Will Comcast cut you off?
Digg was abuzz over the weekend on the topic of monthly download caps at Comcast and other ISPs. Apparently, a few users have run into trouble when they went over an undisclosed 200GB per month limit on their connections. See the transcript from TechBasic.net.
I called customer service at Comcast, my ISP, and asked if there was a limit. "No, sir," came the answer. "You mean I could leave the connection on and constantly downloading all the time and it'd be OK?" I asked. "Yes," he answered.
I also hit up the online chat-based support. My rep told me, "There are no restrictions on the amount of data you may upload or download." Except for newsgroups, where you only get 2GB a month.
It looks like the Comcast cap that TechBasic uncovered is so secret that many Comcast reps don't even know about it.
Regardless, 200GB is an awful lot of bits, certainly more than most normal users will need today. But it's not necessarily abuse of the system, as Comcast led the TechBasic poster to believe. 200GB a month is approximately 10 HD movies. A user could also soak up a lot of upstream bandwidth by keeping Bittorrent online to allow the continuous uploading of legal files--like Linux distributions. Got a few heavy users in a household? Are you a video editor who works out of your home? It'd be quite possible to use up 200GB in a month. It's not easy for the ordinary user, but it is possible.
Other ISPs do have posted usage limits. Cox, for example, limits customers to 4 to 60GB/month, depending on the package signed up for.
Posted or not, a usage limit on an Internet connection is a strange idea. It's like a cable TV company cutting you off after you've watched too many hours of programming in a month. With the Net carrying more video and entertainment content every day, and with more of it high-definition, monthly usage limits on bandwidth really can't last for long. Or so I hope.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe.
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What surpised me is that the 18mbit service has a lower bandwidth cap then the Extreme, with a price difference of nearly $40. Exactly how are they going to justify this?
More and more I'm finding that my HSDPA service is the only one I think I will stay with since it is always on where ever I go. Now if I can only find a really big battery :)
guy when he refused to state what my bandwidth cap should be. I was exasperated to say the
least. He mentioned that I'd been doing about 200GB per month and needed to "drastically
cut back" on my bandwidth usage. He did also mention that I needed to stay off of their
"top 1% of users list". I admit, my family are Internet power users. We have about 5
computers connected to the firewall router and my 8yo daughter uses the connection too.
The next day I called ATT and got signed up for DSL. ATT has new types of DSL that do not
depend on distance to the central office and rely upon remote connection points instead,
where a fiber connection is aggregated for the area and sent back to the CO and then
connected to the Internet backbone. This is a much more scalable architecture and it is
obvious to me that Comcast is very much worried about being able to maintain their current
network in light of some customers downloading Netflix movies and so forth in the months
to come.
The 200GB figure was not completely a surprise to me, as I do various P2P activities on
occasion, we have Vonage and my wife is a homemaker and talks to friends and family every
day. I think software and video downloads on youtube, as well as ebay picture uploads
would account for a great deal of bandwidth in addition to the Vonage use. I did cut back
on downloads quite a bit (I tried to limit to 2GB per day) and thought I would be OK for
the next couple of weeks until ATT DSL was installed; having a date about a week out when
I would get switched on, I continued to do downloads on my Comcast account, albeit at a
much lower level.
I WAS WRONG. My Comcast Internet service was shut off within about a week.
Of course my wife (who uses the phone a lot, as well as the Internet for her business) was
ticked off; po'ed at me and very mad at Comcast. I told her I had been reading DSL reports
and various ISP reviews that indicated that once the service was cut, nobody had been
successful in getting them to turn it back on. Maybe a dozen reports I had read were very
uniform in this respect.
I told her to take the kids and go visit her mother (has DSL) for the weekend and our
service with ATT would be switched on in a few days...
Of course ATT has never been a very progressive company and I found out just how bad they
are when I ordered DSL and realized they had completely fouled up my DSL order, except for
the phone line itself (there are 3 parts: phone line, unlimited LD, and DSL installation)
needed to be completely reordered! They had not completed 3rd party verification of the
ULD, and that was on hold. The DSL order was completely misplaced and had to be reordered.
