I remember about six years ago, I got a notification from them for using too much data. When I spoke with them, I said I needed more data (we get everything over the internet, there are several of us here, and I also work from home). I needed to know what my cap was. They wouldn't say. They just said that I had gone over it and if I went over this non-specific cap again, I would be banned from service for a year.
Fine, then how can I buy more bandwidth at the same price? Can I just buy a second account and double my bandwidth? Whatever that cap might be? Nope. What options do I have? Nothing. Sorry, we can't help you.
When I moved, a Comcast person came by to offer me service and told me about their business offering. That is what I use. I have never had a problem with it. Granted, it is much more expensive, but at least I can generally do what I want.
I pay about $180/mo for 75Mbps down and 15Mbps up and generally use a couple terabytes per month.
Gosh, you're so unreasonable! Why do you need so much bandwidth?
It's ridiculous that anyone would ask that question in this day, but they do. And they ask it accusingly. How dare you use a lot of bandwidth. What kind of monster are you for wanting to use internet services? JUSTIFY YOURSELF!
First, we use Netflix. That is 2-4gb per hour per stream. With four people living here, that's an average of maybe two hours per person per day or 750gb/mo.
Second, we use a remote backup service across six machines and that comes out to between 50-500gb/mo.
Third, we consume a lot of podcasts, video podcasts (easily 1-2gb per episode), streaming music, streaming radio, youtube, live-streams on twitch.tv, two of us are constantly VPNed into work on at least one box, VOIP (often with video), video games, and countless other things. Multiplied by the several people that live here.
As more content is available over the internet and in better quality, this consumption will only increase.
To live with 75Gb/mo per person in the modern age when you get all of your entertainment and work and communication over the internet is ridiculous. And charging obscene overage charges is abusive.
Especially after we have all already dispensed with the "but bandwidth is a precious limited resource, like oil!" nonsense.
Off topic but $180 is cheap. We pay $450/m for 50/15 from Time Warner for our business class cable which is a backup to our fiber which is 50/50 which we pay $1500/m which is a Time Warner owned fiber but our service is with another provider.
As for the bandwidth is precious, the cable loops are shared. It took over 6 months to get our fiber provisioned so we were on cable for those 6 months. We did notice a huge drop in bandwidth around 6pm at our office. We correlated to people getting home.
One thing I realized with last mile connectivity/bandwidth is that our city/neighbors were partially to blame. We talked to Verizon about FIOS, they said they would run us a line if we could get city to allow them to dig up the roads. They said they've been trying to do it but the city won't grant them permits. The city blocks them because people complain about noise and construction. Without having an alternative we have no leverage to negotiate pricing.
The reason this happens is because of how ISP business models work and specifically over-subscription. I'm not defending comcast, quite the contrary, but you're going to hit this problem with every ISP, because of over-subscription.
Consider the following:
1) you have to build out a certain type of network to provide a good experience, and this includes a minimum bandwidth allotment that is quite high.
2) because "normal" bandwidth usage is extremely bursty there is no reason (almost) to ever upgrade the bandwidth to the edge nodes.
3) bandwidth to edge nodes is constrained, even for incumbents. There's 2 cases, non-incumbents have to buy it from a monopoly, which is expensive. The other case is incumbents. They can get it cheap, until they hit a specific point (the bandwidth initial buildout that was done decades ago). When they hit that point it takes a massive investment to increase it.
4) the reason people go over bandwidth limits is peer to peer traffic. This unfortunately has two properties. Firstly, it's a consistent download, not bursty. Second it doesn't go out of their network (if it's a large network that is), meaning anyone that does this creates a constant traffic flow in TWO points of their network, and every component in between. This means that the bandwidth needed to support p2p is a factor more than the bandwidth your client actually reports to you, and exponentially more than needed to support browsing (even youtube).
