Comcast 1TB Internet Cap Is Becoming A Reality

[Exavior]

Um you just need to rethink this. I can't tell if you are trying to communicate or deliver a poem.


Any number that doesn't adjust automatically to a certain variable is a static number. The fact that someone can manually change the number doesn't mean it's not static.

Let me try to reword that in a more simplistic manor and see if you can understand it. Didn't realize my initial post would be that hard to understand.

You are comparing two different things. A price increase of only the people that use over 1TB of data a month, or a price increase of every single customer. It is that simple just those two groups. Those are the two ways they can make money, charge everyone or charge a group. The original posted talked about the top 1% (those using over 1TB) paying more is the same as the people that have most money (top 1%) paying more in taxes. He was comparing the top 1% of data users to the top 1% of people with money. small group vs small group. You then made the statement that taxing the top 1% is not the same as increasing the price for all of your customers. Meaning that you are now trying to compare 100% of data users to 1% of the people based on wealth, or large group to little group. You have now compared two different things, one of them being a group that was never mentioned at any point. In fact that is the group not being effected by this. 100% of the data users are not seeing a price increase. So my statement was simply that comparing 100% vs 1% being equal and 1% vs 1% being equal is not the same thing. Since they are not the same thing you can't twist the logic in the way that you did.

As for the other part, it is static in that somebody has to change it and we were never told a formula that will be used to decide when to change it. However you original post was using the term static as never changing since talked about how data usage will increase over time however this 1TB will be fixed for the rest of time. You did not take into consideration that while it is 1TB today they might have an in published rule in place that states if % percent of the user base gets to a certain value that the data cap increases. They might also have a rule that states it increase by X% every Y years. Or they might decide to keep cutting that number down to find the best way to fuck people over. Wouldn't put anything past them, however that doesn't really mean that it is static to the point where in time we will suddenly see that 1% turn to 30% then 80% hitting that limit. We have no idea how it will adjust as more hit that level.

 

[Exavior]

Ummm...

I now work for an ISP.

The infrastructure providers need to be regulated. Data connectivity providers do not.

Aka.... Road Owners should be regulated, the guy who sells you cars and provides you with taxi service shouldn't be.


Building out hundreds of miles of infrastructure costs lots of money. Money that small service providers don't have.

You need to be able to choose between 2-3 video, internet and phone providers all on the same cable lines.
You need to be able to choose between 2-3 video. internet and phone providers all on the same fiber lines
You need to be able to choose between 2-3 video, internet and phone providers all on the same cell towers/freq

If you can do these things you have choice and competition. If you can't there is no invisible hand, you've got a monopoly.

There's a damn good reason Bell Telephone was broken up into multiple companies, and Comcast needs to be broken up for the same reasons.

If you work for an ISP then you should realize some of the technical issues with what you are saying. I find it funny how everyone wants everyone to share the same plant instead of allowing somebody else to come through and say fuck you to the local company and put in something better.

Lets start with copper. So first off somebody has to be in charge of that copper, which since it is already in the ground by the local ILEC lets assume it is them. Now this is the same company that probably has let it go to shit to begin with. I have some crap copper that I am working on getting fixed or am replacing with fiber to the home. So I know that I am not immune to that. With the bigger guys around me, they are far worse. So now you are trying to sell services over somebody shit cable with no way to fix it. You also run into the issue of network design. With copper you have to worry about loop lengths. This means that for one person to put something closer everyone has to now purchase new equipment to all build in the same locations. Otherwise if you have say Company A trying to serve from one location, Company B trying to serve from 1000 ft closer and Company C trying to serve from even closer. Well first off you would have trouble trying to get all those wires correctly managed going from all those boxes to the customers. Next you would run into issues where the equipment closer would be putting more power onto the line and as a result would cause service issues for the stuff behind it as it would have already dropped off power wise. This is why you don't put a DSLAM out further than another DSLAM on the same binder group. So for copper this would be a huge fucking mess to try to do. The places to do try to do something like this just deal with the issues caused by the local ILEC having shit cable and offer whatever shit service they can.

With fiber. Not as bad but you now need a lot more fiber. If doing everything yourself you can have a feeder fiber go out to a certain point and then split it out in the field. meaning that you can run say a 12 fiber out to an area then instead 12 1x32 splitters. Only needing 384 fibers from there to the end users. Now if trying to do something like this, instead you are running all 384 back to the shared location and each person then patches off to the customers at that location. So you will have a need for far more fiber. Not as bad as copper and is doable. I am actually working on colocation plan for a city fiber network for businesses that will use this type of model.

