Received my quota warning from Comcast

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mryerse

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Comcast called to inform me that I exceeded their 250GB quota and that if I do it again they will shut my service off for 12 months. He had the balls to offer a commercial dedicated line with a $10k install and $1,500/mo. I said "Sign me up for that quick!".

Wish FIOS was out here, I would switch in a heartbeat. The only other high speed I know of is quest DSL which has 896k up versus 2m up with Comcast. For now I'm going to shut down the main bandwidth using programs.
 
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And how far did you go over? Charter did the same crap and put a 250GB/month limit on. I had to cancel and move to 7.1Mbps Verizon DSL. FIOS coverage stops, I kid you not, a half mile down the street from my house.
 
mryerse said:
Comcast called to inform me that I exceeded their 250GB quota and that if I do it again they will shut my service off for 12 months. He had the balls to offer a commercial dedicated line with a $10k install and $1,500/mo. I said "Sign me up for that quick!".

Wish FIOS was out here, I would switch in a heartbeat. The only other high speed I know of is quest DSL which has 896k up versus 2m up with Comcast. For now I'm going to shut down the main bandwidth using programs.
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Your solution is pretty simple. Stop torrenting/newsgrouping :)


and wait for a new carrier to offer service.


or, buy the comcast business cable internet, it's about $10 more but you get no cap
 
Ockie said:
Your solution is pretty simple. Stop torrenting/newsgrouping :)


and wait for a new carrier to offer service.


or, buy the comcast business cable internet, it's about $10 more but you get no cap
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You can easily hit a 250GB cap these days with zero torrenting. I have an account with FilePlanet and get access to quite a few game betas through that. So it's not uncommon for me to download quite a few 3-6GB games in a month. Plus with HD Hulu and VOIP, it's just really not that hard.
 
kevinzak said:
You can easily hit a 250GB cap these days with zero torrenting. I have an account with FilePlanet and get access to quite a few game betas through that. So it's not uncommon for me to download quite a few 3-6GB games in a month. Plus with HD Hulu and VOIP, it's just really not that hard.
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I dunno, it takes an awwwwful lot to hit 250 gigs. My house does tons...TONS..of online gaming, I'm usually 6-8 hours a day of gaming. Literally. And heavier online games...Battlefield series. The kid torrents a little,he games at leat 10 hours a day..yes..literally., XBox too, and more like 16-18 hours of gaming per day over the weekend. I frequently download *nix distros (regular http downloads, no torrent stuff touches my computer), I upload lotsa files to clients, VPNs, I watch HULU a lot, 6x computers in my house.

I frequently repair computers at home...so that's often installing virgin Windows...and then all the service packs and updates and drivers.

I have not exceeded 100 gigs...I'm usually more in the 60-80 range.

People that are binging past 250 gigs...you've gotta be torrenting crap 24x7...if you were my neighbor, I'd be pissed at my node getting swamped..climbing up on the pole and cutting your line.

Basic home accounts aren't designed for that, if you're running servers 'n stuff at home, or utilizing your ISPs resources THAT HEAVILY, own up and purchase a biz account. You get what you pay for!
 
See, I hit 80-90GB on my crappy connection (I envy you city people and your fancy FIOS) and I don't torrent all. I do a lot of online gaming, my brother and parents do a lot of Hulu and high def streaming, a lot of iTunes movies and series, I'm on some form of VOIP almost constantly, I download game betas, and I download a lot of service packs and driver updates for whatever I'm working on.

I figure someone with a decent connection could hit 250GB fairly easily considering I feel limited by what I have. Maybe I'm just overthinking it, and I would just have a lot my first month and then fairly normal usage. I dunno.
 
It all really depends, for example...

If you have a 15mbps down pipe you can effectively download close to two MB per second (1.875MB)

1.875*60 Seconds = 112.5MB per minute
112.5*60 Minutes = 6,750MB per hour
6,750*24 Hours = 162,000MB per day (24 hour period)
162,000*30 Days = 4,860,000MB per month

Or about 4.746TB per month, so constant torrent hammering is not likely happening in this case. I have a 6mbps DSL line at home and pulled in over 40GB of linux distros over a few days. It is very easy to hit a 250GB cap if you are at home, online, doing stuff. On top of that 40GB of down bandwidth, I was streaming movies, video clips, surfing and general web stuff. Internet access is meant to be free and open, or at least it functions better that way. I pull in vast amounts of data every day and learn countless things. Both useless and trivial, for example. Nine to twelve months ago I did not know a damn thing about Linux. Now I operate about ten servers both personal and for business. All by my unrestricted online access to download as many distro's as I wanted and access to the millions of pages worth of *nix info online.

