"When that happens, it’ll be interesting to see what type of excuse Comcast trots out to defend its seemingly arbitrary data cap."
Why would they even have to come up with an excuse? They are in a position of monopoly almost everywhere, what do they care? "If you're not happy you can go to another internet company. Oh wait, there is none! Now suck my d*ck and pay up!"
Eh. This is lawyer-speak, probably more than a little bit influenced by all the trouble AT&T has had with the FCC over their grandfathered "unlimited" plans.
If corporate documents are instructing reps to tell customers it's about congestion when there is no congestion, that doesn't look good at all when the government starts asking about these plans and policies.
It's also probably not a good idea to be telling customers that the network you spend hundreds of millions of dollars marketing as super modern and awesome just can't handle their traffic.
I'm not a fan of caps, either, but aggregate home bandwidth usage is going to go up and up, while more and more customers are going to have everything they need from IP services and thus want to cancel traditional TV. Should you charge an IP customer who uses 4TB/month streaming 4K the same as one who uses 200GB? How else do you discriminate?
There are other ways to discriminate, but not many have been actually tried to my knowledge.
One place where I worked studied a model with peak-load throttling. If you're trying to stream 4K video and the network isn't congested, you get full speed. If the network is congested, the subscribers who have been less active during previous peaks get priority and others get throttled. (Actually this was some years ago, before 4K video was a thing, but it's same idea)
Another model I remember studying involved charging for "time using the service" and not "number of bits transferred." This is similar to how voice plans have "anytime" and "off peak" allocations of "minutes."
So there are people thinking about this (or at least there were several years ago), but I'm a little surprised to not see any trials of alternative arrangements.
If you're not offering a competitive streaming option, you're not really eligible to receive that revenue anymore. You can't just invent a new way to monitize it with existing customers who have existing agreements for your services without offering them something to agree to, then allowing for their choice.
There is no reason to discriminate as the TB's are basically free. The only problem is the shared medium on cable (Docsis)/GPON internet. And the evil ISPs who want to make more money because nobody wants their uncompetitive TV products anymore.
You discriminate by partitioning up your bandwidth. Like they always have done. Data is free, bandwidth is not. You partition the bandwidth you have with a certain overbook factor and sell that.
The Comcast cap has nothing to do with technical decisions, it is purely there to discourage video streaming in favor of Comcast's own options.
I previously worked in engineering at ISPs. There are two points to make: (1) Monthly data caps do not help manage congestion, at least not directly. However, non-engineers have a lot of trouble understanding this. (2) Telling customer support agents to say "this is not about congestion management" is a perception-management move. Cable companies are very sensitive to criticism that they are offering a "shared pipe" and that you're somehow not getting what you signed up for.
On the first point: Congestion is problem during peak hours, not during the whole month. You could download a few terabytes over the course of a month and not cause a problem for anyone else, if you avoided peak hours. Data caps only work for congestion management if they discourage you from using services during peak hours.
There's not a grand conspiracy by the cable or mobile companies about this, though - it's mostly a failure to understand this concept, or an unwillingness to go back to peak load pricing (e.g. different night/weekend rates like phone plans have/had).
Satilite ISPs actually do this. The one I had when I lived with my parents gave us 18 GB a month with unlimited downloads between midnight and 5:00 am. Since I ran Linux I'd just throw my heavy downloads in crontab and go to bed and have my big shiny package the next morning.
Exede seems to be moving away from this model, actually. Their new plans don't offer unlimited periods at all, but instead, some types of traffic are exempt from the caps. The problem with that is Exede won't say exactly what type of data is exempt other than "basic web browsing and email." No one really knows if that includes HTTPS, HTTP2, QUIC, WebSockets, etc.
The need to exempt various types of traffic for business reasons is ultimately why I think monthly data caps will fade away for cable/telco-provided Internet service.
An example would be some provider like Disney saying that in order for Comcast (or some smaller operator) to be able to carry their TV channels they must also zero-rate streaming from their sites. Or Hulu and Verizon do a deal in which Hulu content doesn't count toward a cap on Verizon phones. These things are becoming more common, and I think the difficulty of figuring out which bits count and which ones don't (especially when they all come from the same CDNs) will prove to be more trouble than it's worth.