For cell towers / freq. First off multiple people on the same tower isn't an issue. This happens now in most places. We have fixed wireless equipment on cell towers, and tv station towers just as every other WISP in our area does. Cell phone companies have even started to move away in some places from having their own cell phone towers and have with to leasing space on towers. There is a few companies that actually just go around and build cellular towers then go out and try to get one of the big guys to lease space on them. So that part happens now. The issue here is freq, you can't share that. If everyone was using the same frequency for their equipment you would start to knock stuff down. Hell we knocked down one of our own WISP towers by turning up new equipment on the same frequency and having it point at a tower 10 miles away. Right now if we are using the same frequency as somebody else on the same tower as us one of us has to change otherwise neither of us are going to have good quality of service. That is like trying to say that you think every radio station should broadcast at 100.1Mhz but that it should know which station you actually want when you turn on the radio. That isn't how that works.

 

[nilepez]

Ummm...

I now work for an ISP.

The infrastructure providers need to be regulated. Data connectivity providers do not.

Aka.... Road Owners should be regulated, the guy who sells you cars and provides you with taxi service shouldn't be.


Building out hundreds of miles of infrastructure costs lots of money. Money that small service providers don't have.

You need to be able to choose between 2-3 video, internet and phone providers all on the same cable lines.
You need to be able to choose between 2-3 video. internet and phone providers all on the same fiber lines
You need to be able to choose between 2-3 video, internet and phone providers all on the same cell towers/freq

If you can do these things you have choice and competition. If you can't there is no invisible hand, you've got a monopoly.

There's a damn good reason Bell Telephone was broken up into multiple companies, and Comcast needs to be broken up for the same reasons.

Good idea, but I'm not sure how that'd work for cell providers. Incompatible freqs and technologies. I guess you mean someting like MVNO, but that's really not going to help much, because you're constrained at the cell tower even with a single carrier+roaming partners.

Cable/fiber might make sense. It'd be something like TX does with power, which seems to result in cheaper prices.

 

[Darth Millennial]

1TB is a pittance...

Fixed that for you.

 

[kac77]

Let me try to reword that in a more simplistic manor and see if you can understand it. Didn't realize my initial post would be that hard to understand.

You are comparing two different things. A price increase of only the people that use over 1TB of data a month, or a price increase of every single customer. It is that simple just those two groups. Those are the two ways they can make money, charge everyone or charge a group. The original posted talked about the top 1% (those using over 1TB) paying more is the same as the people that have most money (top 1%) paying more in taxes. He was comparing the top 1% of data users to the top 1% of people with money. small group vs small group. You then made the statement that taxing the top 1% is not the same as increasing the price for all of your customers. Meaning that you are now trying to compare 100% of data users to 1% of the people based on wealth, or large group to little group. You have now compared two different things, one of them being a group that was never mentioned at any point. In fact that is the group not being effected by this. 100% of the data users are not seeing a price increase. So my statement was simply that comparing 100% vs 1% being equal and 1% vs 1% being equal is not the same thing. Since they are not the same thing you can't twist the logic in the way that you did.

Rewording was required because your first attempt at your pretzel logic was poorly executed and didn't make any sense.

The cap affects everyone. Literally everyone who goes over 1TB will be charged. You are creating a fake grouping of users. The more people who view content online the more people will hit that cap. THAT'S WHY IT'S THERE! It's as simple as that. When we talk income tax increases that only affect the 1% we are literally talking about a TAX BRACKET. An increase on the 1% literally only affects them and no one else because we are dealing with percentages. There are 350 million people in the US. I can guarantee that all 350 million people will NEVER enter the top 1%. It's mathematically impossible. Not today not tomorrow not ever. The same can't be said for your side of the argument. Comcast could very well leave it in place for an extended period of time such that 40% or 100% of their consumers could go over it. You can't guarantee that's not the case. There are no brackets based on percentages when it comes to Comcast's cap.

As for the other part, it is static in that somebody has to change it and we were never told a formula that will be used to decide when to change it. However you original post was using the term static as never changing since talked about how data usage will increase over time however this 1TB will be fixed for the rest of time. You did not take into consideration that while it is 1TB today they might have an in published rule in place that states if % percent of the user base gets to a certain value that the data cap increases. They might also have a rule that states it increase by X% every Y years. Or they might decide to keep cutting that number down to find the best way to fuck people over. Wouldn't put anything past them, however that doesn't really mean that it is static to the point where in time we will suddenly see that 1% turn to 30% then 80% hitting that limit. We have no idea how it will adjust as more hit that level.

Static doesn't necessarily mean not changing. Nor did I say it could never be changed. Just that there isn't some automatic formula that kicks in and adjusts the cap automatically. If I create a static IP am I prevented from changing it? No. So lets not create discussions where we know the outcome.

