Cox Expands Home Broadband Data Caps and Overage Fees

lcpiper said:
In Mass ?

I got to spend some time in Mass, at Fort Devens to be precise, Ayre. I enjoyed weekends when I could catch the train into Boston and spend time down in Chinatown. I had a couple of semesters of Mandarin Chinese in college before I joined, Chinatown gave me a chance to refine my ear watching Kung Fu flicks. It wasn't a perfect deal though cause most of those movies were in Cantonese and not Mandarin.
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Yeah, the state did away with all coal fired electricity in the last 20 years, moving over to natural gas, but were too short-sighted to upgrade the natural gas capacity to support the plants, so in the winter home heating season, we get "winter electricity rates" that go up like crazy.

They've been trying to fix it, but environmentalists keep demonstrating whenever they want to build a new pipeline and nothing ever seems to happen, resulting in the irony of record low natural gas prices nation wide but record high prices in Mass.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Yeah, the state did away with all coal fired electricity in the last 20 years, moving over to natural gas, but were too short-sighted to upgrade the natural gas capacity to support the plants, so in the winter home heating season, we get "winter electricity rates" that go up like crazy.

They've been trying to fix it, but environmentalists keep demonstrating whenever they want to build a new pipeline and nothing ever seems to happen, resulting in the irony of record low natural gas prices nation wide but record high prices in Mass.
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Oh, it's fixed alright (y)
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
This will depend on what kind of agreement they have with their peering partners.

Usually - unless the ISP is a Tier1 and has enough leverage to come up with a neutral peering agreement, or even charge someone else for the bandwidth - the ISP pays for the total data in which ever direction is the greatest. For consumer ISP's this is overwhelmingly going to be downstream.

It never made any sense to me that they gimp upstream bandwidth (you know, 100Mbit down, 5Mbit up type of plans) to their users when this model essentially means that upstream is free to them.

I think Verizon finally realized this a few years back when they across the board made all of their FiOS plans have the same upstream as downstream.
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You're missing the argument made with the 100MB / 100GB vs. 25MB / 200GB. The argument is based on cost of hardware build-out for peak load instances to handle a theoretical load of everybody with the fast plan trying to max their bandwidth at the same time, not monthly data sharing agreement between the ISPs. Of course, we all know that when the existing hardware gets saturated everybody just gets throttled rather than the ISP building out more bandwidth and honoring the stated speeds in their advertisements. Funny how the existing cable companies are suddenly able to double, triple, or quintuple their captive customer base's bandwidth, even during peak load hours, when a fiber company like Google comes to town.

In my neighborhood when it came time for the HOA to renegotiate with Comcast, Kabletown offered nearly triple the bandwidth for less money after Hotwire Communications began courting the community.
 
Geee... another provider who bundles cable TV and Internet service putting up data caps? I wonder why.... could it be because of the threat of alternative services (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Crunchyroll) will negatively affect their bread and butter (cable TV service)?

Trust me, E$PN and the Regional $ports Networks are the most expensive of the non-premium channels on a per-subscriber cost. This is painful for those of us who have only a minor passing interest in sports. With the exception of perhaps the lowest cost package, E$PN and the R$Ns are included.
 
this is just horrible news and whenever people try to diss cox I tell them it could be worse alot of people have data caps. luckily I'm in VA so safe ... for now.
 
if they want to put in data caps, they should have a rollover plan, like rollover minutes.

Sometimes you cross 1TB, sometimes you don't. In those months where you cross 1TB, credit should be applied from those months you did not exceed the limit.

They are implying that customers get 12TB per year allotment included in the regular price. I should be free to decide when I want to use it.

It's truly bullshit, because there is no way 1% of customers is severely crippling the other 99%. Bandwidth is cheap.
What matters more is if they can handle the day to day bandwidth for the 99% of users without slowdowns.
 
whateverer said:
Because the average home uses WAY less than 1TB. That was made very clear by highlighting "just 1% exceed that cap."