It lasted less than 2 days when I had a plan like that. Only could change to 100gb since that's all was offered. Now I still go over constantly without trying. The ISP gets congested massively on Friday, Saturday & Sunday even with these limits.
>or an unwillingness to go back to peak load pricing
It's actually a decent system - for eg. one local mobile operators provides unmetered/uncapped 4G between 22-6 for a small premium - if you don't have access to a landline it's a great deal.
peak load pricing? in an age where physics and manufacturing processes have given us native 100GE signals at shockingly low cost per bit?
it used to be backhauling access traffic was expensive (think T1s to cell phone towers). well, those days are long behind us. a little less profit taking and a little more infrastructure investment would solve bandwidth problems in duopolist markets.
A Netflix "ultra HD" stream requires 25Mbps. Even if all 100 homes are simultaneously streaming ultra HD, that's 2.5Gbps in total. Coax can handle that easily with modern equipment.
Obviously they could be using very old equipment that can't, but whose fault is that?
Cable companies can't replace network hardware every three years. It's just not profitable. Cable systems were upgraded to broadband 2000-2005. 10-15 year replacement is short in the telecom industry. It's not surprising that new entrants into the market can give much higher speed. If you demand upgrades every 5 years that is going to increase costs considerably.
Also a large amount of coax spectrum is for video tv service.
The real curiousity is why Verizon fios can't deliver near 1gbps. It's already has a fiberoptic network. I'm guessing it's the hardware at the nodes.
It's getting a bit ridiculous. ISPs have pocketed multiple rounds of order of magnitude jumps in network technology while customer speeds have stalled and "usage caps" are on and off.
And that's just the "assume they are not acting in bad faith" stance; we know they are willingly not upgrading the interconnects to (eventually) Netflix and others, who their customers are requesting more and more data from.
There might as well be a conspiracy to advertise best case performance and avoid making any sort of guarantees about minimum bandwidth (for consumer plans).
I understand that this is because the one is more marketable than the other, but that isn't really very comforting.
So why don't they do something like: deprioritize traffic in proportion to how much you that user uses at peak times. (Shouldn't be hard to turn it into a more rigorous formula.)
So the pipe is normally shared equally between requests, but a heavy user might get only half a normal share. That way, they optimize against the real scarcity (in peak time usage, not total downloaded) but no one has to worry about overage charges, and any throttling is to the benefit of other users.
There've been a lot of reports locally of Comcast reporting an overage where none existed. Neighbors saying that nothing in their use suggested they were anywhere close to that kind of use and yet being charged.
There were enough anecdotal reports that if I had Comcast I'd put my own router in front of theirs to have an independent measure.
Unrelated: my experience with Comcast business over the last few months has been the worst customer service I've experienced in the last decade. Completely unreliable.
I disagree, even if customers would not flip out. Charging per bit is an incorrect alignment to consumption of a finite resource (such as water, gas, or even electric). Data is not a finite resource, as receiving data does not deplete the source providing the data. The only sane way to charge for connectivity is to charge for operations and support, with a profit percentage.
The point of charging more during peak times is to discourage usage during those times, which leads to a greater proportion of available bandwidth per user at that time.
What I would really like to see is peak and off peak data rates. You pay $X/month for 15Mbps (guaranteed, even during peak hours) and "up to" 1Gbps, then you pay twice that much for 30Mbps peak and 1Gbps off peak etc. No usage fees, but if you expect to consume 50Mbps during peak hours then be ready to open your wallet.
Sure, charge me based on percentile billing, I'm more than happy to pay for it. But in return, they better offer higher speeds, uptime with more than 1 nine and an SLA for intra-network connections (All transit carriers guarantee no congestion within their network, can Comcast do the same?).
I already pay ~$1500/m/rack in bandwidth (5Gbps, 95th percentile, mixed transit product + interconnect fees for an exchange). I'll happily pay $100/m for 100mbit 95th percentile bw at home, with the same throughput guarantees. .