Are you literally saying that Comcast has this secret formula (that NO ONE has seen) that will increase the cap so therefore it's not static?? Well I have a unicorn she says, "Hello." No one knows what "formula" Comcast will use and no you can't then proceed to make one up. LOL WOW.

 

[Exavior]

Rewording was required because your first attempt at your pretzel logic was poorly executed and didn't make any sense.

The cap affects everyone. Literally everyone who goes over 1TB will be charged. You are creating a fake grouping of users. The more people who view content online the more people will hit that cap. THAT'S WHY IT'S THERE! It's as simple as that. When we talk income tax increases that only affect the 1% we are literally talking about a TAX BRACKET. An increase on the 1% literally only affects them and no one else because we are dealing with percentages. There are 350 million people in the US. I can guarantee that all 350 million people will NEVER enter the top 1%. It's mathematically impossible. Not today not tomorrow not ever. The same can't be said for your side of the argument. Comcast could very well leave it in place for an extended period of time such that 40% or 100% of their consumers could go over it. You can't guarantee that's not the case. There are no brackets based on percentages when it comes to Comcast's cap.

Static doesn't necessarily mean not changing. Nor did I say it could never be changed. Just that there isn't some automatic formula that kicks in and adjusts the cap automatically. If I create a static IP am I prevented from changing it? No. So lets not create discussions where we know the outcome.

Are you literally saying that Comcast has this secret formula (that NO ONE has seen) that will increase the cap so therefore it's not static?? Well I have a unicorn she says, "Hello." No one knows what "formula" Comcast will use and no you can't then proceed to make one up. LOL WOW.

If given from now to the end of time. yes at some point everyone will go over that point if nothing changes. However we aren't talking about that. We are talking about today, right now, this exact second. This does not effect 100% of the people because 100% are not using that much data. It only effects 1 or 2% of the users of their network today. Which is the time frame we are looking at, not 10 years from now or 100 years from now.

And no I am not saying there is some secret formula. Just that they could be doing something in the background that you are not aware of. If my customer network gets over a certain percent utilized guess what I am going to be doing? I am going to be upgrading my backhaul. How quickly will I upgrade it, what will I upgrade it to? Well that depends on multiple factors and what I think is a good choice. But I can tell you that if a area is increasing their data usage by 1% every 12 weeks vs a place increasing 4% every week, I will be focusing on the 4% area a lot more than I will the 1%. The 1% I might let get closer to fully maxed out as that isn't as big of an issue as the 4%. By the same accord a place that peaks at 70% for 30 minutes then normally is at 30% the rest of the day, again not as big of a concern as an area that is at 65% all day. None of this is secret to our customers in that I am trying to hide information from them. It is "secret" in that there is nothing explained to them and nothing set in stone. I will upgrade our network as I see fit based on various factors. I know others that do the same. I know one ISP that if their peak data usage hits 70% of there current capacity (doesn't matter for how long, could be 1 minute) they double the bandwidth of their backbone. They don't post that on their site. So just because something isn't being screamed by an ISP doesn't mean that a policy or idea isn't in place. Does that mean that Comcast does? Not at all, no idea if anyone there has a brain cell in their head that actually can spark a single though. However that doesn't mean that they don't. They have already raised it from 300GB to 1TB so they must have somebody there that makes up new numbers as it has increased once already.

 

[kac77]

If given from now to the end of time. yes at some point everyone will go over that point if nothing changes. However we aren't talking about that. We are talking about today, right now, this exact second. This does not effect 100% of the people because 100% are not using that much data. It only effects 1 or 2% of the users of their network today. Which is the time frame we are looking at, not 10 years from now or 100 years from now.

And no I am not saying there is some secret formula. Just that they could be doing something in the background that you are not aware of. If my customer network gets over a certain percent utilized guess what I am going to be doing? I am going to be upgrading my backhaul. How quickly will I upgrade it, what will I upgrade it to? Well that depends on multiple factors and what I think is a good choice. But I can tell you that if a area is increasing their data usage by 1% every 12 weeks vs a place increasing 4% every week, I will be focusing on the 4% area a lot more than I will the 1%. The 1% I might let get closer to fully maxed out as that isn't as big of an issue as the 4%. By the same accord a place that peaks at 70% for 30 minutes then normally is at 30% the rest of the day, again not as big of a concern as an area that is at 65% all day. None of this is secret to our customers in that I am trying to hide information from them. It is "secret" in that there is nothing explained to them and nothing set in stone. I will upgrade our network as I see fit based on various factors. I know others that do the same. I know one ISP that if their peak data usage hits 70% of there current capacity (doesn't matter for how long, could be 1 minute) they double the bandwidth of their backbone. They don't post that on their site. So just because something isn't being screamed by an ISP doesn't mean that a policy or idea isn't in place. Does that mean that Comcast does? Not at all, no idea if anyone there has a brain cell in their head that actually can spark a single though. However that doesn't mean that they don't. They have already raised it from 300GB to 1TB so they must have somebody there that makes up new numbers as it has increased once already.