They're charging you $50 for 250GB in overage, which is way more data than your average user actually utilities. So even if you exceed your cap, you're still getting GREAT value out of your plan, compared to some grandma who only checks Facebook, and uses maybe 10GB. Or a lightweight streamer and cabler watcher family, who maybe uses 100-200GB.

They just want some of that money back. But not all of it.
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Their "average" user only uses the internet for email, checking Facecrack, news, and maybe playing Words with Friends. So let's leave out the false advertising about the "average" home user.

Let's talk what they advertise. They advertise speed, not data caps. Hell, if they want to do caps then give me a data cap option to pay for instead of speed. Hell, if I got their 1GB speed, my cap only goes to 2TB. What good is "Gigablast" if I can gigablast through that in half a day?

Let's see, I am on the 150MB download speed plan. In theory that could be run through in less than 16 hours. Why the hell would anyone pay for anything more than what you can get in your data cap in a month? Other than being an impatient person, what advantage is there?

Try streaming in 4k and see what happens. Have 2 people at home all day over Xmas break or the summer streaming and see what happens. Add in games at 40-60GB per download, games, YouTube, etc....I'm not even abusing the system. No torrents, no massive 24/7 downloading, etc....none of that. Went through almost 1.4TB in December and that was with people home for 2 weeks. That's an additional $80. That almost doubles my cost. They are pissed because they keep raising their cable prices and people keep dropping it for streaming.

So, it looks like my options going forward are to either sign a 3-year deal for their business Internet, which has no caps (shocking!!!!) OR checkout the sub-standard CenturyLink 1GB since that has no caps either.
 
evilwon said:
Their "average" user only uses the internet for email, checking Facecrack, news, and maybe playing Words with Friends. So let's leave out the false advertising about the "average" home user.

Let's talk what they advertise. They advertise speed, not data caps. Hell, if they want to do caps then give me a data cap option to pay for instead of speed. Hell, if I got their 1GB speed, my cap only goes to 2TB. What good is "Gigablast" if I can gigablast through that in half a day?

Let's see, I am on the 150MB download speed plan. In theory that could be run through in less than 16 hours. Why the hell would anyone pay for anything more than what you can get in your data cap in a month? Other than being an impatient person, what advantage is there?

Try streaming in 4k and see what happens. Have 2 people at home all day over Xmas break or the summer streaming and see what happens. Add in games at 40-60GB per download, games, YouTube, etc....I'm not even abusing the system. No torrents, no massive 24/7 downloading, etc....none of that. Went through almost 1.4TB in December and that was with people home for 2 weeks. That's an additional $80. That almost doubles my cost. They are pissed because they keep raising their cable prices and people keep dropping it for streaming.

So, it looks like my options going forward are to either sign a 3-year deal for their business Internet, which has no caps (shocking!!!!) OR checkout the sub-standard CenturyLink 1GB since that has no caps either.
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They don't want you streaming video, they want you buying it from them.

This isn't a hard concept to understand.
 
vegeta535 said:
On top of that they will cut your bandwidth down to 100GB cause you don't need it anymore when using their services.
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Problem: Captured client/customer with desired external services being hindered or locked out from competing by sole area data/line provider
Definition: Monopoly
Remedy: Federal and State antitrust lawsuits filed as a class action
 
I have Cox Cable. For those who say it's not possible, the past 3 months, I've averaged 250 GB. So that's not close to the 1 TB, and I'm fine, right? Well, yeah, but the only thing I've done the past few months is watch Netflix, Amazon Video, and a bunch of internet surfing. I haven't downloaded anything. Let's say I format my hard drive. I have Visual Studio, Adobe Creative Suite, and a few other programs which will easily surpass 500 GB. God forbid I have to format more than once a month.
 
During the grace period, which last three months (Jan is my first month where it counts) I was well over the 1TB mark. Steam Winter sale pushed me over a good bit. I on average use anywhere from 780~1780GB (October) a month. I've had to change the settings on my Plex server which my family uses from across the country and in Europe to try and stay under the 1TB mark. Fuck Comcast.
 
