Comast setting monthly "bandwidth threshold" of 250 GB

[Tekneek]

We've listened to feedback from our customers who asked that we provide a specific threshold for data usage and this would help them understand the amount of usage that would qualify as excessive. Today, we're announcing that beginning on October 1, 2008, we will amend our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) available at Comcast.net Terms Of Service - Acceptable Use Policy and establish a specific monthly data usage threshold of 250 GB/month per account for all residential customers.

Read the announcement here...

[SirFozzie]

Welcome to the days of "Unlimited doesn't mean Unlimited".

[molson]

How much porn in that per month?

[miked]

I wonder if one can track this real-time.

[SirFozzie]

Originally Posted by miked

I wonder if one can track this real-time.

Of course not.. that way they get to surprise you by charging you by the MB/GB you go over.

Whoops: Read up elsewhere.. you go over once, no problem.. you go over twice in six months, they don't charge you more, they just kick you off their service. For a year.

[DaddyTorgo]

heh - like any customers actually wanted them to set specific limits. Why don't they just man-up and admit that they're doing it for their own reasons, instead of giving us this bullshit about customers wanting it?

[Noop]

Fuck Comcast, EA Sports, Microsoft, Apple, AT&T and if you want to be down with them then fuck you too.

[SteveMax58]

Well...I dont know what the "average" internet user does, but 250 GB is a lot of crap to download in a month.

Though...it starts at 250 GB and who knows what it changes to in the future.

[SirFozzie]

How big is your typical Netflix video? ESPN360? MLB/NFL Audio/TV?

It adds up quickly.

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by DaddyTorgo

heh - like any customers actually wanted them to set specific limits. Why don't they just man-up and admit that they're doing it for their own reasons, instead of giving us this bullshit about customers wanting it?

I don't work for a cable provider and don't have any reason to support them. When they say their customers wanted this, they didn't actually have many customers that said "Gee you should limit our bandwidth". They probably get this from surveys that were phrased such as either:

1) Would you rather limited bandwidth or higher costs to support additional bandwidth need

or

2) Something to do with limited bandwidth and better performance, or possibly degraded performance from oversubscribed connections.

I could see easily people saying yes to limited bandwidth on surveys phrased along these lines.

250 GB is actually a decent amount of data though a month. That is 2,000,000,000,000 bits a month and if I am doing the math in my head correct, somewhere above 500 hours straight of downloading on a T1 sized connection. There is only something like 800 hours in a month, and lets say someone has an even faster bandwidth connection and download at 5Mb/s speeds, that still is almost a week straight of downloading.

This is something that will likely never effect casual users at all, and is aimed at people who do high amounts of media streaming or what not obviously.

That said, I'm not a comcast user, and if I was limited on bandwidth, I would be annoyed too.. but I can be hypocritical about this as long as it doesn't effect me. I won't be suprised if this doesn't happen to other larger providers in the future though, they just want to target the heavy abusers, not mom and pop at home on the internet (or even likely most of us).

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by SirFozzie

How big is your typical Netflix video? ESPN360? MLB/NFL Audio/TV?

It adds up quickly.

Most DVD quality movies end up being roughly 5-6 GB without special features, menus, etc I believe. Netflix and these other providers use various forms of compression however to make it smaller. I don't know the exact size, but lets just use the 5 GB amount and assume they don't compress it any (which isn't the case).

That still would be 50+ netflix movies in a month. I mean I watch alot of netflix online since I work from home.. but I probably watch on average 5-7 a week. You would have to watch 10-12 a week or about 2 a day to hit this limit uncompressed. With the compression they use, it probably even becomes more. Like I said in my last post, they are targeting people who do a huge amount of media streaming, or heavy downloading alot.. not the average user.

I would classify someone who watches 50 online movies in a month a heavy user

[SteveMax58]

Originally Posted by SirFozzie

How big is your typical Netflix video? ESPN360? MLB/NFL Audio/TV?

It adds up quickly.

Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)

From the article...and this sounds about right from my quick math(I came up with about 3GB per movie...I likely estimated the movie time at 100 minutes/ea.

[Alan T]

Just looked up the information on the size of netflix movies from online. It is not official, but people who rip the instant watch movies say the highest quality setting still ends up being under 2 Gig always and usually around 1 Gig (just a bit under)... so like I figured I was way under on my estimate. You're talking closer to 100-120 movies a month instead.