However, these calculations are assuming perfect line conditions and constant hammering on the download. That being said, on a slow month of the things I just described, I easily push 250+GB/mo. That's just during normal usage, tinkering and learning months. Not including the event of me working on PC's or what not. I do however archive old data for easy local retrieval with my 1.8TB worth of drobo storage which is nearing capacity for some reason. Saves on re-downloading the same stuff again because I thought I don't need it. So I just store files away like a file pack-rat.


Everybody has their own pace at which they consume data/bandwidth. I am sure some users get the cheapest DSL. Send emails, use IM and maybe some family pictures. Thus using less than 10GB per month. But then there are people that are just so addicted that they go balls deep in everything the wonderful online world has to offer. I would one of those internet addicts. :eek:
 
People that are binging past 250 gigs...you've gotta be torrenting crap 24x7...if you were my neighbor, I'd be pissed at my node getting swamped..climbing up on the pole and cutting your line.
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Get off your high horse, people are actually using the bandwidth the ISP sold to them and now the ISP are caught with their pants down for over selling and is somehow the users fault....

an ISP says you get X speed unlimited this and that and now you try to use that speed and get things and suddenly is your fualt, blame the ISP for not upgrading their equipment to handle the loads, or tell ISPs not to over sell so dam much hoping people will only check emails.

online gaming does NOT use alot of bandwidth, even in games like team fortress 2 where you have to download maps you dont have, most online games you download little content and just send packet back and forth.
 
turb0 said:
quit surfing all that porn..... you're welcome.
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Surprisingly that is very little of my bandwidth usage in that category. Maybe trickling in less than 100MB/mo on a busy month. I've got that part of my life covered. ;-) Computers take a boatload of my time, but when the subject comes up. I don't give a f*** about computers for the next 5 minutes! :p hahahahaha



good times :D
 
You can definitely use all that bandwidth. I'm not the only one that feels that this is an attempt of the cable companies to curb the proliferation of streaming and downloadable media cutting into the sales of cable, especially HBO and others. Downloading a few High def movies to watch a month will put you over, streaming HDTV, etc. etc.
 
yeah, I know when ABC.com had LOST Season 4 in HD streaming, the wife had that laptop streaming for 4-5 hours straight almost every night for 2 weeks.

TWC hasn't capped me, but I don't do too much at home like I use to. I'm too tired when I get home to really want to deal with computers.
 
Frankly, what I am doing with the bandwidth is my business, not Comcast's. But they are not raising the content of my bandwidth usage as an issue, they are just concerned about total consumption, so that point is a non-issue.

I used 700 and something gigs. And I thought I was being conservative. I guess not. I believe I had actually been exceeding 250 for several months, so I applaud Comcast for being lenient. The main cause of the use of bandwidth was downloading uncompressed HD video. That is how I prefer them. The source of the content and whether it is legit or not has no bearing with me. The point is that I pay Comcast for a service and they have imposed a limit. I will comply with the limit for the time being, but will also consider other providers. I am also okay with paying another $10/month or however much it is for a business account to have no limit. But his comment about paying 10k and then $1,500/mo was ridiculous. Personally I don't like their attitude and business model and would prefer to give my hard earned money to a company that doesn't impose such limits on their customers. My opinion is that if they advertise 12/2 as the bandwidth, I should be able to peg 100% of the time if I want to. If they can't support it then it's time for them to upgrade their back-end network capacity, not threaten me. I Hear switched fiber networks are on horizon so I look forward to these problems being a thing of the past.
 
I'd love to agree with the "don't be a whore and waste the bandwidth allowed", I can't. The internet is there for us to evolve as a society. To learn, to grow, to enjoy etc. I hate the fact of these caps and restrictions. These companies are certainly not hurting for money.


Example = Internet in Asia 50Mb for somewhere around $50/month... America the greatest country in the world can't compete with that? I think not, WON'T is the operative word.
 
They charge it because Americans pay it because "that's just how much it costs". Sheep.
 
Maybe Comcast will use the extra money they make from these caps to improve their customer service. Hahahahaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
All these same people that agree with the caps are also the ones saying that physical media is going like the dinosaur. Um... HD video takes a lot of space, and a 250GB cap is what? 10 full Blu-ray size movies (averaging ~25GB each). Wow. I don't think so.

I hate the caps. They blow. I watch a LOT of videos online, and easily get close to 250GB, if not more. But, I'm on DSL with no limit. Slower, yes. But, no caps! :) I also download a lot of ISO's for Linux distro's and MSDN CD/DVD's. Plus beta software, game demo's, etc. add up FAST. And I don't think getting a business account for a residence makes much sense. It's not a business. Extra $$ a month so you don't get screwed and you get what you should get with residential? No thanks.
 
I believe so my friend. And if you pay extra for faster speeds, you're still limited to 250gb/month. I must give Comcast credit for not using strict enforcement. I am certain I went over the limit for several months before they warned me. And they just warned me. They didn't disconnect my service right away. Still sucks though.
 