HorseproofBacon said:
I think I would personally have to try very hard to reach a 1TB limit, and I have a full compliment of over 200 steam games and a netflix subscription. Even with all that, it would be difficult to reach that limit unless I just set my computer on a stream loop (why I would do that is anybodies guess).

I wish AT&T would have that high a limit, they are currently stuck at 250gb if I remember correctly, which is very easy to hit if you aren't careful.
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250 is too low, but 1TB is fine, IMO. That said, if there was competition, we probably wouldn't have any limits. I didn't see a full list, but I bet it's not in Lafayette LA, because they compete with LUS Fiber and LUS has no caps...they also have symmetric connections.
 
Nytegard said:
I have Cox Cable. For those who say it's not possible, the past 3 months, I've averaged 250 GB. So that's not close to the 1 TB, and I'm fine, right? Well, yeah, but the only thing I've done the past few months is watch Netflix, Amazon Video, and a bunch of internet surfing. I haven't downloaded anything. Let's say I format my hard drive. I have Visual Studio, Adobe Creative Suite, and a few other programs which will easily surpass 500 GB. God forbid I have to format more than once a month.
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Unless you mean CC, CS is just an installer. Surely you keep the install files (on a CD, I would think). Not sure if VS has moved to a download installer...haven't used it in years.

Regardless, I don't know how one can have 1TB of programs to install in a homes system. Most boot drives aren't even 500 GB, much less 1TB.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Yeah, the state did away with all coal fired electricity in the last 20 years, moving over to natural gas, but were too short-sighted to upgrade the natural gas capacity to support the plants, so in the winter home heating season, we get "winter electricity rates" that go up like crazy.

They've been trying to fix it, but environmentalists keep demonstrating whenever they want to build a new pipeline and nothing ever seems to happen, resulting in the irony of record low natural gas prices nation wide but record high prices in Mass.
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Well I'm all for the environment, but that's just stupid. Until we have the means to do all of this stuff with Renewables, LNG is the cleanest way to go (outside of Nukes and those take forever to build...and almost nobody wants one near them).
 
Cox now has an android app, and it will tell you how much data you used. I used over 650GB in November, and that was without have any 4K HD, just Steam, Netflix, YouTube, and gaming. I blame the steam sales. I've been with Cox for 20+ years, I have the 50mb down tier plan, and rates have went up, I now pay $78 a month for just internet. If I had the 300MB plan, a terabyte seems low.
 
Verge said:
They don't want you streaming video, they want you buying it from them.

This isn't a hard concept to understand.
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Right...which I said without directly saying that. It also isn't a hard concept to sell what you advertise. It is like advertise the ability to drive 63mph but are limited to only average 33 miles a day over a month (about 1000 miles a month). Sounds stupid when it is put like that, doesn't it? Make it more asinine to say that you can go 150mph but are limited to only 33 miles a day. Throw in their gigablast and you can go 2000mph but are limited to about 66 miles per day average. They advertise speed, not caps. Again, not a hard concept to understand either.

As for people who think 1TB is enough, I'll say stream some 4k content, download a new game or two, etc....instead of living in your shell, poke your head out and realize that we are not standing still but advancing. Larger file sizes, 4k video streaming with 8k on the way. Not like it is rocket science to figure out how one can get above 1TB without being excessive. I'm shocked why people think everyone can conform down to their minimalist ideas. Before we were streaming exclusively, we never had a month below 400GB unless we were out of town. .
 
If they are going to charge me for going over my cap, then they better be giving me a refund for all the data I didn't use when I'm under my cap.

It's like the gas station having a minimum $50 charge, even if you are only putting in a few gallons to top off the tank.
 
Just checked my Cox usage, and I'm at 158GB out of my 1TB, with only 1 day left on the month. Guess I don't need to worry about going over this month. :p
 
Cox and Comcast are doing this because we have a business man in office. FCC chairman is against it but will probably have no choice but to follow the house of representives when they win the vote


this is going to get worse in the coming months when a bill is finally passed to do away with net neutrality and each company will throttle VOD from netflix , hulu etc. You will only be getting full bandwidth when watch VOD with comcast


just pay the full price for unlimited internet and start building up your plex drive. Mine is already 100tb
have a nice day comcast i win in the end

DVR is a joke
 
I've been trying to do some research on routers and 3rd party firmware (Tomato, DD-WRT, etc...) but haven't found what I'm looking for.