[SirFozzie]

Originally Posted by Alan T

Just looked up the information on the size of netflix movies from online. It is not official, but people who rip the instant watch movies say the highest quality setting still ends up being under 2 Gig always and usually around 1 Gig (just a bit under)... so like I figured I was way under on my estimate. You're talking closer to 100-120 movies a month instead.

What about 3-4 hours of MLB.TV? If you focus on little bits, yes, that's something. Let's not forget all those services like Amazon's Unbox and everything.

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by SirFozzie

What about 3-4 hours of MLB.TV? If you focus on little bits, yes, that's something. Let's not forget all those services like Amazon's Unbox and everything.

That is what I was trying to say in my first post.. even with all of the little bits, you still are talking roughly 2-3 weeks worth of solid downloads in some cases. (for people with faster connections, obviously less amount of download time to reach the same total).

In most cases, you aren't talking about people who watch tv or movies at night when home from work, and watch it all day on weekends. You're generally talking people who leave it downloading via P2P programs all day/night while not even at the computer.

I am sure there will be some cases of people with normal usage who might be able to hit that limit, but they are the exception and not the rule. I am guessing I could probably get close to that amount myself, but that is because I am a network engineer, live on my computer, work from home and watch movies all day online while working

I guess I'm not trying to defend Comcast, I could care less about comcast.. they aren't even my provider. I just don't want average joe user to panic thinking they're going to get cut off. That simply isn't the case. Comcast (and I am sure later other providers) are simply targeting the overusers or the abusers with this in an effort to keep their service affordable I would guess. I doubt this will effect 95% of FOFC that is on Comcast at all. The others of you will just have to download less porn

[Deattribution]

It seems like if this became the norm this would discourage internet providers to continue to increase speeds, and content providers to not push forward with new tech (say, 1920p HD or something). I could understand this if it were being offered as an option tier which you paid less for, but why would anyone who has used comcast suddenly be excited that they're limited to 250gb now?

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by Deattribution

It seems like if this became the norm this would discourage internet providers to continue to increase speeds, and content providers to not push forward with new tech (say, 1920p HD or something). I could understand this if it were being offered as an option tier which you paid less for, but why would anyone who has used comcast suddenly be excited that they're limited to 250gb now?

I wonder if that is their next step in the peice here for them.. they'll later unveil a truly unlimited service for a substantial amount more down the road.

[SirFozzie]

Hell, at least we're not in Canada.. there's an ISP there that's limited "Unlimited" users to 5 GB a month.

[stevew]

Not a suprise. Although I fear it will becoMe the industry norm. I wonder how much this was motivated by the fear of RIAA type lawsUits. While some can easily legitimately use that much data, I wouldn't be shocked if much of the heavy bandwith was related to illegal activities.

[SirFozzie]

Originally Posted by stevew

Not a suprise. Although I fear it will becoMe the industry norm. I wonder how much this was motivated by the fear of RIAA type lawsUits. While some can easily legitimately use that much data, I wouldn't be shocked if much of the heavy bandwith was related to illegal activities.

None of it really.

They just expected much less usage, when they set their policies, and oversubscribed the capacity of the lines, and now that there's programs to really USE that bandwidth (Slingbox, Netflix, Other streaming video, etcetera).. they don't want people to actually live up to their promises.

[Raiders Army]

What about families? At this point, two cell phones, two 360s, one PS3, one Wii, and four computers use our internet service. That's a total of ten devices. While we don't really download movies, I could see if two or three of us did, we'd be in trouble.

[Deattribution]

Originally Posted by Raiders Army

What about families? At this point, two cell phones, two 360s, one PS3, one Wii, and four computers use our internet service. That's a total of ten devices. While we don't really download movies, I could see if two or three of us did, we'd be in trouble.

They'd probably suggest subscribing to a seperate line then. I like how they try to write this as if the consumer base has been begging for it.

[Deattribution]

dola

The upside to this is that this only last if other companies (time warner, cox ect) join in, otherwise as others continue to expand or already exist in comcast territory, they'll have to drop it when the competitors advertise their 'real unlimited' internet.

[sterlingice]

Hell, our local service in Lawrence has had 20GB limits for a while and I can stay under that if I stay off the bit torrent too much. 250GB just isn't that hard to stay under.

SI

[thesloppy]

heh.

Interestingly, I just finall gave into Comcast and ordered their 'tier' with the NFL Network, and while I was on the phone, the guy talked me into 'sampling' (free for now, $10/month in 3 months) their 8mb cable connection (I currently have a 6mb connection). He reasoned that the extra speed would be a great boon to heavy internet users.

