Comcast's 1TB data caps start to roll out nationwide
engadget.com
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Otherwise I think it's safe to assume that once the caps are entrenched, they won't ever be increased and they'll try to move everyone into a regime like cell phone data is currently: high prices, tightly metered, innovation dead.
The key is competition though, as you've pointed out.
There are indeed no caps, but only at the expense of streaming video, which is throttled and restricted to SD resolutions, unless you pay extra to get HD, which seems to me to be a blatant disregard of net neutrality.
Look at Germany, where they existed for a while already, and have pushed against net neutrality, refuse to peer with companies unless they get paid, replace ads in websites with their own with MitM proxies and so on.
T-Online/T-Mobile are the worst of the worst.
Unfortunately paid peering is pretty much the norm these days unless you are part of the exclusive club of Tier 1 ISPs, not that I'm defending it. I don't have much great to say about any of the wireless carriers but I feel like T-Mobile is at least trying new things. The T Mobile One plan for instance is really great if you travel internationally. I don't know of any other carrier that is doing that.
I like T-Mobile and dislike Comcast, but IMHO violating net neutrality by billing for data differently based on who I'm exchanging packets with is much worse than being a dumb pipe that happens to have a monthly download cap.
Telecoms have individual circuits going to each house that can be leased. The problem is that the majority of those need massive upgrades to go beyond adsl speeds.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
In the proposed system, either the government would pay for the upgrade to ADSL, or the network operator would recoup the investment through the access fees. (Probably both, depending on the area's expected ROI.)
The modem MAC address. The cable company associates your modem with your account so that you can have access to the Internet.
https://www.publicknowledge.org/assets/uploads/documents/UBP...
So far the only one announced is Google Fiber, but the long term plan I've heard is for choice.
Ars Technica story from earlier this year: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/what-i...
And of course they were sued by AT&T:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/tennessee-kills-m...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbundled_network_element https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling
I agree with everything you are saying but my cynical side says that this unlikely to happen again.
Now, don't get me wrong: from what I have read, Comcast seems to be a prime example of the second kind of ISP and they are implementing data caps, so yes this would make me try to switch as well. But dismissing data caps in general seems not to be the right approach for me.
It literally makes no sense at all to offer metered data. It doesn't help the consumer, it doesn't help the business, and it doesn't help us as a society. Even if it's not a total dumpster fire that doesn't mean it makes any sense at all.
This is a short term money grab by the worst company in America. That's all.
They have projected precisely the point at which they can enter the market with a cap high enough that nobody will care today, and over time things like 4K netflix and larger and larger games, with frequent large patches and OS updates will eat that buffer to become pure profit. They will be sticking hard at 1TB, not at 99th percentile. Remember that 4K is 4x the pixels that 1080p is, and HDR adds even more data.
"High (Best video quality, up to 3 GB per hour
for HD and 7 GB per hour for Ultra HD)"
If they're going to oversell the network[1] and cap my data, what the hell good are they?
Internet is too important to be mis/greedily handled as it currently is. ISPs need to start providing something of an SLA, and we need to start running monitoring tools in user end routers to ensure up time.
[1]: I can only assume this due to speed drops during peak times.
Full, unrestricted, unmonitored, uncensored, IPv6-compatible compatibility sold by the gigabyte.
They are honestly fantastic (I'm even using them as my mobile provider - and I don't live in the UK anymore). However, if you use them you'll understand why this model can't go mainstream: It gets expensive pretty fast, especially if you aren't paying attention.
However I will straight up recommend AAISP to the UK HN crowd. If you don't know them, please look into them!
I've never really understood how it's OK for ISPs to market contended, capped connections as if they were dedicted leased lines. At what point does contradicting yourself in the small print with 'fair usage policy' and 'up to' become illegal?
AAISP applies time-and-byte-based billing, with higher billing rates in the evening. One buys a number of billing 'units' at the start of the month and these deplete with the calculated usage, if you exceed your purchased units then they add another one and charge you.
Eventually this reached the point where my wife was asking 'how much will it cost to watch this video?' and we were trying to work-out whether it would fit in our purchased allowance, given the time of day, or require a top-up. So it was easier to move to an equally competent ISP ( Goscomb ) who offered various capped tiers, so now she can just look at the usage level and determine whether she can watch a 1.5GB video or wait until next month. There is also less fear about how much my self-hosted services are costing me.
Several months after I migrated-away from AAISP the latter cancelled the underlying broadband service on my line. So they're not infallible, either... and they never did apologise. Thankfully Goscomb fixed the issue and soaked-up any charges from BT, the infrastructure provider.