5) If some ISP decides against this (they're small for example, in which case it all goes over cheap transit or even peering) that brings them extra costs, but not extra customers (because only the expensive customers like you, which can't be supported by the infrastructure, will switch over)
6) Most customers refuse to pay more. (e.g. switch to the business account)
7) Nobody is ever going to pay for a network that can support exponentially increasing bandwidth. It's not possible, for obvious reasons. When you're as big as comcast is, the investment for a 5% upgrade would require ridiculous amounts of capital, so they don't want to.
(replacing the current infrastructure with fiber MAY fix this, however the people who control the current infrastructure like Comcast have an interest in blocking that for obvious reasons. However there are problems with fiber too, the root of the problem is the constant light -> electrical -> light conversions that are necessary at lots and lots of points and make the capital investments quite high)
The tax-payers have subsidized massive broadband expansion that never happened. Many of the players pocketed the savings and just never followed up with their end of that deal.
Also, network congestion has nothing to do with bandwidth limits (data caps, really). If you are transferring large amounts of data at 3am on a Tuesday when the rest of the network usage is almost non-existent, then you are not impacting anything. If you are doing it at 8pm on a Friday night, you probably are contributing to network congestion. So, why apply the concept of a limited resource (data) across the board?
We are done with the lie from telecoms that data is somehow a precious resource. It is an artificial constraint used to justify both lack of infrastructure investment and jacking up prices on customers. This is no longer a point of contention as it is finally known industry-wide and covered by the press (finally) as of a couple years ago.
Think of data caps in relation to a freeway. That freeway can carry a certain number of cars at one time. That is the only constraint. Cars that are driving at 2am when the freeway is empty are not eating into tomorrow's rush-hour-drive freeway traffic capacity. It is a constant. Likewise, it is not your 300gb of data per month that is impacting the network. It is when you are transferring that data.
And, finally, since the telecoms claim that "only two percent of users use a lot of bandwidth" and that something like 95% of users do nothing but check their email and watch one or two youtube videos a week, then there should be PLENTY of bandwidth left over for these bandwidth hogs. The solution is simple if that is the reality (which it isn't): Make email the highest priority in your traffic shaping. That way, those horrible people consuming a ton of bandwidth are not impacting the flow of those 12 kilobyte messages passing by here and there.
Oh, and finally, people do not go over their bandwidth limits because of p2p traffic. They go over it because it is 2014 and Netflix movies run several gigabytes per hour and people consume a lot of movies/tv shows every month and multiple people live in a single home. They go over it because they listen to lots of podcasts or watch video podcasts which run a gigabyte an hour. They watch streaming online networks, listen to streaming music, use remote online backup services, use VOIP, watch youtube, watch twitch.tv, stream to twitch.tv.
Youtube and Netflix account for just over 50% of traffic.
P2P accounts for 10%.
> The tax-payers have subsidized massive broadband expansion that never happened. Many of the players pocketed the savings and just never followed up with their end of that deal.
All I can say is that subsidies -believe it or not- do not exempt anyone from mathematics. If you are unable to see that packets travel more than one "freeway" there is nothing to say at all.
Hell, even freeways don't work like that. Believe it or not, cars on a freeway come from somewhere and go somewhere. This affects the capacity of the freeway for obvious reasons. If people did on freeways what they do with p2p, random any-to-any travelling, there would be no possible way to keep freeways uncongested, and yet there'd be loads and loads of "free" space. And yes, we would all be talking about making more intense users pay more, or get them off the roads alltogether. Hell, we're doing that now.
I looked into Business class, but wasn't willing to sign a 2-3 year contract with Comcast for it. Maybe I'd be happier with business class, but I wish that 2 years from now I'll have a different provider.
Depending on where you are the business plan might not be more expensive. I went from a Comcast standard to a Comcast business plan and pay the exact same amount per month. The only difference is that for the business plan they had me sign a two year contract.
They also use the HTML injection (which I assume is why this was posted to HN) for the "five strikes" "Copyright Alerts" bullshit too; if you have an allegation flung against you, all of your HTML will have a Comcast popup injected into it until the account owner logs in and acknowledges that they were bad.
