Xfinity/Comcast data cap - 1.2 TB/monthly

Fred Claus said:
Didn't I read someplace that they pulled their request to issue data caps after Biden was sworn in? Something about the new FCC chair wasn't going to approve it so they just withdrew? I pay 75.00 a month here in New York and don't have caps. Of course we only get 100mbps (I did speedtest.net though and saw I was getting 225 mbps)
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I've had a freaking data cap for like 5 years now. They "generously" increased the cap from 1TB to 1.2TB a year or two ago. I've had to pay an extra $30/month for unlimited data forever now. Makes me want to just download movies I don't even want to watch and then delete them just to spite the a$$holes.
 
Fred Claus said:
Didn't I read someplace that they pulled their request to issue data caps after Biden was sworn in? Something about the new FCC chair wasn't going to approve it so they just withdrew? I pay 75.00 a month here in New York and don't have caps. Of course we only get 100mbps (I did speedtest.net though and saw I was getting 225 mbps)
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How old is your modem? Several years ago I dumped the ISP provided modem and got my own. Had similar speeds. Fast forward a few years and I read an article that pretty much all ISP's had upgraded the backbone hardware for much faster speeds, as in 100's of mb's. Just needed better modem. Replaced my DocSIS 2 with a 3.1 and my speed went from the 80'smb to a couple of hundred mb.
 
Mine is my own modem/router, and it's about 3 years old. By the way I was reading this article, and got confused. I thought it was Comcast, but it was Charter. We have Spectrum here in New York, isn't that Charter? We used to be Time Warner Cable and Spectrum bought them. I'm all confused. There are so many companies out there but they are all owned by one or two different companies.

gizmodo.com

Charter Waves the White Flag on Data Caps as Trump Leaves the Building

Mere days before Donald Trump’s helicopter shrank into the skies, we got a promising early indication that telecom companies’ hog-wild joyride under
gizmodo.com gizmodo.com
 
Charter=Spectrum=TW. The Charter Spectrum thing is kind of like what Comcast Xfinity is. A new name that sounds cool.

On you modem check what DocSIS it supports.
 
Markverhyden said:
How old is your modem? Several years ago I dumped the ISP provided modem and got my own.
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I do this with my residential service as well, but I have had the experience with tech support (we have had a couple of line issues over the past few years) where as soon as they find out you have your own modem, they make you prove it's not the modems fault before they will continue. "Oh, that one is 2 years old, I don't think we support it any more". I had to jump through a bunch more hoops before they would roll a truck. All when the problem was a squirrel chewed through one of the access lines to the house. The next time I had a problem, my modem was 3 years old, and I just replaced it with a new model before I even called them to avoid that bull$hit.
 
HCHTech said:
I do this with my residential service as well, but I have had the experience with tech support (we have had a couple of line issues over the past few years) where as soon as they find out you have your own modem, they make you prove it's not the modems fault before they will continue. "Oh, that one is 2 years old, I don't think we support it any more". I had to jump through a bunch more hoops before they would roll a truck. All when the problem was a squirrel chewed through one of the access lines to the house. The next time I had a problem, my modem was 3 years old, and I just replaced it with a new model before I even called them to avoid that bull$hit.
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I've had that happen to me. The helpless desk claimed they could see my modem but it wasn't communicating. After running over to Worst Choice to pick and install a new modem the second tech was like - "I can't see anything". Turn out a pole tech had not tightened down a connection. That's why I keep a backup modem now.
 
Tried to browse the web on my Stinkpad, using Internet Exploader, and Nutscrape Navigator. But it was useless, because my Comcrap connection must have went down again. Although could have been due to my Stinksys router, Nutgear wireless NIC, or DStink and TPStink powerline over AC bridges. Whatever that adapter was in Device Mangler with the yellow exclamation point!

Time to make like a baby and head out!
 
LOL this is my most recent bandwidth usage:

6qNpmBD.jpg
 
I've got 6 people in this house... including 4 kids doing distance learning. We stream EVERYTHING.

I run two businesses out of here, which includes public web servers here with me!

Last 30 days of bandwidth consumption... 914.9GB

I always seriously wonder how people run into caps, they always scream no streaming... but they must be. Because that's literally the only activity I've seen even move this consumption meter.