No we are not just looking at today. People are concerned today because of the likelihood of what will happen tomorrow. This does affect everyone regardless of their usage right now this second. Why you are arguing something that Comcast intends to apply to everyone is beyond me. But so be it I guess. If Jane Doe today uses more than 1 TB is she charged? Yes. If she uses less than that tomorrow will she still be charged for the day before? Yes. The fact of the matter is that who enters that 1 to 2% could be any one. Do I know 100% that Jane Doe will go over the 1TB? No. But will she be charged if she does? Yes, at least if you believe Comcast there is a 100% certainty there regardless of what you say.

Second you don't know that it's 1 to 2% nor that it would be maintained. There's no outside agency that monitors Tier 2 providers and alerts the public to say their internal utilization is truly 1 to 2%. But let's take their word for that too. It still comes down to this argument and that Comcast will ensure no more than 1% will hit that cap. This is just ludicrous. You are arguing against basic business practices. This argument isn't a technical argument. It's a financial one. If you have never had service from Comcast then please try to trust someone who has had Comcast as a residential ISP. Comcast does not give two shits to the wind about it's residential customers. To say otherwise when they have a lock on markets in certain regions is just stupid. Sorry, not sorry, but there's no other word for it. There's no competition in these markets Comcast is not going to just gleefully raise the cap to keep their customers happy. They have done a shit job so far and hit top 1 as the most hated company in all of the United States. So if you think they are just going to raise the cap to keep their customers happy you are smoking some serious shit. I don't know if it's Krokodil, marijuana, or some new age shit but it's got to be powerful. You need to share. Then go see Samsung because your "VR" is obviously better than what they have going on.

 

[nilepez]

Consumer reports agrees that it will not be an issue for several years ://www.consumerreports.org/telecom-services/how-easy-to-burn-through-1TB-data-cap/

 

[Nobified[H]]

Am i the only one that will just disconnect from the internet? I literally do not give a fuck about isp control freaks. Cross me and click...disconnect. It is extra money fixing up my jeep cherokee!

 

[Shintai]

Ummm...

I now work for an ISP.

The infrastructure providers need to be regulated. Data connectivity providers do not.

Aka.... Road Owners should be regulated, the guy who sells you cars and provides you with taxi service shouldn't be.


Building out hundreds of miles of infrastructure costs lots of money. Money that small service providers don't have.

You need to be able to choose between 2-3 video, internet and phone providers all on the same cable lines.
You need to be able to choose between 2-3 video. internet and phone providers all on the same fiber lines
You need to be able to choose between 2-3 video, internet and phone providers all on the same cell towers/freq

If you can do these things you have choice and competition. If you can't there is no invisible hand, you've got a monopoly.

There's a damn good reason Bell Telephone was broken up into multiple companies, and Comcast needs to be broken up for the same reasons.

You dont need to break it up. Do like others have done with huge success. Regulate whole sale prices. Alternatively nationalize the infrastructure.

Breaking it up doesn't solve anything in the long term.

 

[Uvaman2]

WE need real competition to end this crap. Caps also threaten the future of computing as its currently envisioned by the big boys.
Video is one thing and a big one, but as all your devices and main computing become dependent of what a company is offering in the 'cloud' it will take more and more data.
I hope Google's wireless attempt takes of for real, and hopefully starry too.

 

[Ducman69]

Am I the only one that has already burned through my two "free" overage months? Next month I have to make sure I don't exceed 1TB... sucks, I like to have my home cameras streaming at work to keep an eye on my house on my extra monitor.

I thought I was fine, but I bought a crapton of HUGE games on Steam on their winter sale, and without thinking just queued up a ton of installs and then sure enough it popped up... "You have exceeded your 1TB limit".

 

[bigdogchris]

Am I the only one that has already burned through my two "free" overage months? Next month I have to make sure I don't exceed 1TB... sucks, I like to have my home cameras streaming at work to keep an eye on my house on my extra monitor.

I thought I was fine, but I bought a crapton of HUGE games on Steam on their winter sale, and without thinking just queued up a ton of installs and then sure enough it popped up... "You have exceeded your 1TB limit".

I used 318GB in December, and that's with only 1.5 hours of Netflix (busy month).