As an aside, check out the "Flexible Data Option" linked from that page for some other laughs - a $5 discount to drop your quota from 300 GB to 5, and also your overages suddenly become five times more expensive ($1/GB vs. $.20/GB). That's some nice math.
To be fair, the "Flexible-Data Option" seems to only be available on the "Economy Plus" plan, which is their $20/m @ 3Mbps option. Still an annoyingly small quota, though.
This is scary. What the hell are they using to move bits around, avian carriers? In Poland I can get 20Mbps for $3/m (and no data limit!), not the other way around.
Pretty good deal for little old granny who only uses the computer her son set up for her to send emails to her grandkids. That's my granny, BTW; it does happen.
$5 off a $70 bill is not "good" for your granny. Frankly, any broadband wired home should get a trivial "email access" style service for a minimal fee just to cover the accounting and maintenance. Your granny should be paying $5 or $10/mo; not getting $5 off.
...Okay? You just linked to a random corporate policy FAQ page; I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be thinking here.
Is your point that 300GB/month is not enough for your needs? Well, I agree, which is why I haven't signed up for 300GB/month service. If I had signed up for a service like that, I think I'd really appreciate that they offer flexible and customizable notifications and are up front about where the limit is and what happens if you cross it (you pay $10/50GB overage, no additional throttling). You hear so many horror stories about folks being suddenly threatened with nebulous consequences for crossing invisible lines, and apparently XFINITY doesn't do that, so good on them!
I finished reading the comment thread, and I now think maybe you're complaining about the "in-browser notifications." That was clear as mud, thanks. I know Hacker News is pretty strict about headlines, but there's a comment thread right here. This HN habit of linking to random pages with an interesting tidbit in paragraph 5, and leaving it to us to figure out why we're supposed to get huffy, is tiresome.
Because they have been doing the injections for at least a couple years now and it was widely covered in the press when it started.
There's nothing, therefore, for people to do in this thread beyond devise their own discussions around what element of the old-news that they are most interested in.
That's odd. According to the terms of service for my Comcast service in Denver, the "bandwidth limit has been temporarily suspended". Over the last 6 months I have used between 350GB and 600GB of traffic each month and I have never received any sort of notice.
In fact, I could have gotten 40mbps DSL for $35 (special deal) but they had a 250GB/month cap and the only option to have no cap was a $175/mo for the same speed (but a dedicated link).
So I'm using Comcast specifically because the lack of a limit on bandwidth.
"This information applies only to customers in Huntsville and Mobile, AL; Atlanta; Augusta and Savannah, GA; Central Kentucky; Maine; Jackson, MS; Knoxville and Memphis, TN; and Charleston, SC"
These are the only markets with caps right now. Which is up from 2012, when there were only two.
Portland, OR also has caps. I remember trying to research this about a year ago when I was running into the then 250GB cap with Comcast. None of these lists seem to include my region, but I was still receiving warnings, and could see a maxed out bandwidth usage meter when logging into the Comcast account management site.
I was surprised to see a notification injected into the HTML of the page I was browsing when my parents' went over their limit in December. Never seen it before.
Wow, I was reading this thinking how great it is, but the comments here are the opposite.
Up here in Northern Canada, a 100Mbps plan has a 250GB cap for $140/mo and a 50Mbps plan has a 150GB cap for $110/mo.
Overage charges? $5/GB !
People up here that are getting multi-thousand dollar overage bills are thinking about a class action lawsuit against the sole telco because they believe it's intentionally over-counting data used to drive up revenue....
I thought rogers was caught doing "accidental" billing to accrue a certain amount every month. I think that was quite a while ago though. Good to know that they are up to their old tricks again!
I'm so happy I live in Sweden =)
About $33/mo for 100/10 mbit no cap.
$42/mo for 100/100.
For $150/mo I could get 1/1Gbit with no cap.
(Above are prices for fiber connections. DSL connections are generally more expensive, but no where near the prices you are discussing.)
It's kind of crazy that there isn't more competition between ISPs in the u.s.
Oh, forgot to mention: It's 50 cents per GB for overages.