Metered goods have a long history of having to have the meters certified by state bodies.
For instance, grocery store scales, gas pumps, power meter manufacturers, etc.
If we're going to lose the fight with Comcast over metered bandwidth, then perhaps we need to push for laws regarding inspection and validation of their metering systems themselves.
If they're limiting consumers to a certain amount of traffic, I want the definition of traffic to be clearly delineated and for the measurement systems to be properly inspected and regulated.
For instance, do they measure at the modem? At the local node? At the edge of the network?
Does local traffic within Comcast's city-wide network count?
If someone sends an IP traffic that their computer never requested and is filtered out, does it add to the traffic usage?
Does a UDP broadcast in a subnet count towards everyone's bandwidth, even if the cable modem filters it out?
Does this cover ICMP and UDP?
Does Comcast's own "Are you there?" packets to cable modems count towards traffic allotments? Does Comcast's cable modem traffic to the registration and DHCP servers count?
If they're going to screw-over customers, then there needs to be clear rules they have to follow so they can't just make up numbers. There also needs to be a way to make sure that DDOS attacks can't attack the bills of customers.
The problem is two-fold: Comcasts lobbyists will make sure this never happens and even if I'd did, our members of Congress are CLEARLY not tech savvy enough to understand what any of this means.
Anecdote: back in 2009, I had a Comcast account in a metered market and didn't need cable service for a bit, so I tried an experiment.
I plugged my cable modem into a dumb switch. It had a link, but there was nothing else attached; there was no router to act as a DHCP client, no frames being sent to the cable modem at all. In six days, my usage meter incremented by 0.5 GB. Plugging in a protocol analyzer revealed a constant stream of ARP requests for other subscribers' IPs. These were apparently counted against my cap, and presumably they were counted against everyone's caps, making 250 GB/month 1% smaller than advertised.
Comcast sent me to a document describing their metering methodology:
Their reps defended the practice of counting Comcast-generated broadcast traffic against everyone, even though there's no way for subscribers to prevent it.
This is a fantastic point that I don't see brought up enough. I have some anecdotal experience of my own to help illustrate what an issue this really is.
Our ISP has recently enacted data caps. The first time they threatened to disable our account for going over, I pointed out to them that:
- My firewall has logged tens of gigabytes of dropped/rejected traffic.
- That if I ran a TCPDump on our WAN interface, could see management and broadcast traffic for neighboring CPEs (modem).
- That I know for a fact (I used to work for them in a previous iteration) that their network isn't built in a way that would allow them differentiate their management and monitoring traffic from individual customer traffic.
- And finally, that the Layer 2 & 3 statistics of that WAN interface were nowhere close to their own statistics for the account.
They have yet to respond to that complaint, despite going to the FCC. I really wonder what would happen if one were to take their ISP to court with the proper documentation.
Word. And if I'm getting charged for traffic, they better exclude advertising content from the meter, or give me a way to turn off advertising. I'm certainly not going to pay Comcast for the privilege of watching auto-play ad videos.
"they better exclude advertising content from the meter"
Am I understanding correctly that you want Comcast examining the content you are downloading and deciding whether it counts towards your usage or not? This sounds like the complete opposite of net neutrality.
No, you're jumping to conclusions and changing the subject. I said I don't want to pay for advertising. If Comcast is going to enforce limits, then Comcast needs to provide a way for me to pay for the content I asked for, and not charge me for content advertisers deliver without my consent.
The point of my comment is partially tongue-in-cheek, because this is a problem Comcast can't solve, and they're setting themselves up for a rampage of angry people, as the amount of bandwidth being used for advertising increases every year.
But, since you brought it up, Comcast already examines your content. You are mistaken that net neutrality is broken if they filter advertising from your meter. Net neutrality is about not prioritizing or throttling responses to your request, not how Comcast bills you. And, for that matter, auto-play advertising is already worse for net neutrality than it would be for Comcast to categorize your surfing for billing purposes. Your internets are already being jammed and throttled by advertising video that in many cases is much larger than what you asked for.