They have a 1TB service now which is very cheap, same as Comcast, so for most people I actually think this problem is solved. Back when I used them, my usage was greater than today and I was ordering only 300GB monthly so it was a pita. Yet look at me still recommending them :)
> So they're not infallible, either... and they never did apologise
Honestly that doesn't sound like them, unless it legitimately wasn't their fault. Ring them. Hell, ring them today and ask for an apology I'm fairly certain you'll get one. They did mess up when I was moving out as well, by turning it off a day early - I gave them a ring and it was fixed in 10 mins, and they did apologize :)
Now today I'm stuck with an ISP that doesn't train its staff on what IPv6 even is. I can't call it about increased latency or 70 disconnects a day without being asked "have you tried turning it off and on again". I can't get transferred to a manager. I can't get a refund despite 4 months of completely unusable service.
I'll take the constant worries of metering over eating meat from a butcher that doesn't know what a cow is.
And yet, no one can think of any possible justification for implementing a change like this for consumer data usage...
The "low data users subsidize high data users" thing is widely misunderstood. People imagine that if it wasn't for that one guy in a hundred, instead of paying $49.99/month that one guy would be paying $99.99/month and everybody else would be paying $15/month. But do the math; the one guy in a hundred would be paying $99.99 and everybody else would still be paying $49.50.
And in practice what happens is that the user whose bill just doubled cuts back their usage. But those people are the early adopters you're shutting down. So nobody can ever build a service that requires above average data because it would blow the user's usage cap; all such services become DOA which means the ISP can forestall upgrades indefinitely. The internet never gets any faster and nothing that requires faster internet ever happens.
You want to be subsidizing that guy, because it isn't that expensive and tomorrow you're going to want the upgrades the money paid for.
Physical materials limit concurrent throughput, not monthly transfer. ISPs oversell their throughput and then hope that monthly transfer limits will dissuade users from actually saturating "their" bandwidth too often.
The honest strategy here is to sell much lower throughput links such that everyone gets to saturate theirs 24x7 without causing problems for anyone else.
Such an option might make BitTorrent users happy, but we live in a streaming world now - most consumers seem to want bursts of extremely high bandwidth followed by hours of nothing.
VPS providers have substantially the same problem with RAM, and for a time their approach was to state the baseline and "burstable" RAM of a given price point separately.
Recently I was cancelling my comcast for wave. I was charged an early cancellation fee of multiple months service (The cancellation was due to moving out of my apt at end of lease to a house for which comcast did not offer service). The early fee was not on my original contract; and was apparently added without my consent in the interim, and the lower level managers intended to enforce despite their inability to even provide me service.
I refused this and continued to escalate until I got a surprisingly high tier manager who talked like a techie and seemed to understand a thing or two and had a degree of self awareness (when told "Thanks for your help, I'm sorry you work for such a shit company since your good effort could be better used in better actors" he responded with "yeah I know; at least it pays the bills"). He made ALL my problems disappear and listened to my complaints of a decade with Comcast, and why I'd never go back, seeming legitimately remorseful and sad that the company has been generally anti-consumer, promising that they were pushing to improve things and acknowledging the pain I felt to the degree of comping multiple months+fees.
So my question. Is that an act? Or is this another poor middle manager trying to do his best? Are they really so tuned out as to how much ill will they're generating such that I had "not comcast" as a prerequisite to the massive act of _buying a house_? And to the other half of that question; how can we make them feel the pain more as consumers? (legal action of course but in addition.) As a tech influencer I do all I can to try and tell people about the great local ISP alternatives in my area if they aren't aware, but it seems like comcast lives in its own little bubble where the realities of good consumer practices just don't apply. (or maybe I'm being pessimistic and the hammer will drop in a few decades, I don't have many good prior historical examples with similar enough context to extrapolate, if anyone else does I'd be curious)
Let me tell a tale:
I've been with my fiance for ~10 years now. We've had Comcast for ~8 of the ten years. We had a "full" internet/cable package for ~6 of those 8 years.
Every year - like clockwork - she would get a bill after the "year" intro period and the price would go up. I'm not sure of the numbers but from ~100 to ~150 or somewhere in there.
Why like clockwork? Because every year she would call and say "cancel the package... oh? you'll extend it? AND add another pay channel bundle? Okay... talk to you next year".
With each year it got harder and she had to fight longer - sometimes through multiple calls. When it got escalated to cancellation managers they would inevitably change their minds.
It finally got to the point last year that we actually canceled everything except for the ABSOLUTE basic cable. No HD. Only half of the channels (no MTV, HGTV, etc).
The reality is simple: It's them or... dialup? Satellite? couple other crappy options. The joy of "monopolies". They know that people who want channels MUST go through them.