Does anyone know if there is a router/firmware that will not only show usage per day/month, but also allow the user to set hard total limits of usage either per day or per month?? The limit could either shut off the internet completely or maybe throttle it. I think this could be done with Tomato and my own scripts, but I'm looking for something already written just to save me the time.

I'm on Cox in KS and my biggest concern is accidentally running over the cap. It's always possible a machine can get infected and start burning up tons of data. This would be particularly bad if I wasn't home at the time. At even 150 Mbit, it doesn't take long to rack up a huge bill with this new cap.
 
whateverer said:
They do :D

https://www.chooseenergy.com/blog/energy-101/electricity-rates-rise-in-the-summer/

Rates change by the season, and for most business customers, rates change over the course of the day. So if you use more at-peak, you pay more.

Then I've heard CONSUMERS from California complain about higher kwh rate brackets if they exceed the cap for a month. So yes, it's common on both the business and consumer side to pay higher rates for higher-than-average usage.
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You can't QoS throttle electricity like you can Internet traffic. There is no reason for data caps.
 
evilwon said:
Right...which I said without directly saying that. It also isn't a hard concept to sell what you advertise. It is like advertise the ability to drive 63mph but are limited to only average 33 miles a day over a month (about 1000 miles a month). Sounds stupid when it is put like that, doesn't it? Make it more asinine to say that you can go 150mph but are limited to only 33 miles a day. Throw in their gigablast and you can go 2000mph but are limited to about 66 miles per day average. They advertise speed, not caps. Again, not a hard concept to understand either.

As for people who think 1TB is enough, I'll say stream some 4k content, download a new game or two, etc....instead of living in your shell, poke your head out and realize that we are not standing still but advancing. Larger file sizes, 4k video streaming with 8k on the way. Not like it is rocket science to figure out how one can get above 1TB without being excessive. I'm shocked why people think everyone can conform down to their minimalist ideas. Before we were streaming exclusively, we never had a month below 400GB unless we were out of town. .
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?


No the bandwidth caps are clearly advertised and stated when you sign up for service. What are they not advertising?
 
Teenyman45 said:
Funny how the existing cable companies are suddenly able to double, triple, or quintuple their captive customer base's bandwidth, even during peak load hours, when a fiber company like Google comes to town.
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Google should just announce that they're deploying country wide and watch how the US becomes the leader in the world for fast affordable internet as the ISPs scramble to try and maintain their customer base.
 
Comcast started capping in the SLC area now too. We usually are between 800-1TB a month right now. Between 4K Netflix/Amazon streaming, multiple heavy gamers in the house, etc. that cap fills up pretty quick. While I can pay an extra $50 a month for unlimited, I feel like if I'm paying for one of the top tiers of speed, I should get a little more cap. I don't think that's unreasonable. If I've taken the time to get the faster speed it's because I know we need it and use it so why not include more data? Silly...
 
Why is the other TB of data so expensive though?
Hate the idea of caps, but at least they shouldn't be assholes about it, why not an equal portion of the monthly payment.. or are COX's service 200$ a month?
 
evilwon said:
Right...which I said without directly saying that. It also isn't a hard concept to sell what you advertise. It is like advertise the ability to drive 63mph but are limited to only average 33 miles a day over a month (about 1000 miles a month). Sounds stupid when it is put like that, doesn't it? Make it more asinine to say that you can go 150mph but are limited to only 33 miles a day. Throw in their gigablast and you can go 2000mph but are limited to about 66 miles per day average. They advertise speed, not caps. Again, not a hard concept to understand either.