Comcast should not even have an opinion about what your browser is and is not configured to do. As a human being, your tools are your own responsibility.
Unless you are claiming that Comcast injects their own ads into your traffic, what are you even saying?
You request a page from a server, they deliver that page to you, in whole as requested- The fact that there might be advertising on that page is due to the server/site owner. Why should Comcast have to not charge for content that you technically requested (although likely didn't want).
If they are injecting ads (which I have seen through other providers, but I believe it wasn't related to Comcast) then your point is valid. At that point you are being delivered packets (large video-laden amounts) were not requested, and being charged for them. As a side note, I believe Verizon was doing this to mobile customers, not sure how it ended though.
I suspect that the 300GB figure comes as a result of (poorly) capacity planning for 1Mb/month @95th percentile per customer. If they can encourage people to stay within that limit, they can say: we have 1000 customers originating from PoP X, so we need to provision 1Gb bandwidth to cover that.
What kind of things do you do that push you over a terabyte? I don't get anywhere near that. I'm just curious, and not in any way saying there is anything wrong with that.
It's hard to say for sure, as I don't classify traffic in any way, and I only have traffic-by-IP for the past 24 hours.
Personally I just watch an unhealthy amount of anime, which probably accounts for the majority of DL/UL traffic. My monthly offsite backup to Amazon Glacier accounts for ~30GiB UL.
I don't think my household is that extraordinary: we're just three average millennials who all work first-shift.
Something to point out is that we don't get any sort of regular broadcast television -- so all our media consumption is done either online or w/ physical media.
---
A funny thing to note: AT&T has been trying to get my business for a while now, as they just installed fiber (to the node) in my neighborhood. I had to turn them down as the contract included a 300GiB bandwidth cap.
The guy seemed genuinely floored when I actually produced logs showing I routinely exceed that cap. He claimed the caps are unlikely to be enforced, but I'm not willing to have it in writing that I agreed to such a thing.
I just checked my router; at over 130 GB D/L for less than 5 days worth of usage, our household is on track to use 800+GB D/L this month.
I think it's streaming video, more than anything else. Netflix seems to use somewhere between 600 to 1000 kb a second, depending on the available quality and connection (I just checked a couple of shows that we watch regularly). Assuming 0.7 MB/sec, you'd hit 27 GB a day with only 11 hours of Netflix streaming.
My GF usually works from home, and generally keeps a streaming show on a secondary monitor as background noise. With a bit of overlap in viewing, it really doesn't take much to hit big numbers.
For the past 4 months my family has used between 554GB & 968GB each month. We are just 3 people that surf the net, play a little bit of online games, and watch Netflix on 2 TVs. Nothing out of the ordinary at all, yet we would blow through 300GB in a couple of weeks.
So it's just about charging $30-35 more for the same "unlimited" service. I don't understand how that's not false advertising when taking into account the real definition of "unlimited" and the fact that you have to read some obscure FAQ / TOS to find out that "unlimited" is not "unlimited."
I can't help but chuckle and shake my head in amazement at the script their flacks came up with to say "we're starting to charge people an extra $30 to use more than 300GB":
Current policy: Don't say "unlimited data," say "250 GB data, but not enforced."
New policy: Don't say "300 GB data," say "we gave you 50 GB more data for free!"
IMO a big part of the issue is the consumer. Consumers know very little about internet other than "buy the one with the biggest number". So internet is advertised like flow rate (L per minute) and restricted like water (Cubic M).
I think they should goto a connection + volume model. $10 a month just to be connected, maybe 500MB free download or whatever. And then you pay per GB, variable rates based on time of day. $1 per GB at 7pm, $0.01 at 3am. Like how industrial electricity rates work (if i understand correctly).
Pricing models will screw consumers over until the pricing model matches the economics of the situation. If I were a startup this is the issue I'd fix; Pricing models that do not match the economics.