I'm glad good ol' Comcast is looking to fuck me over two ways here, recognizing my need for more speed, so I can get up to their new cap as fast as possible. It's not too surprising that the subject of this bandwidth cap never came up, in a discussion that was primarily centered on my heavy internet use.

[mckerney]

Originally Posted by Raiders Army

While we don't really download movies, I could see if two or three of us did, we'd be in trouble.

Sure downloading movies could put you over the limit, but why worry about that when you can instead use Comcast's Movies On Demand service?

[DanGarion]

It's better then the numbers Time Warner is talking about. 8 gigs a day is a lot of traffic.

[Daimyo]

You seriously would have to try to get over 250GB in a month. This won't affect anyone other than people serving illegal content.

250GB = 2,147,480,000,000 bits

What can you do with that many bits?

Average 1.24 Mbs every waking hour (assume 16 hours/day, 30 days/month)
or
Fully max out your connection for 6.6 hours every day (assume 3 Mbs connection)

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by Daimyo

You seriously would have to try to get over 250GB in a month. This won't affect anyone other than people serving illegal content.

250GB = 2,147,480,000,000 bits

What can you do with that many bits?

Average 1.24 Mbs every waking hour (assume 16 hours/day, 30 days/month)
or
Fully max out your connection for 6.6 hours every day (assume 3 Mbs connection)

That is what I was trying to say but stopped because I didn't want people to think I was pro-cable company. I actually have other different beefs with cable companys providing of internet connectivity, but this is not one of them. In my mind this is a very understandable move to try to keep costs down by Comcast.

I understand the arguement people are saying,"Who actually was asking for limits" but like I said before I bet none of their surveys or polls that they took were phrased as such. I would have to bet they staged each of the questions around the decision of people preferring to pay more for the same service or having a limit put on it so high that most people would not hit it with normal usage.

[DanGarion]

Originally Posted by Alan T

That is what I was trying to say but stopped because I didn't want people to think I was pro-cable company. I actually have other different beefs with cable companys providing of internet connectivity, but this is not one of them. In my mind this is a very understandable move to try to keep costs down by Comcast.

I understand the arguement people are saying,"Who actually was asking for limits" but like I said before I bet none of their surveys or polls that they took were phrased as such. I would have to bet they staged each of the questions around the decision of people preferring to pay more for the same service or having a limit put on it so high that most people would not hit it with normal usage.

I may be pro cable company because I work for them, but I think bandwidth caps are some of the stupidest things to come out lately. They should increase the bill price if there is an issue, not put hard caps. Don't sell the service if you aren't going to offer it unlimited.

[DanGarion]

Originally Posted by Tekneek

We've listened to feedback from our customers who asked that we provide a specific threshold for data usage and this would help them understand the amount of usage that would qualify as excessive. Today, we're announcing that beginning on October 1, 2008, we will amend our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) available at Comcast.net Terms Of Service - Acceptable Use Policy and establish a specific monthly data usage threshold of 250 GB/month per account for all residential customers.

Read the announcement here...

I wanted to add to this. They did this because they were already shutting off people that were considered "abusive". So people complained there was no documented threshold that was quantified, that is why they now have announced the specific amount.

[Celeval]

Originally Posted by Alan T

I don't work for a cable provider and don't have any reason to support them. When they say their customers wanted this, they didn't actually have many customers that said "Gee you should limit our bandwidth".

Actually, I think they're saying their customers wanted to know what the limits /were/. They've had the limits for a while, but it was only stated as "excessive usage".

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by DanGarion

I may be pro cable company because I work for them, but I think bandwidth caps are some of the stupidest things to come out lately. They should increase the bill price if there is an issue, not put hard caps. Don't sell the service if you aren't going to offer it unlimited.

Maybe it doesn't phase me as much as I've been dealing with bandwidth caps or similar things since the 1980s. There used to be restrictions not on the amount of bandwidth used (since that wasn't really an issue back then), but instead on how long you stayed connected with your dialup modems into dialup pools. Simply because the choices back then were to charge more for all users to increase the infrastructure (add more modem pools) constantly, or limit how often they could be used.

