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Comcast updats AUP!!!!!

A

AOM

Gawd
Joined
Aug 12, 2004
Messages
960
I know we've known this was coming or rumored to be coming in the next few months and it's finally apon us as of Oct. 1st, 2008. I received an email this afternoon containing the following info below on the updated AUP.

In the next few years I could see this being a problem with digital downloads of games via steam, XBL, PSN and of course DVR HD movie distribution etc. Hopefully this will go away as did rate plans for dial-up from AOL etc back in the day.

I'm moving soon for a couple of years then again after, so I hope the next few places where I'm living possibly have FIOS.

One can only hope. :(



Dear Comcast High-Speed Internet Customer,

We appreciate your business and strive to provide you with the best online experience possible. One of the ways we do this is through our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). The AUP outlines acceptable use of our service as well as steps we take to protect our customers from things that can negatively impact their experience online. This policy has been in place for many years and we update it periodically to keep it current with our customers' use of our service.

On October 1, 2008, we will post an updated AUP that will go into effect at that time.

In the updated AUP, we clarify that monthly data (or bandwidth) usage of more than 250 Gigabytes (GB) is the specific threshold that defines excessive use of our service. We have an excessive use policy because a fraction of one percent of our customers use such a disproportionate amount of bandwidth every month that they may degrade the online experience of other customers.

250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of bandwidth and it's very likely that your monthly data usage doesn't even come close to that amount. In fact, the threshold is approximately 100 times greater than the typical or median residential customer usage, which is 2 to 3 GB/month. To put it in perspective, to reach 250 GB of data usage in one month a customer would have to do any one of the following:

* Send more than 50 million plain text emails (at 5 KB/email);
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song); or
* Download 125 standard definition movies (at 2 GB/movie).

And online gamers should know that even the heaviest multi- or single-player gaming activity would not typically come close to this threshold over the course of a month.

In addition to modifying the excessive use policy, the updated AUP contains other clarifications of terms concerning reporting violations, newsgroups, and network management. To read some helpful FAQs, please visit http://help.comcast.net/content/faq/Frequently-Asked-Questions-about-Excessive-Use.

Thank you again for choosing Comcast as your high-speed Internet provider.
 
Where I lived before...I had Comcast...I was in a sparser area of mostly middle to older people, so the torrent heads never impacted me. But if I did live in a more densly populated area with more youth, I'd be appreciative of this.

250 gigs per month is an incredibly...incredibly generous allotment. To break that, you've gotta be going ab-so-lu-tely insane with downloading and uploading movies/music/'n..err..stuff.

I consider my household quite in the high range as far as usage, the boy downloads tons of music and game patches, he's on like 20 hours a day on weekends/summer, and still a hefty 10 hours a day during school, I upload and download tons of stuff doing my consulting work, I game a lot, lots of *nix ISO downloads, 5x computers in the house, wife is a heavy surfer and keeps building her iTunes library, boy is a heavy surfer, the 5yo girl even goes lots of online games. I don't think I've seen us go past 70 gigs.

I'd applaud them if they went to a "pay for what you use" model, or at least tiered brackets. I use a lot, so I'd expect to pay more, and would support that. I pay for the amount of gas I use, I pay for the electricity I use, I pay for the food I eat, I spend more at the package store if I drink a lot, if I crank the heat up in the winter I'd expect a higher oil bill. . //shrugs.
 
the day and age when torrenting actually effected connections is over.. this is just a bogus way to hide the fact that they over expanded their networks by over selling their 16mbit/2mbit connection.. now that they have done this 250GB limit crap i have to go back to 6mbit/1mbit because i hit 250GB within the first week.. i have 16/2mbit right now... they tried to compete with verizon and realized they failed and now they are trying to cover their arses.. comcast obviously hasnt cought on to the HD age yet.. because 250gb is nothing.. that only equates to 5 full disc blu-ray movies.. and if your like me and you use netfix download service to watch movies.. this is going to start costing these direct to drive companies money since comcast holds such a huge portion of the west coast market..

yet another failure by comcast.. i mean seriously.. will they ever stop shooting them selves in the feet?
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
the day and age when torrenting actually effected connections is over.. this is just a bogus way to hide the fact that they over expanded their networks by over selling their 16mbit/2mbit connection.. now that they have done this 250GB limit crap i have to go back to 6mbit/1mbit because i hit 250GB within the first week.. i have 16/2mbit right now
Click to expand...

WTF? You are the 0.00001% percentile user, then. Downloadable HD movies are usually 4-5 GB in size. No service ever puts up full BluRay discs, even BluRay rips aren't over 8GB.