Eh, I just looked at my graphs and i'm at 33.47 transferred for the last two days... That's without torrenting.
 
get a comcast biz account. alittle more, but they do not care what you do with it. servers, torrents, terabytes a month. Better reliability and customer service on top of it.
 
ya is funny, here havea 25MB line free upgrade! so now you can download more, faster, BUTTT you still only havea max of 250G

i am sure if you dont max out your connection 24/7 they wont care as much as they know what your doing anyways, sure people who get warned they monitor ands ee your are sucking up and down speed 24/7 or at least most of the month.
 
Why is Comcast providing a monthly data usage threshold for its residential high-speed Internet users?

Comcast has been evaluating a monthly data usage threshold for quite some time and it has heard from high-speed Internet customers who have asked that it provide a specific number for excessive use. By providing a specific monthly data usage threshold, Comcast is providing greater clarity to its customers about excessive use.
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Just throwin' that out there.
 
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turb0 said:
quit surfing all that porn..... you're welcome.
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maybe they'll give you a discount/deal on your service if you threaten to leave
they've done it to me before.

they sure as hell dont want to lose your business - even if it is just a single person
 
Personally, while I want more for my money, I'm just glad that they finally provided a number instead of disconnecting you without warning. I had surgery last year and ended up spending a lot of time in bed, and watching lots of streaming video. I was cut off, and when I asked "how much was to much", I just got "well there's no specific number..but you went over it". :rolleyes:

Now at least they're upfront about it, and we can decide whether we want their service or not.
 
AMD_Gamer said:
is that 250GB cap up and down?
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They count up too. So in reality if you download 100GB in torrents and try to keep a high upload ratio of 2.5 you are done for the month. Of course it's really easy to exceed that.

Oldie said:
Personally, while I want more for my money, I'm just glad that they finally provided a number instead of disconnecting you without warning. I had surgery last year and ended up spending a lot of time in bed, and watching lots of streaming video. I was cut off, and when I asked "how much was to much", I just got "well there's no specific number..but you went over it". :rolleyes:

Now at least they're upfront about it, and we can decide whether we want their service or not.
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Agreed, I appreciate their warning and specific usage data.

They should still make the data available real time though. I asked for that and they said the report runs once a month. He suggested buying a monitor but I know I could monitor it on my own. I just think if they are going to have the restriction, they need to have the metering+reporting offered with the service. They're probably afraid some people will realize how little they d/l and result in more people trying to max out the 250 :) Oh well though that's life in a service provider industry. Tired of these American telco price+policy fixings.
 
so if you get the warning they shut you off for the month? or just warn you not to do it again?
 
As far as I know, you get one warning; and then you're put on a 12 month probation. If you go over the limit another time in that 12 months they cancel your service.
 
I think it can kind of depend how much you have gone over, how often, but ya, suppsoed to be a warning first.
 
Comcast sucks, I have a few stories I could tell, but Comcast sucks sums it up best.

Now, the reason Comcast in particular is so interested in how much bandwidth your using is simple. They are a cable company. If you arent buying the super huge 300 mega channel package, and instead watching streaming content, theyre losing money. Well, how can they stop you from using that bandwidth? Limit it. ( this is a paraphrased version of an actual well written article I read when Comcast fist pulled this crap, at that time supposedly some of the online media companies were supposed to be filing suit, guess its still in litigation or they lost)

I swapped to DSL. Its a tad slower, but it always works ( Comcast was horrible uptime) and so far as I know, no limits. On a good run in a few days I have DL'e over 200 gigs of um, "Collector Edition Adult Entertainment" so 250 is nothing, Id be 28 out of 30 days a month w/o internet.

Friends dont let friends surf Comcast.
 
When it comes to internet access I have one thing to say...It has always been a gentlemens agreement that users pay for ACCESS not for information! To now turn around and say 'ok we're gonna do it backwards now' is just f'ing insane! The ISP's doing these types of practices need to be bitch-slapped back into reality and wise up or I so dearly hope they lose every last one of their customers!!!!!!!!!!
 
Phantum said:
To now turn around and say 'ok we're gonna do it backwards now' is just f'ing insane! The ISP's doing these types of practices need to be bitch-slapped back into reality and wise up or I so dearly hope they lose every last one of their customers!!!!!!!!!!
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Not that many people will take the time to read this, but I have some experience with ISPs due to partnering with a few over the years and doing some stuff in their data centers 'n working with their guys.

The thing that appears to elude so many people, most ISPs...including Comcast, have always had in the EULA from day 1...they've always had terms which describe the limitation of "home accounts" to within reason.

http://www.comcast.net/terms/subscriber/

http://www.comcast.net/terms/network/

So people keep saying "Now my ISP is telling me I have limits....blah blah"...truth is, most of them have always had some thing in the EULA which mentioned, in a summary..."within reasonable limits".

