Comcast Considering 250GB Cap, Disconnecting Pirates

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DSLReports says they have inside information that suggests Comcast is considering 250GB caps on usage and giving people the boot after receiving four DMCA letters in a one year period.

While still in the early stages of development, the plan -- as it stands now -- would work like this: all users get a 250GB per month cap. Users would get one free "slip up" in a twelve month period, after which users would pay a $15 charge for each 10 GB over the cap they travel. According to the source, the plan has "a lot of momentum behind it," and initial testing is slated to begin in a month or two.
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So much for use of my legit use of, Napster-To-Go, FTP of Game patches and the like..

Ok.. 250gb is a pretty large window.. but a Cap is NEVER good, Especially with such a huge fee attached.. $15 for every 50gb over would be reasonable I guess.
 
250 gb of usage per month is Huge imo. while i agree that a cap is never good, how many people actually download that much?!?
 
You also see where this is going, don't you????
Just like cell phone minutes......tiered use plans.
29.95 gets you 250 GB, etc.
99.99 gets you unlimited use.

This is going to suck, I mean my son plays on-line with his friends 1 or 2 hours a night.
My daughter thinks itunes is free.
Man......I'm screwed.:eek:
 
I cant understand how you can use MORE then 250gb. IF you use more then that you really need to be looking at a professional connection and not burdening a normal home connection with your massive leaching.
Of all the ideas i've heard this is the most reasonable.
 
magoo said:
You also see where this is going, don't you????
Just like cell phone minutes......tiered use plans.
29.95 gets you 250 GB, etc.
99.99 gets you unlimited use.

This is going to suck, I mean my son plays on-line with his friends 1 or 2 hours a night.
My daughter thinks itunes is free.
Man......I'm screwed.:eek:
Click to expand...

This really is going to suck, this just puts the internet squarely two steps backwards. I agree with detering piracy, but anyone who uses a lot of streaming video will come close to using this up. I am really going to have to move out of Georgia to get FIOS and get away from this crap.
 
they better give you some way to monitor your usage.

Really its a lot of stuff but if digital delivery of movies ever really hits people will eat through this faster than you think. If you get a full res blu-ray movie with all the extras you are going to be looking at up to 25 gigs a piece. 10 movies a month might be a lot of watching to some people but in reality with any other high bandwidth things you might do in a month you can really eat through that faster than you think.
 
The subsidy business model doesn't work for ISP's providing unlimited access broadband, it's THAT simple. Someone is always going to use a hell of a lot of bandwidth and all the low usage users essentially pay for that user to be able to download a lot.

This has already happened over the last 1-2 years in the UK in case no one had been paying attention. 8Mbit ADSL was rolled out over ~98% of the country and ISP's just cannot afford to offer "unlimited" downloads like they advertise.

Anyone with any brains will switch to an ISP who knows how to correctly sell and manage their bandwidth so your get a good and consistant service. I pay over the odds for my connection and it comes with bandwidth limits on/off peak.

Bottom line is that bandwidth isn't free, the more you use, the more it costs your ISP, and because of the subsidy going on with most current ISP's business models people are used to very cheap bandwidth, this is very misleading, bandwidth is actually pretty expensive when you're downloading 250gb+ a month, people will just have to learn to pay for it, the only other option is to go with a crap ISP who oversells their network based on the assumption of "average use" and will find their networks crashing to a halt when bandwidth usage peaks unusualy high.

I know comcast are an american company, if you're interested in how it's all going to go down over the next few years then take a look at the UK market, we're way ahead of you when it comes to disintergration of broadband services.
 
I will NEVER choose comcast as my ISP.

While the board of directors at comcast are making millions of dollars and the company as a whole is posting a huge profit every quarter, they are hard at work coming up with ways to fuck you out of what you've paid for. Investing revnue into improving infrastructure is just plain silly when comcast can easily give their customers less service for a higher subscription fee compared to other ISPs and even what comcast itself offered in the past.
 
as a side note if companies are thinking about doing this, i think they should start putting on your monthly bill how much bandwidth you consume each month.....that way people atleast know......


not to mention have a way to check real time how much you have used for the billing period
 
theystolemyname said:
I will NEVER choose comcast as my ISP.