That is, unless I have the rare circumstances of doing what Saphirescales is doing, and uploading / downloading a wad of junk into / out of the cloud.
 
@Sky-Knight Just my mom's Netflix streaming eats through almost 1TB of bandwidth in a month. I mean, granted it's at the highest resolution/quality possible, but still. I guess if people are streaming on phones/tablets they probably stream to you in lower quality because you won't notice it on a 5" screen. I dunno. I don't use my smartphone for anything other than calls and texts, pictures, and GPS. I don't even browse the internet on it! I use less than 1GB of bandwidth per month on my phone and my mom uses like 20MB.

My excessive bandwidth use is due to cloud restores. I'm also downloading a lot of data from a movie archives server. The server has approximately 100TB worth of movies on it and I plan to download them all.
 
sapphirescales said:
Just my mom's Netflix streaming eats through almost 1TB of bandwidth in a month.
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I don't care what you're streaming, or at what resolution, that is a HUGE amount of data.

During Life in the Time of Covid I've been streaming from Netflix at a rate that I never did prior, and that's multiple shows a week in HD, as well as the occasional movie. My usage has never been above 100 GB per month.

You'd have to be streaming 24/7 to multiple devices, at a minimum, to hit 1TB per month in data. Something's not right here.
 
@britechguy a full Blueray quality movie streams at 40Mbps. That's 5 MB / s, or .005GB / s.

With 3600 seconds in an hour, that's 18GB / hour when streaming 4k content. That crap adds up... FAST.

Note, the above totals include 7 channel audio as well.
 
A single individual would have to be streaming ultra-high res material, all the time, and sitting in front of the TV (or just letting streams run and run) to reach 1TB per month under any typical scenario.

That's not how most of us stream.

1TB is a s*$tload of data, no matter how you slice it. And it's difficult for any normal streamer to come even close to that in a month. It's difficult even in families with multiple streamers to come close to that in most months unless they're all glued to their TVs.
 
@britechguy Sky-Knight gets it. It's not 2010 anymore. Streaming eats up a TON of bandwidth. My mom is retired so she watches a few hours of Netflix a day. At 4K it's easy to hit 1TB. It takes less than 2 hours/day to reach 1TB if you're streaming full 4K content.

Most families are streaming on laptops, phones, and low-res TV's. They don't stream 4K.
 
@britechguy You're right! But you're missing the point...

18gb / hour / screen running. And people turn this crap on, and walk away... just letting it run all day as background noise like they used to do with the TV.

So no, they don't have to be sitting there, the TV just has to be on. And when you have 3-4 screens going at the same time in various rooms / people?

As I said, this crap adds up... FAST.
 
Sky-Knight said:
@britechguy You're right! But you're missing the point...

18gb / hour / screen running. And people turn this crap on, and walk away... just letting it run all day as background noise like they used to do with the TV.

So no, they don't have to be sitting there, the TV just has to be on. And when you have 3-4 screens going at the same time in various rooms / people?

As I said, this crap adds up... FAST.
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Well, we live in different worlds.

I know of very few people who stream, and particularly UHD video, as "background noise."

And if you happen to have data caps, then if you're going to do "background noise" you'd better think about whether you want to do that with UHD (hint: you don't).
 
britechguy said:
Well, we live in different worlds.

I know of very few people who stream, and particularly UHD video, as "background noise."

And if you happen to have data caps, then if you're going to do "background noise" you'd better think about whether you want to do that with UHD (hint: you don't).
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Wait you mean if I take responsibility for what I do I can reduce my usage and therefore my bill? That's crazy talk!

And also absolutely correct. I was just pointing out how easy and mindlessly it is to hit a 1.2TB data cap.
 
@Sky-Knight @britechguy Yeah, having the TV running in the background is just something my mom has always done. She doesn't necessarily sit in front of the TV for 2 hours a day (or even watch it every day), but it averages out to a couple hours per day when all is said and done.

To be honest, I think data caps are BS. We never used to have them before. This is just the cable companies being greedy and punishing people for not paying for their overpriced, crappy TV service. Yes, we're using more data than 10 years ago, but technology has advanced a lot from 10 years ago too. Technology is supposed to get better over time, not worse.
 
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