As for people who think 1TB is enough, I'll say stream some 4k content, download a new game or two, etc....instead of living in your shell, poke your head out and realize that we are not standing still but advancing. Larger file sizes, 4k video streaming with 8k on the way. Not like it is rocket science to figure out how one can get above 1TB without being excessive. I'm shocked why people think everyone can conform down to their minimalist ideas. Before we were streaming exclusively, we never had a month below 400GB unless we were out of town. .
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Oh PUHLEEZE. 8K isn't going to be here for years, but if you get one sooner, then you can afford the extra charges to watch 8k on your 100,000 dollar TV set.
4K penetration is still relatively limited (though growing fast), but it's only 7GB/hour of video. I've downloaded games and I stream (though not much 4k) and I have a server that I can stream my own content (yes over the net, not just locally) and I've had exactly one month where I hit 800 GB....on average around 500-600GB. I can promise you that's way above the median.

When the masses start closing in on 1TB, they'll raise the cap, just like Comcrap did. And if they don't, then I'll be protesting right along with you, but arguing that a cap 1TB isn't enough is BS. I've got friends who paid extra for Comcraps trully unlimited plan to avoid charges and they switched back once the cap went to 1TB (less than a year later)...and I know these guys torrent like a MOFO and play tons of games too....so yeah, 1TB is enough for almost all of us.

Actually for the vast majority it's total overkill (which is who it should be). For the record, I'm not against truly unlimited, just the assertion that 1TB is a huge burden on a lot of users.
 
UnrealCpu said:
Cox and Comcast are doing this because we have a business man in office. FCC chairman is against it but will probably have no choice but to follow the house of representives when they win the vote


this is going to get worse in the coming months when a bill is finally passed to do away with net neutrality and each company will throttle VOD from netflix , hulu etc. You will only be getting full bandwidth when watch VOD with comcast


just pay the full price for unlimited internet and start building up your plex drive. Mine is already 100tb
have a nice day comcast i win in the end

DVR is a joke
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Bullshit. Comcast was doing this 5 years ago. And clearly you're the reason we have caps, MR. Downloading 100 TB of pirated material.
 
Well shit... this is for a house full of nerds... Dang roommates, although I'm not helping. Have not been hit with an overage fee yet but it would have been $260 overage + $85 just for December :spam:!
 
Hypergreatthing said:
Google should just announce that they're deploying country wide and watch how the US becomes the leader in the world for fast affordable internet as the ISPs scramble to try and maintain their customer base.
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good i hope comcast goes out of business
 
Verge said:
?


No the bandwidth caps are clearly advertised and stated when you sign up for service. What are they not advertising?
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Again, they are advertising and charging you different prices based off speed, not caps. Go to their website and look and what's in bold - the cap or the speed? As for nipples, enjoy your caps. It works for the "vast majority" who do nothing but read email and surf web pages. Do anything technical and it is easy to hit the limit. As for your "friends who torrent" they are obviously limiting the speed. If I were to torrent I could rip through the data in less than a week. I don't torrent and it is not hard to hit 1TB in 30 days. Stick your head in the sand and live by yourself, sure you can do it. Hell, if all I did was stream Pandora, worry about who liked my Facebook post, surfed Fox news, and laughed at the POTUS twitter page, I'd have no problem staying under 1TB. Have a family, have a couple of streams going for 3-4 hours a night minimum, stream 30-40 hours of 4k a month (at least and there is far more 4k content than you think), download games for multiple people or multiple machines....not hard at all.

I would love to see anyone debating this elaborate on why would they have 50MB, 150MB, and 300MB plans all with the same data cap yet charge you different prices for each? If the argument is that people pay for SPEED, then why are there caps? If I am paying for a cap, then offer pricing based on data caps, not speed and let me choose. They are selling one promise but charging you penalties based on another. Wait for it....wait for it....people are paying higher prices for speed yet cannot even use that full speed for 1 hour per day for a month without going over the cap. Awesome. Why not sell me a 9MM then only offer shells for a 22? It makes as much sense.

Even the crappy wireless carries don't do that. At least they sell one thing and you can buy more if you need more.

Let me sensationalize stuff as well...hooray for 1984.
 
i am going unlimited data next month after i use up all my 1tb data caps , gave me two.

