Comcast bandwidth capping now official

I'm not a person? News to me!

I think you underestimate the amount of content on the Live marketplace. Then again, I don't have an Xbox, so I won't pretend to know. All I can do is reiterate my experience with the PSN store, which accounts for well over 100GB/month of my bandwidth usage.

What is your usage, anyway? I daresay you would not be classed as a "heavy" user by anyone but a neophyte

By definition that is precisely what you've done though (define the usage of others). Your educated guess is not accurate, in this case. Your usage is just that - your usage.

It's not unreasonable at all, not even by today's standards, let alone tomorrow's. The point here is not that the majority of internet users today are going to exceed these caps. The point is that demand for streaming media is on the rise, awareness and utilization of it is on the rise, and we are entering the hi-def era. Add all these things up and throw in bandwidth caps and you've got a recipe for trouble.

Do you know you're passive-aggressive?

 

Oh no, they do download 50 distros a month. These guys are hardcore and part of the open source community. They might not test all of them, but when you've got like 7 laptops and 5 desktops in one room and every time I go in there they are installing some form of Linux on at least one of them I know they're hardcore.

We don't really need to worry about bandwidth any more since we now have a dedicated connection that the four of us (the 2 girls barely use the internet in the house so we don't make them pay) pay for. There's no cap on our monthly bandwidth and the speed is pretty much guaranteed. 45 Mbits is fast! But that's what you get when you're shelling out $2,000 a month per person lol.

Comcast just couldn't hack it for the personal use of this household. Back in summer of 07 I called tem up and canceled the service. They never did cancel it and a few months later I had something on my credit report from them. They have such piss poor customer service. It's really annoying. Anywho, we did end up with a court date and they had to take away the crap on my credit report and pay my lawyer fees. It was pleasant, but really what else would happen when they don't even show up? Good thing I had a record of the phone conversation, and their Online CAE confirming that the service was indeed being canceled.

The point is, Comcast should do everything in their power to change their marketing to demonstrate that it is indeed not unlimited. I understand that 250 GB is quite a bit for the common household, but the common household here in SF and the Bay Area in general most likely has a higher median bandwidth usage than the rest of the country. We're all a bunch of geeks here who've come to love the internet for what it is and many of us utilize it and get the most we can out of it.

 

Comcast and other ISPs will more or less *have* too at some point or another. Its simply math.

The rate of internet users demand as well as the yearly increase in additional customers is growing much, much quicker than actual bandwidth. Even with new technology and unlimited funds to lay wire down, their is still no way to actually avoid a bandwidth crunch.

The problem has been evident for nearly ten years now, and the extrapolations have it going really sour somewhere in 2015-2020

 

Better than the situation in Canada. Here there is no significant regulation of ISPs. They are free to shape and filter their traffic, and charge anything they like. Thus we have the comical situation of Rogers offering an 18Mbit "unlimited" connection with a cap of only 95GB all for just $100/month. After that they charge you like $1.50/GB to a max of $25 extra. We only have the 10Mbit offering, and our family regularly hits the maximum charge.

 

Exactly. People are wanting the best of all worlds. They want unlimited bandwidth but don't want their costs to go up. While I don't believe much of what the cable and telco companies say it is a fact that bandwidth demand is going up far faster than it can be delivered at a reasonable cost. You also have those at the last mile wanting full speed and for the expansion costs to be covered by everyone else.

I think 250GB is reasonable for the vast majority. I personally use around 30GB to 40GB a month now. In the past, when I used torrents extensively, I could hit 20x that but it was nearly all in illegal material. Funny enough I'm on a 15mbit line these days when I was on a 1.5mbit in the past.

 

Incorrect. Fiber solutions have been vindicated with technologies such as DWDM to be fully capable of scaling. Verizon has effectively future-proofed their network with the implementation of FIOS, as well as provided their own engineers and support crews with the rollout knowledge that will be invaluable as time goes on.

For those companies still stuck on COAX and Copper, such as the cable companies, AT&T, and others, yes they are certainly going to run into the problem of user demand outstripping supply.

Then again, that's why Verizon is being rewarded now for their foresight, and will continue to reap the rewards going forward.

 

That's because you don't have the bandwidth to rent/own, via download, DVD-sized HD movies within 10-15 minutes. They are watchable within 2-3 seconds because of the buffer period. I've already gone through 9 such movies in the past 2 weeks, each averaging 4-6GB. They're usually encoded at 1GB per half hour.

You also don't have the bandwidth to download gigs worth of PSN and Wii demos and other games within minutes.

Within the past month I've downloaded over 80GB just on renting movies, let alone all of the other traffic from talking to family with video streaming via services like Skype, or managing their computers remotely with Log Me In.