 

[/usr/sbin]

Am i the only one that will just disconnect from the internet? I literally do not give a fuck about isp control freaks. Cross me and click...disconnect. It is extra money fixing up my jeep cherokee!

To be fair, if you didn't buy a Chrysler product you could spend that money on something else besides fixing up your jeep.

 

[piscian18]

looks like 650GB average for me. *meh* not like we can do anything about it FREEDOM FUCK YEAH

 

[/usr/sbin]

How accurate is their measurement? Does the consumer have visibility into the measurement to assure accuracy? What counts as transferred data - IP level headers? transport headers? Then you have to define the quantities - what's 1 GB - 10^9 or 2^30?? What about dropped packets? How about unsolicited UDP packets? Does being the victim of a pingflood mean you'll be billed extra? Seriously, these are important questions.

If Comcast insists on usage-based billing, then its routers and billing infrastructure should be inspected, certified, and sealed just like gas pumps, supermarket scales, and electric meters. A sticker should be placed over the management port of any network device to prevent tampering, and by law IP based administration should be disabled. Any time Comcast want's to make a configuration change, that device should need to be re-certified.

Anything measured for trade that is billed by unit has to be certified. If you look closely, you'll see seals, calibration stickers and sometimes expiry dates on the meters (be it gas (natural or petrol), electricity, or water), supermarket scales, etc.

Just as with those other industries, all of this should be paid for directly by Comcast as well.

Yes, we do this because people have cheated in the past. Scales that were off, calibrated weights (for balances) that weren't correct, etc.

Bureau of Weights and Measures

 

[Deleted member 93354]

And comcast just tried to raise my 25Mbps cable to $75/month. ($5 increase or 6.66% markup) I cut back to basic 10Mbps down/2 Mbps up. When they called back and tried to keep us in higher package, I told them to get bent. So far no loss of quality on streaming. That's $300 in savings for the switch per year.

 

[Damar]

I remember when people talked about how great streaming was and things like Steam to download games and I kept telling em, just wait, caps are gonna come in and screw everyone.

I knew this coming long ago. It was inevitable.

Next step is pure billing by MB used... and that's gonna make current prices look cheap by comparison I'd bet.

 

[Deleted member 93354]

How accurate is their measurement? Does the consumer have visibility into the measurement to assure accuracy? What counts as transferred data - frame headers? What about dropped packets? How about unsolicited UDP packets? Sounds like we need to get the govt involved. Their equipment and configurations should be locked down, and interface ports sealed off with appropriate tamper proof seals. Any change should require re-certification.

IE. Bureau of Weights and Measures

Good luck with that. They likely count 5000 modem pings per hour as traffic towards your cap.

 

[/usr/sbin]

Good luck with that. They likely count 5000 modem pings per hour as traffic towards your cap.

I updated my post a bit to add more.

 

[Ruoh]

Added VNstatus to my router. Hopefully that'll give me a more accurate reading. Even though Comacast doesn't seem to care.

 

[farscapesg1]

I was worried but so far we have been averaging about 500 GB/month. That's with Netflix, Amazon Video, Youtube (kids), Pandora, and Usenet/Bittorrent/Sonarr. We don't game though, so I don't get hit with all those large downloads, but I do work from home 3 days a week and run a home lab so I tend to download a lot of OS and sofware ISOs for testing/learning. We run Crashplan with 2.5 TB of data uploaded (thankfully back when there was no cap) which includes my wife's DSLR photos. Plex feeds all my video via my 50/5 connection when I'm at work for lunch.

 

[Flapjack]

How accurate is their measurement? Does the consumer have visibility into the measurement to assure accuracy? What counts as transferred data - IP level headers? transport headers? Then you have to define the quantities - what's 1 GB - 10^9 or 2^30?? What about dropped packets? How about unsolicited UDP packets? Does being the victim of a pingflood mean you'll be billed extra? Seriously, these are important questions.

If Comcast insists on usage-based billing, then its routers and billing infrastructure should be inspected, certified, and sealed just like gas pumps, supermarket scales, and electric meters. A sticker should be placed over the management port of any network device to prevent tampering, and by law IP based administration should be disabled. Any time Comcast want's to make a configuration change, that device should need to be re-certified.

Anything measured for trade that is billed by unit has to be certified. If you look closely, you'll see seals, calibration stickers and sometimes expiry dates on the meters (be it gas (natural or petrol), electricity, or water), supermarket scales, etc.

Just as with those other industries, all of this should be paid for directly by Comcast as well.

Yes, we do this because people have cheated in the past. Scales that were off, calibrated weights (for balances) that weren't correct, etc.

Bureau of Weights and Measures

Great post.

 

[Semantics]

Wrong.