Thankfully Netflix, Amazon Prime,... plex :) have picked up the slack so we actually aren't bother much by the loss of HBO and the like...
OTA channels + indoor antenna. Workes pretty well for me. We watched the Olympics that way, and more recently the presidential debates.
I understand with mobile data you're actually competing for frequency space, among other issues, but this is not analogous to how data over cable works.
Wired and wireless are both "pipes" of a certain capacity. When you install the initial investment you build out a certain sized pipe. Wired has a much larger pipe for obvious technical reasons. In both cases, there is no real cost delta between a low to medium utilization.
In both cases, if the pre-built pipe experiences a high level of utilization, it results in irregularity of service (more latency, dropped packets). With wireless, the impact of high usage is significantly more severe and is more visible at a much lower percent of utilization.
The solution to this is to either reduce capacity or improve infrastructure. The latter involves capital expenditure for both pipes, albeit it is exponentially cheaper to increase wired capacity compared to wireless capacity. Cheaper, but it's not cheap. It's not just hardware - technician training, deployment costs, for larger inefficient businesses it's not easy to upgrade an edge node of 1Gbps to 10Gbps because a feeder for 100 families has a handful of hungry users.
From just a straight business perspective, usage caps make so much sense. The vast majority of customers get nowhere near them and will never notice. The small subset of "power" users that are eating your capacity you're losing money on anyway, so it's easy to sacrifice this market segment.
The sad truth is that the internet video push has turned "power user" expectations fully out of whack with what an executive room was predicting. A business that has had a built network has a hard time justifying large capital pipe expenditures for what it's internally viewing as troublesome "power" users who should switch to business accounts. So they're fighting it with these policies.
The simple truth is that the bandwidth demands are going to continue to increase across the board and this will need to be accepted and the capital spent to expand the pipe. However, a lack of competition will make this process long and painful.
A good analogy is a café. If the place is half empty its negligible to have an extra person come and sit down. But if you have a dozen people who sit there all day it doesn't leave much room for when the rush arrives.
So whatever Comcast want to do, we're literally stuck with it.
>Unlimited Data Additional $50/month No overage charges — no matter how much data is used each month
Can't they just cap the overage at $50? Why the nickel and dime-ing just to get an extra $150 from a handful of customers who forgot to monitor their usage and make a phone call?
They want that ARPU to go up by $50 for the people who think they're heavy users but aren't always heavy users. Best of both worlds from their perspective: someone who only hits 1TB a couple of months out of the year could wind up giving them $500/year of "free" money (10 months of not going over but still paying the unlimited charge). And someone else who doesn't go over except once but does it really big kicks in another $100 or so.
It's all about the ARPU.
I don't understand why they just can't run their business responsibly and not try to screw and scam their customers.
When corporations are more powerful than the law or the political process, then of course they can do whatever they want.
The law of this land is "whoever has more $$$ wins".
Question: if that is true, then how come on the server side of things, where we do have competition and so can switch to a different hosting provider if one charges too much for bandwidth, we don't have major hosting providers giving us unlimited bandwidth?
You can buy unmetered shared hosting (famously, Dreamhost) or even unmetered servers/rackspace. The problem is that at the end of the day everyone involved knows it's an illusion. You can't sell an infinite quantity of data and so any service is oversold to some degree. And since transfer is just the integration of bandwidth consumption, so there are hard limits to what you could ever push through a given server (though the service will ask you to fuck off long before this point).
Furthermore, servers are largely business-driven. Pretend "unlimited" hosting is fine for toy projects but in business long load times or outages are lost money, so reliability is a must and SLAs are the order of the day. Nobody will sign a SLA on "unlimited", bandwidth (to handle peaks) is more important than transfer anyway, and the larger your needs the more you will pay. Every dollar you spend on wasted capacity is a dollar that comes out of your profit.
Anyway, what it largely comes down to is that consumer internet access is a "best-effort" service and that's not acceptable in a datacenter. Data still costs money to deliver even in a "best-effort" service but it's super minimal. The marginal cost of a gigabyte of data is around a tenth of a cent per gigabyte. All of the cost is in the last-mile infrastructure, so overage charges are just a cash grab. I would be perfectly fine with being billed at say $15/mo for hookup plus actual data charges but that's not what's being offered here.
The guy spent several minutes getting more and more belligerent, telling me that I was mistaken, that there had always been a data cap, in fact the data cap was being raised from 300gb to 1tb! The only real difference was now the cap was going to be enforced.
I laughed at him and told him I wasn't going to argue, just cancel the service.
If you do use that much surely its fair you pay extra as you're probably using more data than the rest of the block.