While the board of directors at comcast are making millions of dollars and the company as a whole is posting a huge profit every quarter, they are hard at work coming up with ways to fuck you out of what you've paid for. Investing revnue into improving infrastructure is just plain silly when comcast can easily give their customers less service for a higher subscription fee compared to other ISPs and even what comcast itself offered in the past.
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I wish I had the choice man. I have had Comcast for years, purely because there is no alternative. We had Adelphia, but the owner swindled away the funds and destroyed the company. Now we have Comcast and no, my service has not been "Comcastic!"

I have looked for alternatives, but DSL in my area is a joke and there is no other ISP's besides AT&T or Comcast, so I was stuck.

Nothing made more steamed about paying higher prices for less bandwith. That's just the way they are. I have seen other ISP's offer higher speeds for less. "Power Boost"?!?!? That's a joke. Hot Air Boost is more like it.

So glad I am moving. Good by Comcast. When I called to disconnect they said that they could just change my service to my new location. I said "Hell No! Goodbye" Lol.
 
The cap has been there for a long time, they are just finally admitting it's there. I'm not too worried - according to my router, I've only downloaded 3.38 GB in the last ten days, and I consider myself a heavy user.
 
Between my massive amounts of playing TF2, watching movies through Netflix Watch Now, and listening to music from Last.fm....

.... I'm glad I use Verizon.
 
When I had comcast it was out for 2 - 7 days a week (how long it takes for a truck to come out) per month. Would have made it pretty hard to go over that cap ;)
I downgraded to 3meg DSL just to have something that would actually work all the time. Do you know what days without internet does to a computer nerd? I couldnt subject myself to that every month. Especially not while paying full price and losing ~1/5th of my service.
 
I did some calculations guys... You would have to download at around 800kilobits per second 24/7 for a month to hit that cap. Calculate in upstream bandwidth and you'd still have to be downloading at around 700+ kilobits per second 24/7. I dont know about you guys but my comcast was NEVER EVER that fast. I was lucky lucky to see 600, and there was no way on gods green earth I could keep that up 24/7... what server would I download from? sure as hell not bittorrent unless I had about 20 torrents going at once.

BTW the math is
2097152000Kilobits
2629743 seconds in a month
 
^ I believe they count data going both ways. I could see hitting that cap if someone is downloading a lot of media, or news groups.
 
250 GB is not hard at all to blow in a month. Linux distro's, Technet/MSDN account, MASSIVE game patches, monster game demos/betas (Conan beta was what 12 GB??), legit movie/music downloads/streaming, Slingbox, etc.

It's freaking funny: the industry wants to move to streaming and electronic distribution but then comes along this idea of capping connections. Lame. I hope this does not leap to other providers!
 
Jakalwarrior said:
I did some calculations guys... You would have to download at around 800kilobits per second 24/7 for a month to hit that cap. Calculate in upstream bandwidth and you'd still have to be downloading at around 700+ kilobits per second 24/7. I dont know about you guys but my comcast was NEVER EVER that fast. I was lucky lucky to see 600, and there was no way on gods green earth I could keep that up 24/7... what server would I download from? sure as hell not bittorrent unless I had about 20 torrents going at once.

BTW the math is
2097152000Kilobits
2629743 seconds in a month
Click to expand...

Those calcs are moot: most of the people who would be popping that cap are on 8-12+ Mbit connections, so you would have to assume that download speeds could hit 1 MB/sec or more. 800 kilobits = 100 KB/sec, most people in question are going to get way faster speeds than that.
 
ir0nw0lf said:
Those calcs are moot: most of the people who would be popping that cap are on 8-12+ Mbit connections, so you would have to assume that download speeds could hit 1 MB/sec or more. 800 kilobits = 100 KB/sec, most people in question are going to get way faster speeds than that.
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Precisely. 250GB per month is roughly 100 KB/s. I get consistent transfers in vicinity of 500 KB/s or so... If I was downloading 24/7 I would easily exceed the alloted amount.