If you were accurately charged by usage, the first thing they would do is make the bill amount SMALLER for those that use the least amount of data. Thus, that isn't what they are after. They simply saw their current revenue and said "How can we make this number bigger while trying to justify it to all the customers?"

Yup large data users do hurt the network but throttling those users is the proper response to alleviate congestion during heavy loads. It's a self inflicted issue ISPs oversubscribe nodes so if all the users actually use those full speeds it boggs down. Caps are just a way to justify a cash grab because it doesn't address the issue of peak time usage, and a network not being used and a network being used costs comcost about the same the overhead maintenance is small after installation of the infrastructure, but you can't charge users for throttling them.

 

[Nobified[H]]

To be fair, if you didn't buy a Chrysler product you could spend that money on something else besides fixing up your jeep.

Lmfao! Are you suggesting another brand with a $500 monthly car payment? My jeep is an 1998 model xj 4x4. It has 180k miles...very reliable...the fix up would be 4 inch suspension lift and 31" tires. I accept donations!

 

[bigdogchris]

It will be 2025 and the default cap will still be 1TB. Comcast will be laughing all the way to the bank.

I'm starting to like the idea of Internet pricing like electricity. You use zero you pay zero. You use a lot you pay a lot.

 

[Ducman69]

6.66% markup

Sign of the beast. I don't believe in coincidences.

Its practically 2017, and we are rationing internet like we are at war, and there's not enough internet to go around as its needed for the war effort.

 

[nilepez]

How accurate is their measurement? Does the consumer have visibility into the measurement to assure accuracy? What counts as transferred data - IP level headers? transport headers? Then you have to define the quantities - what's 1 GB - 10^9 or 2^30?? What about dropped packets? How about unsolicited UDP packets? Does being the victim of a pingflood mean you'll be billed extra? Seriously, these are important questions.

If Comcast insists on usage-based billing, then its routers and billing infrastructure should be inspected, certified, and sealed just like gas pumps, supermarket scales, and electric meters. A sticker should be placed over the management port of any network device to prevent tampering, and by law IP based administration should be disabled. Any time Comcast want's to make a configuration change, that device should need to be re-certified.

Anything measured for trade that is billed by unit has to be certified. If you look closely, you'll see seals, calibration stickers and sometimes expiry dates on the meters (be it gas (natural or petrol), electricity, or water), supermarket scales, etc.

Just as with those other industries, all of this should be paid for directly by Comcast as well.

Yes, we do this because people have cheated in the past. Scales that were off, calibrated weights (for balances) that weren't correct, etc.

Bureau of Weights and Measures

I don't do it anymore, but when I had comcast, I monitored it through my router. The big problem with Comcast isn't the accuracy of their measurement. It's the seemingly random day that the month restarts. it generally was something like 30 days, but sometimes it was 25 and sometimes it was more than 30. That made it much harder to determine where you were in a month. With that said, the cap was 250 or 300 gb back then. I don't think I'd have a huge issue with 1TB. And truth be told, most of the time my cap with Comcast was fine too. I never had to pay them for extra GB.

 

[WangChung]

It's time for the FCC to intervene on this.

Not going to happen, at least not for the next 4 years. Not trying to make this a political post but... this is inherently politics. The FCC was headed by a majority body of people (led by Tom Wheeler) that distinctly had public interest in mind. In each and every dissent, Ajit Pai and Michael O'Riley specified that their views were "what's best for business."
I'm on vaca so I have limited internet, but there's multiple articles where both Ajit and Michael and several congressmen and senators had passed on verbiage that was carbon copied from either Comcast or Verizon lobbyists.

Regardless of party affiliation, people don't want to be involved or follow politics until it directly impacts something they care about and by then it's too late. These are the results you get.

 

[/usr/sbin]

Lmfao! Are you suggesting another brand with a $500 monthly car payment? My jeep is an 1998 model xj 4x4. It has 180k miles...very reliable...the fix up would be 4 inch suspension lift and 31" tires. I accept donations!

http://www.autonews.com/article/20160314/OEM/303149977/fiat-chryslers-quality-conundrum

It was more a lighthearted reference to the overall general reliability of Chrysler, not your particular vehicle in the driveway. that being said, I'd recommend something from Toyota in your budget

 

[kac77]

http://www.autonews.com/article/20160314/OEM/303149977/fiat-chryslers-quality-conundrum

It was more a lighthearted reference to the overall general reliability of Chrysler, not your particular vehicle in the driveway. that being said, I'd recommend something from Toyota in your budget

Trust me when I say it has more to do with what company pays which magazine. My father believed the same thing. He bought a 300RX Lexus (Toyota) it went 100k miles and then the transmission went. It apparently was a common problem with all AWD models. It wasn't mentioned anywhere by car mags. There was no recall or anything. You are talking about the supposed leader of reliability on a 40K+ vehicle. Contrast that with a Chrysler van I bought my mother. I spend 25k on it. That thing is over 100k miles easy and the only thing so far that has gone "wrong" with it is the window switches on the driver side....which i could buy online.... if I weren't too lazy. It was even more reliable then my 2010 Sentra with the BS ECM bug that's baked into all Sentra and small cars of Nissan and both were supposedly rated higher.

