out of their $50/mth "unlimited" internet.

How do you abuse something if it is unlimited?

EDIT: If I "abuse" my unlimited nights and weekend minutes from my cellular phone service provider, will I get a angry cease and desist letter?

 

[charrison]

Originally posted by: her209

Originally posted by: Sphexi
I have a 60GB limit, never even come close, and I download a bit. The only people who will whine about this are those who are abusing the hell out of their $50/mth "unlimited" internet.

How do you abuse something if it is unlimited?

EDIT: If I "abuse" my unlimited nights and weekend minutes from my cellular phone service provider, will I get a angry cease and desist letter?

And if your downloads were limited to a 32k voip channel that had to be attended, I doubt there would be problem with unlimited downloads either.

 

[Agentbolt]

Originally posted by: DrPizza

Originally posted by: Agentbolt
Dude.... you're an idiot.

Even when I worked at AOL, as the LOWEST of low tech support grunts, we knew about massive changes like this before it was "officially" announced, usually at least 2 months beforehand. We had to, if suddenly you can keep your AOL email address even after you quit the service, or if the "unlimited" dialup service is suddenly going to start getting cut off after 350 hours in a month, the people on the front lines need to know about it immediately to start being trained on how to handle the inevitable influx of angry callers

Any even marginally self respecting company will let its floor know about stuff like this as soon as possible, and if it gets leaked beforehand like this did, you at the VERY least send out a fucking memo. Do YOU know anything about help desks? :roll:

Well, gee, if you would have read the thread, you would have discovered that a lot of the Comcast employees didn't have a clue about the caps. Apparently not every company behaves exactly the same way you expect them to.

I was responding to Jeff7181's notion that it was ridiculous of anyone to expect that Comcast people would've known about this beforehand, NOT saying that every company tells its people beforehand. Enough do that blitzing someone for expecting Comcast would've told its rank and file about this somehow is stupid.

Re-read my reply Sir Pizza, I think you misunderstood it.