All ISPs have a business model which they follow, which has a formula that focuses on an oversubscription rate. An ISP has a certain amount of bandwidth available at their gateway/backbone, and in order to make business sense and stay productive as a business...they oversubscribe that bandwidth they have. This was true even back in the dial up days. Different ISPs have slightly different oversubscription models which they follow based on their goals...naturally the higher performance ISPs that have lower oversubcription rates are more expensive..hey, you get what you pay for.

Say an ISP has an OC3 as their backbone. That's roughly a 155 megs. Now lets say that their typical home package is an 8 meg package. According to some kids who demand they can run full speed 24x7 without caps..and demand all of that speed all of the time, they would have to dedicate 8 megs per user. Hmmm..155 megs, divided by 8 megs....gee whiz..that's only 20 people they can provide bandwidth for. Now...the price of an OC3...that can be 20, 30, even 40,000 bucks per month..depending on several factors. Lets go low just for the sake of this...and say they have a cheap OC3 at 20,000 per month. Divide by 20 users...and that's a wholesale cost of $1,000.00 per user for their solid 8 meg connection. Wholesale cost..the ISP isn't even making money yet!

Raw bandwidth aside....it's rather well known amongst most people who have some knowledge of network equipment, that torrent/p2p software beats the living crap out of routers, due to all those concurrent connections. Cable ISPs distribute their bandwidth to neighborhoods via nodes. Those nodes are...routers, basically a T3 going to various neighborhoods. See what torrents do to those home grade routers? Now picture the load several warez seekers in the same neighborhood can put on the local nodes router....and yes that will impact the other 95% of normal web users on that node.

ISPs are out to please the majority of their customers. Their goal is to keep the usability of the internet up to snuff for those users. Greater than 95% of their home customers are standard type users. The <5% of bandwidth abusers naturally aren't paid attention to, they're not the big revenue generating percentage of their customer base, matter of fact..their overuse of the bandwidth hurts the big percentage of their customer base. Heck...this is very basic business practice. They're out to...<gasp> :eek: make money! Not dig into their pockets and suffer losses for <5% of their user base. :rolleyes:

Home user accounts are expected to stay within a reasonable bracket of bandwidth consumption, it's a part time thing. Business customers, which are usually the same speed pacakges, and logically expected to consume more of the ISPs resources...that's the primary reason that those prices are more expensive (along with better tech support and higher uptime). It's expected that they'll have much higher bandwidth consumption due to heavier e-mail flow, downloads, VPN traffic, many surfers on at once, blah blah. Higher consumption of the ISPs resources = higher prices.

There will always be a small group of people who try to abuse the privileges they have...give an inch, they take a mile. Just look at that leaked Microsoft Technet fiasco last week...there wasn't even any honor amongst thieves here in the IT tech world...that technet site was raped, pillaged, and plundered within mere hours.

It honestly amazes me that ISPs haven't moved to the "Pay for what you consume" model yet. I'd be 100% in support of that, it's only logical. You do that with your electricity, your gas, your food, your oil. Or a "half 'n half" model such as we commonly see with cell phones.
 
250GB is an eminently reasonable quota. I'm in that 5% and I still rarely break 100GB/mo. Stonecat already covered most of what I was going to say, but do any of you manage a network? If you had 1000 users on your network and 1 user was taking up a disproportionate amount of resources, wouldn't you restrict that 1 user (the typical figure given is that less than .1% of users are affected by the 250GB limit).

I was pissed when I was 14 and comcast started capping uploads at 128kbit/s from uncapped uploads. But after a while I realized that I'm paying for a shared, oversubscribed service. If I wanted to use my connection to its max as much as I want, I'd buy a dedicated line. It's just not worth it to me to pay the premium when I can get my max speed nearly all the time and it suffices for what I want to do. The 250GB limits are CLEARLY spelled out now. If that doesn't work for you, switch to DSL, FIOS (if available) or pony up the cash for a dedicated line and use it for all its worth. That said, I understand the other side of the argument, especially with Time Warner's ridiculous attempt to cap usage at 40GB a month - that was a pretty clear ploy to quash online video. However, 250GB is a reasonable amount - I just hope that the limit goes up over time as all of our data consumption is likely to increase - the cap should go up as well as infrastructure is upgraded. This is especially important now that Comcast has implemented their protocol agnostic throttling to relieve congestion on-demand, so more users downloading more data doesn't mean everyone else has to suffer on the shared pipe.
 
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YeOldeStonecat explains it best here.

But the simple fact of the matter is that you are bound to an agreement with your service provider, and they gave you a warning.

torrent/p2p or not, you went over what they consider to be reasonable and they have to take action.
 
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