Basically most cars that you buy today outside of something from the UK/Euro Zone is going to be pretty reliable overall. I've driven my share of cars from all makes and usually cars that were supposed to be awesome turned out to be just mediocre and cars that were supposed to be shit I had the most fun in. The only sort of exception were BMW's. Those are fun as fuck to drive... when the electronics in them work.

 

[Stiler]

Yup large data users do hurt the network but throttling those users is the proper response to alleviate congestion during heavy loads. It's a self inflicted issue ISPs oversubscribe nodes so if all the users actually use those full speeds it boggs down. Caps are just a way to justify a cash grab because it doesn't address the issue of peak time usage, and a network not being used and a network being used costs comcost about the same the overhead maintenance is small after installation of the infrastructure, but you can't charge users for throttling them.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/The-Bandwidth-Hog-is-a-Myth-117230

Throttling people or any such thing, especially whent hey pay for the service the same as ANYONE else using it, is absurd and does nothing to help the root of the issue.

ISP's oversell nodes and don't provide enough for the amount of people they put on them, "throttling" people will do 0 to stop the issue and in the end simply hurts a paying consumer.

 

[rudy]

I remember when people talked about how great streaming was and things like Steam to download games and I kept telling em, just wait, caps are gonna come in and screw everyone.

I knew this coming long ago. It was inevitable.

Next step is pure billing by MB used... and that's gonna make current prices look cheap by comparison I'd bet.

Lets look at this from the perspective of other examples. For instance many countries outside North America, used or still rely on charging per unit for cell phone usage. Interestingly the USA and Canada preferred plans with unlimited usage, or set limits with overage. However the costs for cell phones was higher in the USA and Canada than most o the rest of the world.

People love to be scared of change but IMO billing per MB or GB would not change bills much. However what it might do is give US internet providers a major incentive to increase their capacity. You wouldn't want to have any case where a person could not use as much data as possible because their internet was too slow if you were doing metered billing. I personally would welcome that over the current system where people get unlimited or large caps but are constantly screwed with other hidden limits and and very slow rollout of increased capacity. The average US house hold only has so much available money for internet just like phone service. You can change any rules you want a thousand ways the average American isn't going to suddenly allow companies to charge twice as much. Consumers will either lower their usage, or hold out for better rates. It would also allow companies to do things like offer incentives to download over night or in off peak hours just like we used to have with cell phones. IMO all of those things would be a welcome change over the current after dinner bog down.

 

[sfsuphysics]

Lets look at this from the perspective of other examples. For instance many countries outside North America, used or still rely on charging per unit for cell phone usage. Interestingly the USA and Canada preferred plans with unlimited usage, or set limits with overage. However the costs for cell phones was higher in the USA and Canada than most o the rest of the world.

People love to be scared of change but IMO billing per MB or GB would not change bills much.

Yeah, you're making a HUGE (and probably wrong) assumption that things would balance out, bottom line is these companies will basically charge what the market can bear first and foremost then "be nice" with things like "unlimited" usage and what not. Remember cell phone costs when you did pay per minute? per text? regardless of you sending or receiving? Yeah it wasn't that cheap then either.

 

[nilepez]

Yeah, you're making a HUGE (and probably wrong) assumption that things would balance out, bottom line is these companies will basically charge what the market can bear first and foremost then "be nice" with things like "unlimited" usage and what not. Remember cell phone costs when you did pay per minute? per text? regardless of you sending or receiving? Yeah it wasn't that cheap then either.

Guess it depends how many texts you send. Your unlimited cell plan allocates at least 10-15 bucks/month of your cost to SMS and just to repeat what everyone who's worked for a cell carrier already knows, SMS essentially costs nothing (aside from the s/w to track sms billing records).

Truth is if you were charged on a per/sms basis, you'd probably just use some app to do messaging. Maybe you'd use FB or Google Hangouts, Line or Skype.
There's absolutely no doubt that for the vast majority of users, unlimited costs more, though AFAICT, data charges didn't really go down when they started using data buckets in place of unlimited data, so wireless data might be an exception to the rule. Personally, I'd gladly take a 10 or 20 dollar cut in fees to have limited daytime voice and 200 free SMS vs unlimited (and I could probably get by with less than 200)

 

[rudy]

Yeah, you're making a HUGE (and probably wrong) assumption that things would balance out, bottom line is these companies will basically charge what the market can bear first and foremost then "be nice" with things like "unlimited" usage and what not. Remember cell phone costs when you did pay per minute? per text? regardless of you sending or receiving? Yeah it wasn't that cheap then either.