Then i will be constantly filling up all my hard drives about 120tb . I kinda want to be like the nsa one day and collect all data


its for educational purposed hehe
 
lollerwaffle said:
So one in a hundred can be charged a tax others are not, a heavy tax at that. If you go over 1TB it's unlikely that you just go over by 50GB. If you don't notice the usage quickly enough, let's say with legal torrents, it can be a couple hundred GB.

And no matter how they sell it, I feel strongly that the amount of internet data consumption should simply not be my concern if I engage in non-commercial activity. I don't CARE what 99% of people do which by the way is a number Cox came up with.. I call that into doubt.

Data caps need to go away. They stifle the internet. People will block ads more because those generate traffic. Mom&Dad watch a lot of movies, too bad kid, your creative online work has to wait until the cap resets. Left Youtube on autoplay overnight? Oh well get in line until next month.
Windows 10 Insider Update pushing you over? That'll be $30.

There are so many scenarios where this is just a cancer. I hope people in Cleveland protest this.
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People have been doing this on cell phones for years and for the most part it hasnt stopped them. Doubt any of the issues you raise up there will really be a concern, especially given that ads and windows updates are not in the size range that throw a person over their cap. Its watching streaming video that does it or downloading large files like games.

hardboner said:
if they want to put in data caps, they should have a rollover plan, like rollover minutes.

Sometimes you cross 1TB, sometimes you don't. In those months where you cross 1TB, credit should be applied from those months you did not exceed the limit.

They are implying that customers get 12TB per year allotment included in the regular price. I should be free to decide when I want to use it.

It's truly bullshit, because there is no way 1% of customers is severely crippling the other 99%. Bandwidth is cheap.
What matters more is if they can handle the day to day bandwidth for the 99% of users without slowdowns.
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I think rollover would actually be a good idea. It would protect average users from a bad day getting worse. IE a computer crashes and its loaded with steam games and backed up to a cloud service and when the unknowing conumer allows everything to redownload they find a surplus bill. This would allow for things like steam sales or a vacation netflix binge to happen without everyone getting angry. However comcast will probably view this as a good scenario the person will pay the overage that month and go on with their life.

byusinger84 said:
Comcast started capping in the SLC area now too. We usually are between 800-1TB a month right now. Between 4K Netflix/Amazon streaming, multiple heavy gamers in the house, etc. that cap fills up pretty quick. While I can pay an extra $50 a month for unlimited, I feel like if I'm paying for one of the top tiers of speed, I should get a little more cap. I don't think that's unreasonable. If I've taken the time to get the faster speed it's because I know we need it and use it so why not include more data? Silly...
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When I signed up for comcast there were different caps, if you paid for the highest plan you got a higher cap. Should double check your area. This makes sense since it would encourage people who didnt need higher internet speeds to upgrade.

NeoNemesis said:
This is the stupidest thing I've heard all day. I guess you'd support the removal of fuel gauges from cars too?

Boggles the mind why people like you crawl out of the woodwork to defend the questionable anti-consumer business practices of multi-billion dollar corporations. You do know they pay people for this, right?

"I never use my headphone jack so good on Apple removing it"
"Pshhh, I never use more than 6GB mobile data a month so THANK GOD Verizon eliminating unlimited data plans"
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A fuel gauge is not at all the same. Comcast does give you a fuel gauge so you can see how much bandwidth you have used so far. The poster is complaining that they do not break down the guage in anyway. IE a car that tells you how much fuel you used to drive on highways vs city, or how much to go to work vs other.
 
Here in Iowa Mediacom just upgraded their network to Gigabit. Their 1 Gbps service comes with a 6 TB cap and costs $140. That doesn't interest me, though. We have three people in the house, but only do basic browsing with some occasional streaming. Most months we don't even exceed 100 GB. In addition to raising speed across the board(and price with it) and adding the Gigabit tier, Mediacom also just eliminated the budget tiers. That means any new customer, even if they only check email and browse the net and use only 50 GB/month, now has to subscribe to the 100 Mbps/1 TB cap tier for $80/month. Thankfully, at least for now, we have been allowed to continue subscribing to a $55 250 GB cap tier we've been on for years.
 
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