I feel sorry for my friends that have a Rogers/Bell/Telus connection. But then again I don't: because they're too lazy to switch but keep complaining about their huge bill.
50GB free for 3 months a year and then $10 per 50GB over... how very reasonable. The typical ISP in Australia "shapes" down to between 128-512kpbs. I've thankfully never experienced it, but I dread the day.
If the topic here is HTML injection, that's pretty creepy. What else are they using that technology for? Surely the cost isn't justifiable purely for excess usage notifications.
Yep, I would take that deal in an instant. Here in India I get a maximum starting limit of 80GB, after which they drop the speed down to a 256kbps crawl. And if I want extra data I have to pay around $10 (that's USD) for 5GB. Fuck.
ISPs have kind of painted themselves into a corner with flat rate pricing sold on the basis of peak bandwidth. They can't afford to let people saturate their connections, but any change to the pricing (like caps) makes customers feel like they're getting less for their money.
I wish we all had unlimited lines and paid by the gigabyte. It would honestly probably be cheaper for most people and makes more sense as at the network levels everyone pays by bandwidth consumed anyways.
Though with the power company at least you can buy more electricity. With my cable and DSL providers in my area going over is not an option. There are no plans above 350Gb. Going over starts insane overage charges. My relatives just moved into the area and were faced with a $900 bill with overages b/c they used 950Gb of data. Thanks FCC I didn't want competition anyway.
I mean, that last statement is true in the areas with brown-outs because the electricity companies haven't provisioned enough generating capacity to handle the load.
No one would be complaining if Comcast had a 5TB/mo limit on 100Mbit lines.
The problem is that Comcast (and many other ISPs) haven't actually build networks that can supply internet at the levels people want, and they charge overly high rates for services which can't provide what people are told they can.
For a lot of people, the telcos are your only realistic alternative, and they're just as bad. That 6Mbps DSL from AT&T also comes with a $10 charge for every 50GB in excess of 150GB.
I really don't know how the complete landscape looks these days, but I'd imagine most reasonably metroish areas still have decent DSL providers (even if they're primarily targeting businesses), which will cover most people here. And I know there would be a lot more DSL build out by CLECs if people didn't automatically dismiss it "too slow" without doing a true comparison.
I remember about six years ago, I got a notification from them for using too much data. When I spoke with them, I said I needed more data (we get everything over the internet, there are several of us here, and I also work from home). I needed to know what my cap was. They wouldn't say. They just said that I had gone over it and if I went over this non-specific cap again, I would be banned from service for a year.
Fine, then how can I buy more bandwidth at the same price? Can I just buy a second account and double my bandwidth? Whatever that cap might be? Nope. What options do I have? Nothing. Sorry, we can't help you.
When I moved, a Comcast person came by to offer me service and told me about their business offering. That is what I use. I have never had a problem with it. Granted, it is much more expensive, but at least I can generally do what I want.
I pay about $180/mo for 75Mbps down and 15Mbps up and generally use a couple terabytes per month.
Gosh, you're so unreasonable! Why do you need so much bandwidth?
It's ridiculous that anyone would ask that question in this day, but they do. And they ask it accusingly. How dare you use a lot of bandwidth. What kind of monster are you for wanting to use internet services? JUSTIFY YOURSELF!
First, we use Netflix. That is 2-4gb per hour per stream. With four people living here, that's an average of maybe two hours per person per day or 750gb/mo.
Second, we use a remote backup service across six machines and that comes out to between 50-500gb/mo.
Third, we consume a lot of podcasts, video podcasts (easily 1-2gb per episode), streaming music, streaming radio, youtube, live-streams on twitch.tv, two of us are constantly VPNed into work on at least one box, VOIP (often with video), video games, and countless other things. Multiplied by the several people that live here.
As more content is available over the internet and in better quality, this consumption will only increase.
To live with 75Gb/mo per person in the modern age when you get all of your entertainment and work and communication over the internet is ridiculous. And charging obscene overage charges is abusive.
Especially after we have all already dispensed with the "but bandwidth is a precious limited resource, like oil!" nonsense.