This pushed out our ATT DSL service date a bit..
ATT it seems is completely unable to track DSL orders for new customers that do not yet
have an ATT phone line. I found this completely unacceptable and inept, and not a small
bit disconcerting! Old school.. they don't even answer the phone after about 9pm pacific.
I pointed out to my wife that our 911 access (via Vonage) had been cut off (by Comcast)
without any notice; a vague warning did not cite any hard limit, and we were not capable
of monitoring our actual usage with any tool provided by Comcast. My emails to
abuse@comcast.net (dev null) inbox where merely being autoresponed to and I saw no
coherent responses that looked like a human being was involved. Mean while the wife has a
cell phone and was putting it to good use.
She called the consumer hotlines. She called Sacramento, the state capital. She talked to
neighbors and tried to alert the media of our problem. Finally she ended up at the Public
Utilities Commission. I guess she happened to find the right person there because they
conferenced her in on their calls to Comcast on her behalf and transfered around to
various departments until they ended up with the high speed Internet department.
The PUC lady kept up her mantra "You have disconnected this woman's 911 access without
notice, and she has a sick child at home; if she needs 911 service, you have a HUGE
LIABILITY on your hands here; do you really want that?"
My wife's cell phone finally dropped the call and she was worried but looks like the PUC
did the trick because within an hour, our Internet connection was back on, and we had
a $50 credit to our Comcast bill (!).
I'm posted this around the Internet because it is the first example I had heard of any
success whatsoever in this type of case.
guy when he refused to state what my bandwidth cap should be. I was exasperated to say the
least. He mentioned that I'd been doing about 200GB per month and needed to "drastically
cut back" on my bandwidth usage. He did also mention that I needed to stay off of their
"top 1% of users list". I admit, my family are Internet power users. We have about 5
computers connected to the firewall router and my 8yo daughter uses the connection too.
The next day I called ATT and got signed up for DSL. ATT has new types of DSL that do not
depend on distance to the central office and rely upon remote connection points instead,
where a fiber connection is aggregated for the area and sent back to the CO and then
connected to the Internet backbone. This is a much more scalable architecture and it is
obvious to me that Comcast is very much worried about being able to maintain their current
network in light of some customers downloading Netflix movies and so forth in the months
to come.
The 200GB figure was not completely a surprise to me, as I do various P2P activities on
occasion, we have Vonage and my wife is a homemaker and talks to friends and family every
day. I think software and video downloads on youtube, as well as ebay picture uploads
would account for a great deal of bandwidth in addition to the Vonage use. I did cut back
on downloads quite a bit (I tried to limit to 2GB per day) and thought I would be OK for
the next couple of weeks until ATT DSL was installed; having a date about a week out when
I would get switched on, I continued to do downloads on my Comcast account, albeit at a
much lower level.
I WAS WRONG. My Comcast Internet service was shut off within about a week.
Of course my wife (who uses the phone a lot, as well as the Internet for her business) was
ticked off; po'ed at me and very mad at Comcast. I told her I had been reading DSL reports
and various ISP reviews that indicated that once the service was cut, nobody had been
successful in getting them to turn it back on. Maybe a dozen reports I had read were very
uniform in this respect.
I told her to take the kids and go visit her mother (has DSL) for the weekend and our
service with ATT would be switched on in a few days...
Of course ATT has never been a very progressive company and I found out just how bad they
are when I ordered DSL and realized they had completely fouled up my DSL order, except for
the phone line itself (there are 3 parts: phone line, unlimited LD, and DSL installation)
needed to be completely reordered! They had not completed 3rd party verification of the
ULD, and that was on hold. The DSL order was completely misplaced and had to be reordered.
This pushed out our ATT DSL service date a bit..