But at least then I could choose to alter my own habits to save money or simply spend more if I wanted too. Basically I had freedom to use my phone the way I wanted too. In the current system I don't have an option to use the internet the way I want to, because unlimited and high cap systems dictate unusual rules about how I am allowed to use my connection as well as remove incentive for ISPs to upgrade infrastructure. If most consumers are just looking at the unlimited or nearly unlimited plans price they often save money by sacrificing bandwidth. In a metered system I can simply choose to limit my downloads. But I might have those downloads done 10x faster when I do use them because the ISPs are trying to give me fast speeds to entice me to use as much as I can. Regardless of what system you choose the cost spread is going to hover around $50 / month for internet. The average user is going to be there. The question is would you rather have that $50 / month buy you 50mbs or 2000mbs. In a metered system everyone would get access to the same fast internet speeds. Likewise ISPs wouldn't give a rip what you use it for, run a server, torrent, whatever. In the current system the ISPs primary motivation is for you to pay a set amount each month and use it as little as possible. And that is how they treat us. Throttling, various ToS limits, slow rollout of new speeds capabilities, stupid charges for renting equipment. Switch to metered and watch the ISPs give you all the hardware for free and upgrade you, let you use any hardware you want too.

Another good example of this comes from phones, I used unlimited data with sprint for years, but guess what, they said I couldn't tether to my laptop, once again stupid artificial limits. When sprint moved back to tiered plans they now had a motivation to get me to use more data, and as such they allowed tethering again.

Guess it depends how many texts you send. Your unlimited cell plan allocates at least 10-15 bucks/month of your cost to SMS and just to repeat what everyone who's worked for a cell carrier already knows, SMS essentially costs nothing (aside from the s/w to track sms billing records).

Truth is if you were charged on a per/sms basis, you'd probably just use some app to do messaging. Maybe you'd use FB or Google Hangouts, Line or Skype.
There's absolutely no doubt that for the vast majority of users, unlimited costs more, though AFAICT, data charges didn't really go down when they started using data buckets in place of unlimited data, so wireless data might be an exception to the rule. Personally, I'd gladly take a 10 or 20 dollar cut in fees to have limited daytime voice and 200 free SMS vs unlimited (and I could probably get by with less than 200)

What you stated is exactly what happened, the entire reason whatapp and line blew up was because people were using them to get around sms gouging. Within a year or 2 all the carriers had switched over to free text messaging. Prior to that they did try to stop it however it was nearly impossible.

 

[Jagger100]

Require it to be a base fee + a usage fee. The low-users will get a discount collectively that trumps the high-users penalty and they'll drop the scheme. I mean grampa using e-mail and watching the sports page is being ripped off. I mean if someone's excessive use cost that much money they have to charge more, then someone who is a low user is over paying.

 

[copy_run_start]

Am i the only one that will just disconnect from the internet? I literally do not give a fuck about isp control freaks. Cross me and click...disconnect. It is extra money fixing up my jeep cherokee!

Yes. You are the only one

 

[DocSavage]

Require it to be a base fee + a usage fee. The low-users will get a discount collectively that trumps the high-users penalty and they'll drop the scheme. I mean grampa using e-mail and watching the sports page is being ripped off. I mean if someone's excessive use cost that much money they have to charge more, then someone who is a low user is over paying.

Exactly. This is how my monthly gas bill works out. There's a base charge of $15 or so per month to pay for infrastructure and maintenance and then I get charged for what I use. This would drastically cut down on people using bandwidth for no good reason. The only thing is the rates and/or profit would have to be regulated to make sure the company isn't just pocketing all the savings this would cause.

 

[tetris42]

Exactly. This is how my monthly gas bill works out. There's a base charge of $15 or so per month to pay for infrastructure and maintenance and then I get charged for what I use. This would drastically cut down on people using bandwidth for no good reason. The only thing is the rates and/or profit would have to be regulated to make sure the company isn't just pocketing all the savings this would cause.

I like how we're using the same logic as natural gas, a finite resource that costs additional money to provide more of v. the internet, which is infinite, costs $0 for the company to provide MORE of compared to LESS and only limited by what speeds can be delivered for everyone during peak hours. Some of these posts talk like if we're not careful, we'll use up all the bandwidth, then oh no, we've run out of internet!