Having said that... My usage doesn't even come close to the limit. However, should I decide to get TiVo or some other hardware solution that would allow me to watch Netflix streaming movies on my TV, it would dramatically change.
 
Game developers should be raising a red flag and crying foul. After all they want their games to be distributed digitally. That's not going to happen if ISPs were allowed to cap.

250gb may be a lot now, but the danger is it sets a precedent and says capping is allowed and tolerated. Why stop there at 250gb? Next month it'll be 150gb maybe.

Besides, 5-7 years ago 250gb was unheard of, especially on the internet. Remember we used to download CDs and then DVD became mainstream and people thought they'll never download DVD sized ISOs to their computer?

What about High Definition contents? Comcast is primarily a cable television provider. Why the hell would they shoot themselves in the foot and impose a limit, while preaching HD being the future, be it cable television or internet delivered?
 
Man, this is going to screw me. I have a slingbox that my buddy stationed overseas uses to watch TV, my upstream is going to go over on some months, especially when football season starts.
 
*shakes head*

At least you're not on WiMax guys. I'd take 15mbit with a 250GB cap anyday over this.

28510.png


BTW, I'm paying $45 a month for 2mbps/512kbps...where have all the kilobits gone?! :(
 
Thats funny, I'm pretty sure the contract I signed said unlimited use. I'll wait for the class action.
 
Gah, this is teh suck. Yes, it's a high cap, but it's not too unreasonable to go over. especially since everything these days is connected to the internet - my TiVo, my PS3, my 4 computers (desktop and laptop each for myself and fiance)... game patches, demos, hell, even windows updates, when you have to download everything 4x....

Maybe I should be looking into getting FIOS at my new apartment.... I've really only held off because of inertia
 
To be honest, I'm ok with a bandwidth cap--as long as they're honest about it. The beef I've had with Comcast is that 1) they offer "unlimited" internet access, but 2) they threaten to cut you off if you go above some limit, but 3) they won't tell you what that limit is. In other words, they're selling you something, but they won't tell you exactly what.

If Comcast come out and say, "you're paying $50/mo for a 5mbit internet connection with a 250GB cap, with $15/10GB overage", I think that's fair. All the terms are there on the table, you know what you're paying and what you're getting. At that point, you can decide whether to buy it, or to walk away (I'm leaving the whole 'monopoly' thing out for now).

And I don't think 250GB isn't that limiting, really. That's about 8GB/day. Sure, there are plenty of big things you can download, but how often do you actually download that kind of thing? The Conan beta--how often do you download something that size? Or Linux iso's. Even if you went nuts and tried out a hundred different distros, that's still less than 70GB. And it's going to take you a very long time indeed to test them all.

Exactly how fast can you consume content, anyway? Youtube: around 500kbps, IIRC, so even if you watched it 24/7 for an entire month, you wouldn't hit 250GB. iTunes? Even less than youtube. Pirated DVD: 50 new movies per month. Every month. You're going to run out of worthwhile movies pretty quick. HD movies: no legit HD movie download service exists yet to my knowledge, so the point is moot. UT2004 server? 512kbps up will handle 16 players comfortably. Seeding torrents is a different issue entirely, however.

And lastly, I'm actually ok with a tiered internet. It more closely approximates the "pay for what you use" model. Hopefully, it means you pay less if you use less. It means that higher-use customers pay more, and that Comcast's revenue tracks their actual bandwidth costs. Ideally, that means that regular customers end up paying less to get the same service they're used to. Unfortunately, considering Comcast's past behavior, I would be very surprised if they actually passed the savings on to their customers, or did more than a token gesture.
 
Oh yeah, and don't forget VPN & remote desktop to work....

(btw, where did the edit post button go?)
 
If you're an early adopter of some sort of streaming media this is really going to screw you. Otherwise 250 GB is reasonable.
 
Hug it today, curse it tomorrow. If this works well for Comcast and the tiering works well for Time Warner, you will be next.
 
