Comcast Now Limiting My Bandwidth

[Diggs]

Get off your high horse. It doesn't cost Comcast anything more for more bandwidth. It's not wireless internet where there's a physical limitation and bandwidth is extremely limited. Comcast was unlimited for a long time and they're starting to roll this BS out to see if they can get away with it.

Excuse me? You're the one that just finished posting how you torrent and pirate all your content. Now you complain you have to pay for the bandwidth to do it. (Shaking head sadly.....)

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Get off your high horse. It doesn't cost Comcast anything more for more bandwidth. It's not wireless internet where there's a physical limitation and bandwidth is extremely limited. Comcast was unlimited for a long time and they're starting to roll this BS out to see if they can get away with it..

Uh...yes it does. Much like a big business network, it's all about what bandwidth there is at the "gateway"..and how to manage all of the traffic behind that gateway.
I've worked very closely with 2x smaller ISP.s....as in, "almost weekly, was in their main data center" doing stuff. I saw what it was like at the main data center of ISPs...I myself had quite a bit of bandwidth going through there from sharing clients, and I got exposed to lots of specific details early on when I was building/colocating/managing some globally popular online gaming servers.

An ISP does indeed have a fixed amount of bandwidth, and ISPs oversubscribe their bandwidth, so that it can remain affordable. Do you really think for a minute that if every single client of an ISP was given unlimited bandwidth, and they all maxed out their bandwidth at the same time, and things should still go smoothly and at full speed? Nope!

ISPs have formulas for oversubscription, so that our prices remain tolerable.

Residential broadband is "best effort" bandwidth. It is never guaranteed top priority, high SLA, 100% up and down all the time like business level internet connections. Never...ever. It was never promised to be that either. It's always 'best effort" with a mix of "you can get up to xxx bandwidth". Key word..."up to".

That's one of the reasons that there's a different in price 'tween residential broadband and business internet. Businesses use more resources of an ISP....so of course it has to cost more.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Nope. Terrible idea. Do you really think they would charge me $70/month and charge $1/month for granny that uses 10GB/month in bandwidth? No. They would take granny and charge her $50/month, and then charge me like $350/month. All it would do is increase their profits and it wouldn't save ANYONE even $1.

My friend has a second property that he only uses part of the year, so he shuts his water off when he's not using it so it doesn't freeze. Imagine his surprise when even though he's using NO WATER, they still charge him $100/month "connection fee." They charge him just because he's connected to city water, then he's charged on top of that for whatever water he uses. I imagine Comcast would love to do something similar if they could get away with it.

Ya kinda contradicted yourself there. Nobody said Granny would only pay 1 dollar. 50 bucks...for the chance to be plugged in and have opportunity to use, sure. Well maybe 25. but yeah, those that are selfish and "hog it"....yup their rates should reflect that.

Why should reosonalbe people have to pay higher costs to "cover" the selfish abuse of bandwidth hogs? 95% of the heaviest usage comes from <5% of selfish bandwidth abusers. Yet the rest of the people get stuck paying higher bills to cover the bandwidth hogs. So yeah it sucks for most of us! THAT is why I'd vote for "pay for what you actually use" price model. It's only the freeloaders that would dread it.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

How would that work though? .

Quite easy. Basic monthly fee to cover the line, much like the phone bill or electric bill..there's something like $25.00 just to have it hooked up. And then..metering...the technology to measure bandwidth is there. easily done.

 

[GTP]

Dial-up is still advertised, starting at $40/month

My partner still pays $9.95 for a dialup connection that she cannot use! (We don't have a phone line!!)
She wont cancel it because she uses the email address associated with it!

 

[Krynn72]

Why should reosonalbe people have to pay higher costs to "cover" the selfish abuse of bandwidth hogs? 95% of the heaviest usage comes from <5% of selfish bandwidth abusers. Yet the rest of the people get stuck paying higher bills to cover the bandwidth hogs

I agree with Bernie Sanders... Err, YeOldeStonecat here. People who use more resources should pay more to use them. It's what we techs do with a really needy client right up until we fire them.