The problem with this is, generally speaking, it doesn't cost an ISP much more for everyone to be using their connection versus everyone not. All the infrastructure runs 24/7 regardless if you're using it or not (if you really get into the math, yes it costs slightly more electricity for equipment to use more hardware resources, but again it's pennies). The real costs come from upgrading the infrastructure to keep up with your top demand, and paying humans to maintain it all.
When I worked at a University I constantly overheard that the bandwidth was doubling every year because the costs were coming down so rapidly.
So it's really no question that any cap that doesn't double at least every few years is a business case and has nothing to do with technological constraints.
I ran a $150 million Internet P&L for several years. The general trend is that customer use of data doubles every year and actual cost of goods sold halve every year. This trend has gone on for much longer than most people thought reasonable.
If you have to get Comcast, sign up for their business plans. The speed is precisely what they advertise for. The regular plans have a spike in speed when you start downloading something and slow down afterwards.
I'm using their base plan (15Mbps) and can stream HD movies with no problem
I looked into a business plan, but wasn't willing to sign a 2 year contract. It's been longer than 2 years and I still have Comcast, but I would drop them so fast if there was any other option that provided reasonable service.
Enjoy your 1Mbps connection, Comcast suckers. My DSL connection has ten times the bandwidth!
Seriously if you still have a local DSL provider, patronize them before it's too late. National policy is explicitly based around competition between DSL and cable, so when you ignore DSL because cable advertises fraudulent peak-rate speeds, you're saying that competition does not matter to you.
Unfortunately, my DSL provider can deliver me 6Mb/s. Comcast promises 75Mbit and actually delivers me 90Mbit.
Granted, I live in Chicago which actually has something resembling competition (AT&T is rolling out GigaPower and as far as I know we're a test market for DOCSIS 3.1) so the Internet metering on the Comcast website just straight up doesn't work and throws up an error.
I've found that if you're savvy enough, you can adopt habits that deal with low bandwidth situations well. I would drop metered plan in an instant if I could just have an unlimited symmetric 5Mbps. That's enough to gradually download libraries of 1080p video. It's not enough for real time, but real time isn't necessary, even when companies insist that it is.
Cable companies know that they can sell you data twice unless you convert your internet data to be your TV.
They don't want to give their customers the means to free themselves from half of their monthly bill.
They have every incentive to make their internet service not work for video.
Someone who ran a local ISP said that bandwidth is becoming basically free. People can only consume so much. Even with a fast connection no one is going to be using it all the time.
84 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadWhy would they even have to come up with an excuse? They are in a position of monopoly almost everywhere, what do they care? "If you're not happy you can go to another internet company. Oh wait, there is none! Now suck my d*ck and pay up!"
If corporate documents are instructing reps to tell customers it's about congestion when there is no congestion, that doesn't look good at all when the government starts asking about these plans and policies.
It's also probably not a good idea to be telling customers that the network you spend hundreds of millions of dollars marketing as super modern and awesome just can't handle their traffic.
I'm not a fan of caps, either, but aggregate home bandwidth usage is going to go up and up, while more and more customers are going to have everything they need from IP services and thus want to cancel traditional TV. Should you charge an IP customer who uses 4TB/month streaming 4K the same as one who uses 200GB? How else do you discriminate?
One place where I worked studied a model with peak-load throttling. If you're trying to stream 4K video and the network isn't congested, you get full speed. If the network is congested, the subscribers who have been less active during previous peaks get priority and others get throttled. (Actually this was some years ago, before 4K video was a thing, but it's same idea)
Another model I remember studying involved charging for "time using the service" and not "number of bits transferred." This is similar to how voice plans have "anytime" and "off peak" allocations of "minutes."
So there are people thinking about this (or at least there were several years ago), but I'm a little surprised to not see any trials of alternative arrangements.
If you're not offering a competitive streaming option, you're not really eligible to receive that revenue anymore. You can't just invent a new way to monitize it with existing customers who have existing agreements for your services without offering them something to agree to, then allowing for their choice.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/fiber-its-not-all...
The Comcast cap has nothing to do with technical decisions, it is purely there to discourage video streaming in favor of Comcast's own options.