ATT it seems is completely unable to track DSL orders for new customers that do not yet
have an ATT phone line. I found this completely unacceptable and inept, and not a small
bit disconcerting! Old school.. they don't even answer the phone after about 9pm pacific.
I pointed out to my wife that our 911 access (via Vonage) had been cut off (by Comcast)
without any notice; a vague warning did not cite any hard limit, and we were not capable
of monitoring our actual usage with any tool provided by Comcast. My emails to
abuse@comcast.net (dev null) inbox where merely being autoresponed to and I saw no
coherent responses that looked like a human being was involved. Mean while the wife has a
cell phone and was putting it to good use.
She called the consumer hotlines. She called Sacramento, the state capital. She talked to
neighbors and tried to alert the media of our problem. Finally she ended up at the Public
Utilities Commission. I guess she happened to find the right person there because they
conferenced her in on their calls to Comcast on her behalf and transfered around to
various departments until they ended up with the high speed Internet department.
The PUC lady kept up her mantra "You have disconnected this woman's 911 access without
notice, and she has a sick child at home; if she needs 911 service, you have a HUGE
LIABILITY on your hands here; do you really want that?"
My wife's cell phone finally dropped the call and she was worried but looks like the PUC
did the trick because within an hour, our Internet connection was back on, and we had
a $50 credit to our Comcast bill (!).
I'm posted this around the Internet because it is the first example I had heard of any
success whatsoever in this type of case.
I moved down here to the ATL Georgia region and am currently living with my aunt and uncle who happen to have a comcast plan for their phone, TV, and net service bundled. The phone and the TV service are cherry and I do have to say the entire deal seems pretty good to... but the net....
Despite being an ex- World of Warcraft now for over a year ( gotta work the 12 steps ) i am still QUITE the little bandwith ho. BiTorrent is on constantly unless I am playing an MMO. Some of us around here have also started toying with a program called Replay AV 8 which takes our ( perfectly legal and paid for Sirius accounts ) and records them to .mp3 24/7. I don't use it all that much cause the bitrate it encodes at is a little low, but my friend has gotten MASSIVE amounts of data via that route.
Anyway, to get more to the point, I am wondering what to expect from the service men / women when (if) they get here tomorrow. They have already been out twice over the last 6 months but of course the internet was working fine whilst they were here, they told my aunt and uncle they had no problem and got in their cush van and headed out to smoke another one at that point i suppose...
While being in absolutley no way an IT guru I did take a couple networking classes for my degree so I can at least keep up with lingo blathering lazies who think they are talking themselves out of having to actually "fix" an issue.
I believe that their piece of garbage modem is a failing 2 year old Modem they gave us when we first signed up.) It hardwires directly to the phones, TV boxes, one Desktop and then into a wireless router which provides access for my two systems.
I have prepared a series of Microsoft Network Logs for each system and while I don't read them blindfolded I am quite sure the results are **much** less than optimal.
I think it is their Modem for serveral reasons:
1. Aunt is hardwired and experiences issues at the exact same times we do.
2. We have alot of variety in our system arsenal, going from my aunt's old win98
desktop to my newer and much better equipped laptop. Despite the differing
OS's, hardware, and drivers, the issue remains.
3. It gets MUCH worse in the late night early morning(when all good
customers are in bed and you would *think* it would actually be
bettter....
Any input / ideas about my conclusions would be greatly appreciated. It has been a while since i bothered with much networking.
More or less, my bottom line is should I be firm and point out facts and demand results like *TODAY BRO* or should I let them prattle on about how i need to hit the reset button on the modem and try restarting my computer forever...
Well if any of you input - sharing - types out there have better ideas of what to show them to or proven methods of getting what you need from them while maintaining a professional attitude, i am at your mercy lol plz help meh.
-Thanks in advance and sorry for the friggin long comment in the friggin old thread...
-Cooper B
( BTW dumb question. The tech lady i talked to yesterday said we should be getting 6 gigs here, my aunt is hardwired like 5 feet from the modem... Is that something I might wanna take up with them ? )