Think of how connected households are today, you've got everything connected to the internet now. Smartphones, Tablets, Laptops, Streaming devices in every room, learning devices/gadgets for kids. You've got Netflix/HBO/Prime video, Spotify, apple music, Cloud backup services will eat into that bandwidth as well.
Just checked my last months usage and I've used 1.3TB of data, and it's not that I'm doing anything crazy, it just adds up.
You'll hit 1TB in 5 years, with 4k streaming. You expect Comcast to raise their 1TB limit? Doubt it.
At least the 2nd rep was nice and told me to call back in the 2nd week of Nov for even more discounted special offers.
I can't parse that. There appears to be some punctuation and words missing.
1.05tb=$10 penalty
1.1tb=$20 penalty
...
1.5tb=$100 penalty
...
2tb=$200 penalty
2.05tb=$200 penalty
...
938376171819393tb=$200 penalty
The third time it's exceeded within a 12 month period, however, the "courtesy months" go away and users will be charged $10 for an additional 50GB of data, which will continue happening to a limit of $200 per month.
Has anyone actually used this? I imagine it wouldn't be as cool as FTTH, but maybe better than Comcast (which shows as 25M down for me even though I have 50M signed up).
Information about a New Terabyte Internet Data Usage Plan
We’re writing to let you know that we will be activating a new XFINITY Internet Data Usage Plan in your area. Effective November 1, 2016, your XFINITY Internet service will include one terabyte (that’s 1,024 GB) of data usage per month. With a terabyte of data you can stream between 600 and 700 hours of HD video, play more than 12,000 hours of online games, or download 60,000 high-res photos in a month.
[Note about your personalized usage vs 1tb]
One terabyte is a massive amount of data – less than 1% of our customers use that amount in a month. However, we still want to make sure you understand your options and choose the Data Usage Plan that works best for you. If you believe you will need more data, an Unlimited Data option is available. Our data plans are based on a principle of fairness. Those who use more Internet data, pay more. And those who use less Internet data, pay less.
One Terabyte Plan and Unlimited Data option:
One Terabyte (TB) included/month
If one TB is exceeded, $10 is charged for each additional data block of up to 50 GB/month $200 overage charge limit - no matter how much data is used
Unlimited Data Additional $50/month No overage charges — no matter how much data is used each month You can also track and manage your usage so there are never any surprises about how much data you use. Here are a few tools you can use:
Data Usage meter – Monitor how much data your household has used with our Data Usage Meter.
Data Usage Estimator - Estimate your data usage with our estimator Tool. Simply enter how your household typically uses the Internet and the tool will estimate your monthly data usage.
Notifications - If you approach, reach or exceed one terabyte of data usage, we will send you a courtesy "in-browser" notice as well as an email. You can also elect to receive notifications at specific usage thresholds and set up mobile text notifications. Learn more about notifications here. Usage notifications will not be sent to customers who enroll in the Unlimited Data option.
For the less than 1% of customers who do exceed one terabyte of data usage, we’re offering two courtesy months, so customers will not be charged the first two times they exceed one terabyte while they are getting comfortable with the new plan.
If you have any questions about the new Data Usage Plan, please visit http://dataplan.xfinity.com/.
Thank you for being an XFINITY Internet customer.
Sincerely,
Tim Collins Regional Senior Vice President of Comcast's Heartland Region
Another good reason to use SSL everywhere
My best guess is the averaged October's data so far with the past two months.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - patronize your local DSL provider before it's too late.
I don't understand how switching to a local DSL provider would benefit me. I don't like Comcast at all, but cutting my typical bandwidth by more than 75% doesn't seem like a net gain. I like Netflix more than I hate Comcast.
But the real value of the comparison is seeing exactly what game cable companies are playing. Their last-mile links happen to have higher bandwidth, but really they do not want to actually carry the corresponding traffic. So they advertise the irrelevant speeds in big print, and then do everything they can to restrict the actual service provided. Meanwhile I'm consistently doing >2TB/mo on DSL.
Don't let CableCos' misleading advertising fool you, the US's last-mile communications infrastructure basically stagnated two generations back. Competition between cable and DSL is the official national policy, and moves like this one make it quite clear that they are providing similar service.
If you're in an area that still has a CLEC, you might even find a provider that actually has technical people answering the phone!
The bulk of consumer use also doesn't require high usage caps so this is an extremely noncompelling argument.
My house also does a ton of streaming and I do a lot of remote desktop. I do care about decent peak throughput.
> And from what I recall, cable companies generally throttle those uses anyway!
Maybe? I'm super in favor of net neutrality but I also recognize that throttled cable internet is still faster than unthrottled DSL.
> Meanwhile I'm consistently doing >2TB/mo on DSL.
So by your math, a whopping 6Mbps.