On the first point: Congestion is problem during peak hours, not during the whole month. You could download a few terabytes over the course of a month and not cause a problem for anyone else, if you avoided peak hours. Data caps only work for congestion management if they discourage you from using services during peak hours.
There's not a grand conspiracy by the cable or mobile companies about this, though - it's mostly a failure to understand this concept, or an unwillingness to go back to peak load pricing (e.g. different night/weekend rates like phone plans have/had).
An example would be some provider like Disney saying that in order for Comcast (or some smaller operator) to be able to carry their TV channels they must also zero-rate streaming from their sites. Or Hulu and Verizon do a deal in which Hulu content doesn't count toward a cap on Verizon phones. These things are becoming more common, and I think the difficulty of figuring out which bits count and which ones don't (especially when they all come from the same CDNs) will prove to be more trouble than it's worth.
It's actually a decent system - for eg. one local mobile operators provides unmetered/uncapped 4G between 22-6 for a small premium - if you don't have access to a landline it's a great deal.
it used to be backhauling access traffic was expensive (think T1s to cell phone towers). well, those days are long behind us. a little less profit taking and a little more infrastructure investment would solve bandwidth problems in duopolist markets.
Obviously they could be using very old equipment that can't, but whose fault is that?
Also a large amount of coax spectrum is for video tv service.
The real curiousity is why Verizon fios can't deliver near 1gbps. It's already has a fiberoptic network. I'm guessing it's the hardware at the nodes.
And that's just the "assume they are not acting in bad faith" stance; we know they are willingly not upgrading the interconnects to (eventually) Netflix and others, who their customers are requesting more and more data from.
I understand that this is because the one is more marketable than the other, but that isn't really very comforting.
So the pipe is normally shared equally between requests, but a heavy user might get only half a normal share. That way, they optimize against the real scarcity (in peak time usage, not total downloaded) but no one has to worry about overage charges, and any throttling is to the benefit of other users.
There were enough anecdotal reports that if I had Comcast I'd put my own router in front of theirs to have an independent measure.
Unrelated: my experience with Comcast business over the last few months has been the worst customer service I've experienced in the last decade. Completely unreliable.
It's a measure to prevent customers from watching video on-line and stopping their TV service.
9am-6pm Mon-Friday is charged at 1.25-10x (ratio depending on the technology/broadband type) the price of bandwidth outside of this peak time.
Granted, AAISP customers tend to be more technical and are willing to pay more for an clueful ISP.
I already pay ~$1500/m/rack in bandwidth (5Gbps, 95th percentile, mixed transit product + interconnect fees for an exchange). I'll happily pay $100/m for 100mbit 95th percentile bw at home, with the same throughput guarantees. .
http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/paris.metro.minimal.pdf
For instance, grocery store scales, gas pumps, power meter manufacturers, etc.
If we're going to lose the fight with Comcast over metered bandwidth, then perhaps we need to push for laws regarding inspection and validation of their metering systems themselves.
If they're limiting consumers to a certain amount of traffic, I want the definition of traffic to be clearly delineated and for the measurement systems to be properly inspected and regulated.
For instance, do they measure at the modem? At the local node? At the edge of the network?
Does local traffic within Comcast's city-wide network count?
If someone sends an IP traffic that their computer never requested and is filtered out, does it add to the traffic usage?
Does a UDP broadcast in a subnet count towards everyone's bandwidth, even if the cable modem filters it out?
Does this cover ICMP and UDP?
Does Comcast's own "Are you there?" packets to cable modems count towards traffic allotments? Does Comcast's cable modem traffic to the registration and DHCP servers count?
If they're going to screw-over customers, then there needs to be clear rules they have to follow so they can't just make up numbers. There also needs to be a way to make sure that DDOS attacks can't attack the bills of customers.
I plugged my cable modem into a dumb switch. It had a link, but there was nothing else attached; there was no router to act as a DHCP client, no frames being sent to the cable modem at all. In six days, my usage meter incremented by 0.5 GB. Plugging in a protocol analyzer revealed a constant stream of ARP requests for other subscribers' IPs. These were apparently counted against my cap, and presumably they were counted against everyone's caps, making 250 GB/month 1% smaller than advertised.