250GB is very generous compared to an ISP I once had when I lived in the boonies. They had a 10GB per month cap and claimed that was generous when I complained about it to them. So much for Microsoft's plans to take over our living rooms with digital downloads of HD movies if all ISPs go to such a scheme. Lots of ISPs already use such a 'secret' scheme but don't tell customers about it until they go over the amount they have set.
 
vengence said:
Thats funny, I'm pretty sure the contract I signed said unlimited use. I'll wait for the class action.
Click to expand...

Might wanna re-read your contract. I have never seen a terms of use agreement from an ISP that doesn't have a clause in it somewhere stating that the terms of the agreement can change at any time with little or no notice.
 
eh, this is gonna suck.

i'm on a 10mb comcast cable connection, i play a lot of PC games, mostly FFXI which is an MMO (not sure how much data per second is streamed while playing online PC games), not to mention music downloads and Steam .... i hope this isn't actually going to happen, 250GB is nothing.
 
Now are they going to give you a way to monitor how much bandwidth you have used in a month, or they just going to continue to keep it secret? Will they send you emails when you start getting close to the cap, or will they just leave it as a big surprise when you end up going 50gb over and the bill comes? The big problem I see with any cap is it is really hard without installing software like DU Meter to really know how much bandwidth you are using. If you have multiple computers on a network, tracking becomes even more difficult unless you can do it right on the router. One of the problems with Comcast's invisible caps is they not only wouldn't tell you how much the cap was, but they also wouldn't tell you how much you used.
 
While some of you may think that you're not going to go over the 250GB limit, it's probably not a month to month thing. Most people probably wouldn't, but it's going to be those "odd" months where you decide to try out 5 linux distros, the new MMORPGs that were released over the last month & your daughter decides to hit up all her friends myspace everyday (these can weigh in a 1MB - 10MB each if you consider a lot of them have built in audio). Perhaps you check out some online video services or subscribe to Netflix with their instant watch service. It'll all add up and while maybe you're normally below the limit, you suddenly find yourself above the limit for this one month. Happens all the time with cell phones for many people. Suddenly that $50 fee is now $100. Or if you have kids who are using the computer & doing P2P all day and all night long & you exceed your cap in less than a week making the rest of your normal web usage very spendy or possibly throttling your connection to a crawl. Sure there's parental responsibility there but I can see it happening and causing a customer service nightmare.

Also there's an education issue. You need to let people know how much they're using and make it VERY easy to understand. Most people don't know a KB from an MB from a GB from a TB. This could definitely scare off the some people don't doing certain action. I think it's going to hurt people who normally wouldn't go over their cap, but suddenly they're confused about downloading a 250MB file, if it'll exceed their cap and cost them money(I can see it happening) - or the parents telling their kid to go buy the CD and not download it from iTunes because they heard from a friend that their kid was on YouTube and they got a $20 bill from Comcast.

Also this seems like a way that Comcast(and other companies) can get out of upgrading their networks or expanding capacity. Let's keep prices the same, keep the same speeds, offer less. Bonus is that we may make more $$$ now with people going over their usage plans. The best part is that in most areas there is NO competition! Let's start rolling in money guys! Yi hah!

So when you look at the big picture, restrict digital freedoms. Enact and roll out your own on demand & video services. Milk your customers via scare tactics and exhorbitant prices. They'll get to rack in huge profit with out having to spend as much on actually upgrading their service & effectively limit the ability for competing video & content services from breaking through.
 
i guess they dont think it costs bandwidth to stream videos off the internet. LOL i guess this is the begining of the end for the internet in america. Speak up while you can or you can join communist china with your government (commiecast) controlled internet.

theres millions of legitimate uses of the internet that would use up a 250gb cap in a month that arent piracy. and arent you paying for unlimited internet with you $60+ a month? who the fuck are they to tell you, you cant use it as much as you want.

DONT TAKE THIS LYING DOWN.

Write angry letters, disconnect your services. YOU ARE IN CONTROL, YOU ARE THE ONE PAYING THE MONEY.
 
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