Even when "high speed" was rolled out, most providers did not initially offer unlimited connectivity to customers. People who purchase hosting or other such things also are very familiar with bandwidth restrictions. Only in the last ten years has "unlimited" bandwidth usage been pretty mainstream and honestly it is stupid to give away something that is limited to people unlimitedly. It didn't used to be an issue when their capacity far outweighed the demand, but now a days there just is so much available to eat up bandwidth, capacity planning has become a nightmare for them.

You say bandiwdth caps are one of the stupidest things to come out lately, but I guess I have always dealt with them to some extent or another, and I actually always have felt offering unlimited access to something that could not be gurantueed was equally or more stupid is all.

If it was me running the cable company, I would probably try to tier up users in groups and offer them pricing based on that group. You can have the normal rate for your normal 1 or 2 Mbps connections and a download cap.. or you can be a more intensive user, pay for the 5Mbps or such , have no download cap and pay a premium (which might be fairly expensive even). Or some combinations of the two.

This is where I am happy I didn't accept that job with RCN back in the 90s, what I do is far easier than dealing with this crap

[DanGarion]

Originally Posted by Alan T

This is where I am happy I didn't accept that job with RCN back in the 90s, what I do is far easier than dealing with this crap

Plus RCN went bankrupt. Although I think they are still around.

[Schmidty]

I wonder how this will affect people that play a lot of MMORPGs.

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by DanGarion

Plus RCN went bankrupt. Although I think they are still around.

They are an option in the Boston area I know still, but yeah I look back sometimes at the long list of job interviews I did back in the 1990s right before the dot.com boom and it is pretty comical how many of those companies no longer exist. Some of the bigger ones I interviewed at are still around such as Motorola and such, but I feel I definitely made the right decision way back when on who I signed with. I've made many wrong choices in my life, but my move from Sprint back then was not one of them.

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by Schmidty

I wonder how this will affect people that play a lot of MMORPGs.

It won't at all. You would have to play any MMORPG (such as WoW) 24/7 the entire month without sleep and you still won't be close to the 250GB cap. Most MMORPGs used to be optimized for 56kbps, but the last few years some of the newer ones have upped that with how common high-speed internet is. Even with that however, it still doesn't come close to using up the available internet.

Seriously, the only ones that will be having issues with this are people who do a ton of P2P traffic (sharing or downloading illegal music, movies, or whatnot) all hours of the night while they sleep, or people who offer servers on their home connection (which usually is a violation of their agreement anyways), or people who really watch more movies/music online than 99% of the average people.

[DanGarion]

Originally Posted by Alan T

It won't at all. You would have to play any MMORPG (such as WoW) 24/7 the entire month without sleep and you still won't be close to the 250GB cap. Most MMORPGs used to be optimized for 56kbps, but the last few years some of the newer ones have upped that with how common high-speed internet is. Even with that however, it still doesn't come close to using up the available internet.

Seriously, the only ones that will be having issues with this are people who do a ton of P2P traffic (sharing or downloading illegal music, movies, or whatnot) all hours of the night while they sleep, or people who offer servers on their home connection (which usually is a violation of their agreement anyways), or people who really watch more movies/music online than 99% of the average people.

Yeah I try to tell people this all the time, when they think they are getting better service because they get Road Runner Tubro. Once you get to a certain threshold the speed of your service doesn't improve your gameplay.

[MacroGuru]

BTW...I used to work with the guy that stirred up the original aspect of Comcast terminating him because of to much bandwidth...

Comcast Broadband dispute

He is a major reason this is being instituted with Comcast btw...

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by DanGarion

Yeah I try to tell people this all the time, when they think they are getting better service because they get Road Runner Tubro. Once you get to a certain threshold the speed of your service doesn't improve your gameplay.

I am not really a MMOPG person, but the only networking thing that would be any impact on playing them is a poor connection or bad connection causing lost packets. As long as the connectivity is clean, it is not networking that impacts them at all. I would guess usually graphics card, memory, hard drive speed and processor speed are the main things that improve MMORPG play for people.

[DanGarion]

Originally Posted by Alan T

I am not really a MMOPG person, but the only networking thing that would be any impact on playing them is a poor connection or bad connection causing lost packets. As long as the connectivity is clean, it is not networking that impacts them at all. I would guess usually graphics card, memory, hard drive speed and processor speed are the main things that improve MMORPG play for people.

Exactly. I always use an analogy of a highway. Imagine you are on the side of the highway and every second 1 car passes you going 65 when 4 people in it. And then imagine 4 cars passing you going 65 with 4 people in each car. The 65 is the ping time, that doesn't change no matter how much bandwidth you have. The #of people is the bandwidth. Then I go on to explain how games only send enough data for 1 of the cars regardless of how many are passing you. It sounds much better when I'm training or teaching people, but that's the gist of it.