I could never have imagined that kind of heavy duty bandwidth usage on my old 3mbit DSL connection.

Quite frankly, in the world of the late 90s where the fastest connection you could buy for the home was 768kbit, something we take for granted today like Youtube and other video streaming services would have not been a reality. And I can tell you now that a 50mb/20mb connection opens up enormous possibilities that are a) completely legal, and b) completely unheard of just a few years ago.

I called up Verizon, Netflix, and Blockbuster within the past month asking if they have download services for uncompressed Bluray movies for rental purposes. I've also contacted Apple because even as good as their HD movie service is, their movies are still highly compressed.

Bluray flicks have a bitrate of about 25-45mbit/sec. That's 3.125 - 5.625Mbyte/sec bitrate for 1080p. The typical AppleTV HD rental is only about 5-7Mbit/sec. That's roughly the bitrate of your standard DVD. I can see the artifacting when compared to my Bluray movies, but that's also because I have a 60" Pioneer Elite Plasma which is pretty much top of the line for under $10k.

But getting that kind of quality will require the ISPs to actually invest as a whole in their own infrastructure. It will probably also require some incentivization from the federal and state governments as well.

I would love to be able to download the movies I own, on demand, from a cloud, with the same or higher quality as my Bluray discs. I own over 400 DVDs and Bluray discs currently, all purchased legally I might add, and they take up two book shelves.

I'd also love to be able to use remote computer services to the fullest extent possible. Even connecting to my job's network for Remote Desktop purposes, which is on Internet2, my FIOS connection doesn't feel any faster than it did with DSL. Why? Because these services were designed with the slower uploads in mind, obviously not meant to scale.

I want to be able to drag and drop files in and out of the remote sessions with ease. I want to be able to stream HD video when I make calls to my friends and family rather than deal with the compressed low quality crap you typically find.

But again, these services, and lord knows what else, won't become available until there are enough high speed connections like mine to make a difference. Youtube could not have existed if everyone in the US didn't have at least a 1.5Mbit Cable or DSL connection. Nor could other services like Flickr or Skype.

You like Steam from Valve? Forget about it before the mid 00's. Think about what else could become possible if everyone had a baseline 50mb connection.

So yea, you talk about how you can't possibly ever use your internet connection that much unless you're pirating? That's just because you're thinking small.

 

Don't worry Nat , My buddy at verizon says the boxes they installed in houses are good enough for 1200/800 speeds so your 50/20 will seem very slow in the next couple of years.

 

Uhh, Natoma I'm on a 15mbit connection that never EVER drops below that. It is constantly there from day to night to morning till whenever. The biggest limitation is not on my end but that of the provider. My connection can easily do everything you said there that is available in a service. But oh well, clearly that's not the case or at least according to you, who of course knows everything I do and the limitations of what I can do.

 

As bandwidth goes up, we find every more uses for it. Look at watching movies. First we went out and rented discs, then we used video-on-demand via our cable boxes, and now we're doing internet downloads to our PS3's. There's no way for applications and bandwidth demand to go except for ever upwards.

Those ISPs that don't keep up will simply lose business to those that do, and the only reason why the likes of Comcast are not investing in their networks is because they have effective monopolies in certain areas, and so would rather tell the customer to take a hike than spend the money.

 

Yea they're all connected to Verizon's GPON, which is 2.4Gb/sec node, servicing 32 homes. That basically means that without any oversubscribing, Verizon can offer symmetrical 77Mbit/sec connections to 32 homes per node.

To put that in perspective, Verizon FIOS's old network was BPON, which was 622mbit/sec for 32 homes. Verizon didn't bitch like AT&T, Qwest, Comcast and others regarding increasing bandwidth requirements. No, they went out and put in the infrastructure improvements to upgrade to GPON.

Not too shabby. And the only thing they need to do is swap out the hardware in their datacenters when they want to increase throughput. No more having to rip out lines and install new crap like the companies have to do with the copper lines.

It'll be a great world.

p.s.: They're already testing symmetrical 100mb connections in NYC right now for deployment next year. I've seen the tests on broadbandreports.com. Sign me up.

 

If you try to download a 5GB HD film, that would take you roughly 45 minutes if you max out your connection. Me? 14 minutes.

By sheer fact of download speed, you can't use your connection the same way I can. Not to mention the fact that I can get 3 movies in the same time it takes you to get just one.

Productivity my friend. Productivity.

Lastly, you couldn't stream a bluray quality film over your internet connection in real time (25-45mbit/sec). I can. Just the same that someone with a 1.5Mbit connection can do some of the things you can, but not everything. And certainly not with the same quality and speed.