I'm a heavy user (or thought I was until I saw that post), and I think 250GB is very generous.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
the day and age when torrenting actually effected connections is over.. this is just a bogus way to hide the fact that they over expanded their networks by over selling their 16mbit/2mbit connection.. now that they have done this 250GB limit crap i have to go back to 6mbit/1mbit because i hit 250GB within the first week.. i have 16/2mbit right now... they tried to compete with verizon and realized they failed and now they are trying to cover their arses.. comcast obviously hasnt cought on to the HD age yet.. because 250gb is nothing.. that only equates to 5 full disc blu-ray movies.. and if your like me and you use netfix download service to watch movies.. this is going to start costing these direct to drive companies money since comcast holds such a huge portion of the west coast market..

yet another failure by comcast.. i mean seriously.. will they ever stop shooting them selves in the feet?
Click to expand...

If Crapcast had kept up with the DOCSIS standards and not oversold the fuck out of their network, none of this would be an issue.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
the day and age when torrenting actually effected connections is over.. this is just a bogus way to hide the fact that they over expanded their networks by over selling their 16mbit/2mbit connection.. now that they have done this 250GB limit crap i have to go back to 6mbit/1mbit because i hit 250GB within the first week.. i have 16/2mbit right now... they tried to compete with verizon and realized they failed and now they are trying to cover their arses.. comcast obviously hasnt cought on to the HD age yet.. because 250gb is nothing.. that only equates to 5 full disc blu-ray movies.. and if your like me and you use netfix download service to watch movies.. this is going to start costing these direct to drive companies money since comcast holds such a huge portion of the west coast market..

yet another failure by comcast.. i mean seriously.. will they ever stop shooting them selves in the feet?
Click to expand...

*Fast...all ISPs have an oversubscription (contention) model they follow...in order to attempt to make a profit. What used to be a common home accounts is 50:1, business accounts..20:1 or for some of the high end ISPs...10:1.

*Burst technologies work due to free available bandwidth at each node.

*Lets think about the nodes you have, the cost of each node..how many clients each node has. Go look at the cost of a DS3...now go divide that up by amount of users on your node. Do you really want your monthly rates to go to 1200 bucks or more per month if there was no oversubscription? (or do mommy and daddy pay it..so you don't care).

Not only is it the bandwidth that gets impacted...but the cable ISPs routers. Which is why cable gets affected more by warez downloaders than DSL..because you share a router on your node. Look at all the posts about how P2P traffic affects peoples home grade routers. Now multiply that on a huge scale to ISPs routers.

ISPs need to keep the majority of their customers happy, that is where their money is, the 95+% of standard users, not the fractional % of users who are bandwidth hogs. Standard business practice here....keep 99 out of 100 users happy, and don't worry about that last 100th person. Versus....have 30 happy people, 69 grumbling rather unhappy people, and 1 really happy person.
 
mps said:
If Crapcast had kept up with the DOCSIS standards and not oversold the fuck out of their network, none of this would be an issue.
Click to expand...

They're preparing to deploy DOCSIS 3 this winter to a fairly widespread area. How many other cable ISPs in the US can say that?
 
Rurik said:
WTF? You are the 0.00001% percentile user, then. Downloadable HD movies are usually 4-5 GB in size. No service ever puts up full BluRay discs, even BluRay rips aren't over 8GB.

I'm a heavy user (or thought I was until I saw that post), and I think 250GB is very generous.
Click to expand...

Blu-ray rips are way over 8 gig on news groups...at least 20 gig normally.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
Where I lived before...I had Comcast...I was in a sparser area of mostly middle to older people, so the torrent heads never impacted me. But if I did live in a more densly populated area with more youth, I'd be appreciative of this.

250 gigs per month is an incredibly...incredibly generous allotment. To break that, you've gotta be going ab-so-lu-tely insane with downloading and uploading movies/music/'n..err..stuff.

I consider my household quite in the high range as far as usage, the boy downloads tons of music and game patches, he's on like 20 hours a day on weekends/summer, and still a hefty 10 hours a day during school, I upload and download tons of stuff doing my consulting work, I game a lot, lots of *nix ISO downloads, 5x computers in the house, wife is a heavy surfer and keeps building her iTunes library, boy is a heavy surfer, the 5yo girl even goes lots of online games. I don't think I've seen us go past 70 gigs.

I'd applaud them if they went to a "pay for what you use" model, or at least tiered brackets. I use a lot, so I'd expect to pay more, and would support that. I pay for the amount of gas I use, I pay for the electricity I use, I pay for the food I eat, I spend more at the package store if I drink a lot, if I crank the heat up in the winter I'd expect a higher oil bill. . //shrugs.
Click to expand...


Couldn't agree more.
 