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by DanGarion

Exactly. I always use an analogy of a highway. Imagine you are on the side of the highway and every second 1 car passes you going 65 when 4 people in it. And then imagine 4 cars passing you going 65 with 4 people in each car. The 65 is the ping time, that doesn't change no matter how much bandwidth you have. The #of people is the bandwidth. Then I go on to explain how games only send enough data for 1 of the cars regardless of how many are passing you. It sounds much better when I'm training or teaching people, but that's the gist of it.

Don't get me started or I'll go into my stories of an office in Minsk, Belarus that couldn't get anything better than X.25 type of connectivity who wanted to do a very network intensive LAN application over a VPN across the Atlantic ocean to the U.S. instead of using some form of Citrix or remote desktop type of solution due to their poor bandwidth and poor latency.

Long story short, they told us that were were over exaggerating, and there wouldn't be any problem and did it anyways. 6 months later they came after us demanding us to "fix" the issue. I got a slap on the wrist when i told them "Sure I'll move Belarus to Canada"

[DanGarion]

I was never a good sales person because I can explain things and understand things too much to sugar coat and make things better then what they really are.

[finketr]

you can reach the 250gB if you are uploading all of your vacation pictures at once.

Also, the bit about 6mb/s to 8mb/s matters depending on what you are downloading. it will get to you 'faster' at 8 rather than 6.

[DanGarion]

Originally Posted by finketr

you can reach the 250gB if you are uploading all of your vacation pictures at once.

Also, the bit about 6mb/s to 8mb/s matters depending on what you are downloading. it will get to you 'faster' at 8 rather than 6.

I believe the 250 GB is on downloads, so it wouldn't matter if you are uploading traffic as well. And I highly doubt anyone has 250 GBs of pictures from vacations. Even at 6 MB a picture that's over 41,000 pictures....

[Passacaglia]

250 GB is only enough to download 6 of the 7 letters in Comcast.

[DanGarion]

Originally Posted by Passacaglia

250 GB is only enough to download 6 of the 7 letters in Comcast.

Hehe.

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by DanGarion

I believe the 250 GB is on downloads, so it wouldn't matter if you are uploading traffic as well. And I highly doubt anyone has 250 GBs of pictures from vacations. Even at 6 MB a picture that's over 41,000 pictures....

I keep all of my family pictures on a web album for my family and my wife's family whom are all over the world to see. (It is much cheaper than sending pictures to South America). I have kept pictures on here since the late 1990s, and currently have a bit over 4100 pictures in this album. Most of my pictures are roughly 2-3 MB in size (My album software auto-resizes for people viewing pictures so they don't have to download huge pictures) even though some are lower quality and under 1 MB in size.

The entire amount of space that all of my pictures since 1998 is 10.98 GB in size. It is large enough where I have to use three DVDs to back it up now, but I could download all 4100 of my pictures 20 times in full and still be under the cap.

Maybe you take more vacation pictures than me though

[Radii]

While I'm not exactly thrilled at the idea of tiered and limited bandwidth, being pissed off about it because we all might all of a sudden go over the limit is... crazy. Hell even if you pirate stuff daily all you have to do is slow down a little to stay under the limits I bet.

My 30 GB ipod currently has about 2000 songs on it and is about 1/3 full. So if i'm downloading music i'm going to need to download about 16,000 songs in a month to hit 250 GB.

The Warhammer download, a new MMO with a huge client install is a 10 GB download. You'd have to be pirating 25 games a month of similar size to hit the limit.

A former coworker of mine has a... large... collection of TV shows on DVD, downloaded the full seasons of The Shield, 24, things like that. That is probably the type of usage that will bump up against this limit.

[Daimyo]

Originally Posted by finketr

you can reach the 250gB if you are uploading all of your vacation pictures at once.

Also, the bit about 6mb/s to 8mb/s matters depending on what you are downloading. it will get to you 'faster' at 8 rather than 6.

Really? 250 GB of vacation photos?

So lets say you've got a nice camera and you're taking photos that take up 10MB of disk space.... to get to 250GB you'd have to take over 25,000 pictures. Assuming your vacation lasted one week that would be one picture every 23 seconds round the clock!

I don't think people realize just how large 250GB is!