As I said, you're just thinking small. What if no one decided to push beyond the boundaries of postage-stamp sized video streaming from the mid 90s (Victoria's Secret video cast) hmm? What if they said "Dialup is all that's required. We can do everything that can be done on dialup." Youtube would never have existed. Nor would Hulu or any of the other sites.

The same with you. You're saying it's all the fault of the websites you try to visit that don't, supposedly, max your connection. Well have you ever considered that the reason those sites don't upgrade is because they figure that the vast majority of users will be on 1-3Mbit connections, and they thusly don't need to get connections, or create content, that can fill a 15Mbit/sec pipe?

Build it, and they will come.

 

It's the same thing that happened with the car companies. Those that took risks and started focusing on green tech like hybrids in the 90s are reaping the rewards today. Those that didn't are falling by the wayside. It's as it should be.

 

Stop b*tching if you cannot afford more bandwidth. 250GB not enough? Get two lines. Comcast doesn't give a sh*t about you 1% who exceed 250GB.

 

Uhm, the cable companies don't run multiple coax connections. They split the current coax you have, so people don't have that option of getting another line. It's not like a phone line.

And as for Comcast not giving a sh*t about the so-called 1%, that's why they're going to be left in the dust as more and more people get higher speed connections and that 1% continues to grow.

A few years ago, only 1% of the population used Youtube. Now a ton of people do. Oh woe it would have been to a company like Comcast had they put caps on the table back then.

You're just too myopic to see that it's bad business to limit your consumers in such a fashion.

 

bad business, hmmm certainly WRT the number of customers but is it bad business WRT profits?
perhaps these ~1% of customers are actually costing the company more in dollars cause of their high bandwidth usage than they receive from them in dollars per month

a similar case is xbox live, is it bad business charging $50 a year?, sure they lose customers cause of that charge but Im sure this is more than offset but the extra revenue they gain.

perhaps they could implement some sort of throttling
eg <250gb fullspeed
<500gb 1/4speed
<1tb 1/10 speed
etc
if in fact theyre not already doing this.

 

It's not bad business if the 1% of super heavy users use 50% of your total bandwidth. You'd make more money serving the other 99%. There will always be people who will pay less for less bandwidth. Why do you think there is residential vs business packages? Watching Youtube isn't going to get you anywhere near 250GB a month, you won't even have the f*king time to watch them. Youtube in HD? Lol when that happens they'll just charge more for each GB over the 250GB cap...very simple business strategy not rocket science. Don't like what Comcast offers? Go satellite and pay twice as much for a fraction of the speed. Money talks BS walks.

Bad analogy. Hybrids don't bring in as much profit as SUVs...in fact car companies lost buttloads of money on each one sold a few years ago. Today they're barely breaking even. Even with the high gas prices people still aren't going gah gah for hybrids. Most people would rather just drive fuel efficient small cars than a hybrid. Hybrids are mostly driven by tree huggers. The problem with the car companies was that they put all of their design and manufacturing behind big profit cars like trucks and SUVs while ignoring smaller more fuel efficient cars. Hybrids are still a niche.

I predict wireless broadband will be taking off big time in the next decade not landlines. Most people just don't have a need for hundreds of GBs of data Youtube or no Youtube.

 

Bad business because new applications and bandwidth utilization are always becoming available. The AOL service didn't take off until they removed the dialup caps and made it free around the clock for users to use.

The same with bandwidth. Comcast needs to focus on building out their infrastructure, not trying to squeeze what little they've got out of a faulty business model.

As for xbox live, $50 per year is a pittance. You sure it's that cheap? That's little more than $4 a month.

 

People live in a fake world where companies stream Blu-Ray quality content and Youtube videos take up tons of bandwidth. Where the fact that being able to download 3 movies instead of one within an hour is actually important. It's just entirely pointless and unrealistic. But whatever, clearly people want to believe that they're using gobs of bandwidth they're not. That their day is actually 48 hours instead 24. That they can consume down unreal amounts of content and could more if they just had that extra 1mbit of speed!

 

I'm talking about 5 years ago when Youtube first debuted. The cap could've probably been set at 20GB and been "realistic" for the demands of the time.

In a world with those kinds of caps, Valve could've never created and rolled out Steam. And forget about Blizzard using Bittorrent to roll out their products and patches.

Make sense?

Not a bad analogy at all. SUV sales are falling by double digit percentages every month while they can't make enough Hybrids today. The car companies are scaling back massively on SUVs in order to stop the hemorrhaging.

Btw, if you haven't noticed, hybrid tech is used in all kinds of cars these days.