Zlash said:
Blu-ray rips are way over 8 gig on news groups...at least 20 gig normally.
Click to expand...
not normally, you can usually find a good blue-ray rip that's 8-9 gigs on usenet...still that can add up rather quickly. I wasn't even downloading blu-ray stuff and I had downloaded over 80gb in one week (without really trying). It was enough data that it was noticed by my ISP (Small company, so high usage gets noticed), they asked me to do my downloading between midnight and 6am...not a problem, I wrote a quick script to start and stop my downloads at the appropriate times, problem solved.

I agree though, 250GB (no matter the package you have) is a generous amount of bandwidth. If you are downloading legit things, chances of going over that on a monthly basis are slim to none. I even pull down tons of DVD ISOs for work (code, etc) that are often over 7gb in size and I still don;t usually hit that kind of bandwidth.
 
Zlash said:
Blu-ray rips are way over 8 gig on news groups...at least 20 gig normally.
Click to expand...

720p's are done in DVD-R size (4gb), and 1080ps are done in DVD-DL size (8gb).

Didn't know there was a large raw bluray scene.
 
Check the blu-ray rips in a.b.blu-ray and a.b.hdtv. They are all over 20gig, mostly in the 40gig range. Not there's a huge demand or selection but the real rips are out there and very large.
 
I'm planning on dropping their home service on Oct. 1. Going to DirectTV instead for TV. Have to go through them for internet though, so I'm switching over to business. Still, instead of getting $240 a month from me, they'll only be getting $95, and I made it clear that I'm leaving because of their new AUP.
 
Zlash said:
Check the blu-ray rips in a.b.blu-ray and a.b.hdtv. They are all over 20gig, mostly in the 40gig range. Not there's a huge demand or selection but the real rips are out there and very large.
Click to expand...

Yea but talking about pirate movie downloads off usenet doesn't really help your cause when you are saying comcast shouldn't have the cap.

I do tend to disagree with the cap though. Betweeen legal movie and tv show downloads along with everything elce I do I've hit over 150 gigs in a month. If I had a room mate I could hit this figure easy. I also fear the fact that I don't think comcast will move with the flow as more stuff hits the internet. I see them trailing behind as the need for bandwith increases as far as their limits go.
 
Zlash said:
Check the blu-ray rips in a.b.blu-ray and a.b.hdtv. They are all over 20gig, mostly in the 40gig range. Not there's a huge demand or selection but the real rips are out there and very large.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but are those AVI/Mkv/Wmv Rips or Direct ISO Rips? All of the HD/Bluray converted rips I've been pulling down are 4 or 8gb as Cheetoz said. Personally, I can't see a reason to download an full ISO of a Bluray disc. Too much misc crap, Save the bandwidth.

Side Note:
Doing the math, a 250gb/mo policy, based on a 30 day month.
Calculates down to a solid 24/7 download speed of 101.135Kbytes/second. That's a rediculous amount of info.
 
Now that this new AUP is in effect let me ask you all something.

How long will it be before comcast offers a "Extreme" user package that has unlimited downloads at 16/2 for more then what we had paying before? I wonder.. (smirk)
 
My initial reaction was "oh noes! they are limiting something!" but the more I think about my actual usage, the more I realize 250GB is actually quite respectable. The fact is that we've been spoiled here in the states - I have family in the UK who still pay by the MB.

Illegal or questionable application of what you see as "your" bandwidth does not a just cause define. Stop whining about the fact that you can't pirate the latest blu-ray before it's out in the store. Go buy the damned thing; or are you somehow "entitled" to download it? Maybe because you "already own" a standard DVD? The answer is no.

"Dude! That's only like 10 blu-ray rips or maybe even less" is not an acceptable gripe. And even if you owned your own DS3 that would still be unacceptable because it is illegal or, for the sake of argument, at least questionable.

Even if you owned a business that was using a "home" package and had (somehow) legitimate usage of over 250GB a month. Know the answer? Upgrade to a business package and stop trying to save a few extra dollars by, again, abusing the system.

And hey, I'm by no means a fan boy -- I hate Comcast with a passion (because of their TV service mostly) and wish they had a competitor in this area to keep them in-line. But come on... complaining about a company limiting your abuse and illegal use of their network is like complaining when the police arrest you for spray-painting their precinct -- and leaving a note with your address saying you were there.
 
I am just glad that Comcast stopped pretending as if they had a no caps and made it clear in there AUP. I am on a business account solely because I didn't want to get flagged for over usage of my home connection without knowing what the cap was. For me personally 250GB is plenty enough for my current usage. With my Giganews subscription I've only gone over 250GB once otherwise this is plenty enough for me.
 
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