 

[NETWizz]

I have little to no empathy as a network guru that is a lot of data.

That works out to an allowance of over 30 Gigabytes per day, which is roughly the same as downloading mabye 5 DVD movies uncompressed everyday.

With Netflix at their highest definition you pull maybe 3 giabytes per hour so that is over 10 hours of Netflix per day.

Now I guess if that is your primary entertainment and you have a family of like 3 or 4 watching different things at the same time then it isn't enough bandwidth. Regular def is only 1 Gigabyte per hour.

 

[Galdorf]

In Ontario they charge an extra $30 for unlimited i think this is all due to streaming avg movie is 3.7 GB now with 4k that will change to 100GB for an average movie i think they are raising the price for increased bandwidth use.

 

[gadgetfixup]

I have little to no empathy as a network guru that is a lot of data.

That works out to an allowance of over 30 Gigabytes per day, which is roughly the same as downloading mabye 5 DVD movies uncompressed everyday.

With Netflix at their highest definition you pull maybe 3 giabytes per hour so that is over 10 hours of Netflix per day.

Now I guess if that is your primary entertainment and you have a family of like 3 or 4 watching different things at the same time then it isn't enough bandwidth. Regular def is only 1 Gigabyte per hour.

Thanks for breaking it down in terms I can understand. I didn't know the Netflix specifics but know 1TB streaming is a lot of data. We have servers hosting websites that don't consume that kind of bandwidth and I think our allowance is 10TB per server. 1TB for home use seems like plenty for most people.

 

[brandonkick]

In my area, I don't think we have a "limit" yet for comcast. Streaming HD content
heavily can hit this limit I suppose. Seems like their way of getting back at users
who are ditching cable for netflix. But it's their service, you don't have to use it.

And I do agree with what YOSC said, it does cost them more money for the bandwidth
they provide. The have to subscribe to a certain amount, the more demand they have
the more they need to subscribe too.... there's a cost of that bandwidth subscription for
them. When their bills go up, expect yours to go up as well.

I pay $170 a month for comcast digital preferred tv, phone, and internet at the 200/10
speed level (which was just increased from 150/10 and I'm getting closer to 235/12).

 

[brandonkick]

Although it's not "directly" related, I felt it was close enough....

In contrast to this I thought I'd share one of my current experiences:

I just bought a new house, signed the papers a day before I got married
which was around two weeks ago.... it was a lot to all happen in a short
time but everything has been fantastic. Fantastic wedding, I'm a very lucky
man as I married a great girl and the house and property are incredible.

Got about an acre of land and a really nice, newer doublewide... just over
1800 sq ft with a nice full mostly above ground basement.... nice walk in
double doors on the one side where the full basement wall is above ground.
Great price... it's worth about 25K more than I paid.

This is the meat of it though... the taxes are very high in this area and there
is no real warrent for it. BUT on top of that, the water, sewerage and garbage
are just highway robbery.

It's about $125 for all three with comparable usages (3500 gal a month) to
what I have now... but my current bill (old house) is $75 a month on average.
What really get's my goat... is the fact that there is a bill every month and it's
at a base price of around $100 per month that gets charged even if I do not
have water, sewer or garbage services active. How in the world that's right
is beyond me. It's like getting charged a monthly fee from the grocery store,
even if you never set foot in it... you pay because you "could" go there. You
have no choice, you pay the $100 either way. Don't get me wrong, even if
I had known that before hand I'd still have bought the house but man o man
talk about shady.

 

[GTP]

is the fact that there is a bill every month and it's
at a base price of around $100 per month that gets charged even if I do not
have water, sewer or garbage services active.

Congrats on your marriage..
This charge is for keeping the infrastructure maintained. Fairly standard practise all over the world.
We should create a thread about "what burns my wick!" or similar so we can vent our frustrations! Who's with me?