Comcast sent me to a document describing their metering methodology:
http://www.netforecast.com/documents/NFR5101_Comcast_Usage_M...
Their reps defended the practice of counting Comcast-generated broadcast traffic against everyone, even though there's no way for subscribers to prevent it.
Our ISP has recently enacted data caps. The first time they threatened to disable our account for going over, I pointed out to them that:
- My firewall has logged tens of gigabytes of dropped/rejected traffic.
- That if I ran a TCPDump on our WAN interface, could see management and broadcast traffic for neighboring CPEs (modem).
- That I know for a fact (I used to work for them in a previous iteration) that their network isn't built in a way that would allow them differentiate their management and monitoring traffic from individual customer traffic.
- And finally, that the Layer 2 & 3 statistics of that WAN interface were nowhere close to their own statistics for the account.
They have yet to respond to that complaint, despite going to the FCC. I really wonder what would happen if one were to take their ISP to court with the proper documentation.
Am I understanding correctly that you want Comcast examining the content you are downloading and deciding whether it counts towards your usage or not? This sounds like the complete opposite of net neutrality.
The point of my comment is partially tongue-in-cheek, because this is a problem Comcast can't solve, and they're setting themselves up for a rampage of angry people, as the amount of bandwidth being used for advertising increases every year.
But, since you brought it up, Comcast already examines your content. You are mistaken that net neutrality is broken if they filter advertising from your meter. Net neutrality is about not prioritizing or throttling responses to your request, not how Comcast bills you. And, for that matter, auto-play advertising is already worse for net neutrality than it would be for Comcast to categorize your surfing for billing purposes. Your internets are already being jammed and throttled by advertising video that in many cases is much larger than what you asked for.
If they are injecting ads (which I have seen through other providers, but I believe it wasn't related to Comcast) then your point is valid. At that point you are being delivered packets (large video-laden amounts) were not requested, and being charged for them. As a side note, I believe Verizon was doing this to mobile customers, not sure how it ended though.
So if Comcast bills you at double the rate for going to Facebook instead of Google+, that's consistent with net neutrality?
I am the 2% !!!
Personally I just watch an unhealthy amount of anime, which probably accounts for the majority of DL/UL traffic. My monthly offsite backup to Amazon Glacier accounts for ~30GiB UL.
I don't think my household is that extraordinary: we're just three average millennials who all work first-shift.
Something to point out is that we don't get any sort of regular broadcast television -- so all our media consumption is done either online or w/ physical media.
---
A funny thing to note: AT&T has been trying to get my business for a while now, as they just installed fiber (to the node) in my neighborhood. I had to turn them down as the contract included a 300GiB bandwidth cap.
The guy seemed genuinely floored when I actually produced logs showing I routinely exceed that cap. He claimed the caps are unlikely to be enforced, but I'm not willing to have it in writing that I agreed to such a thing.
Doing something daring like watching 4k content for one hour a day can blow past a 300GB cap all by itself.
I think it's streaming video, more than anything else. Netflix seems to use somewhere between 600 to 1000 kb a second, depending on the available quality and connection (I just checked a couple of shows that we watch regularly). Assuming 0.7 MB/sec, you'd hit 27 GB a day with only 11 hours of Netflix streaming.
My GF usually works from home, and generally keeps a streaming show on a secondary monitor as background noise. With a bit of overlap in viewing, it really doesn't take much to hit big numbers.
Current policy: Don't say "unlimited data," say "250 GB data, but not enforced."
New policy: Don't say "300 GB data," say "we gave you 50 GB more data for free!"
I think they should goto a connection + volume model. $10 a month just to be connected, maybe 500MB free download or whatever. And then you pay per GB, variable rates based on time of day. $1 per GB at 7pm, $0.01 at 3am. Like how industrial electricity rates work (if i understand correctly).
Pricing models will screw consumers over until the pricing model matches the economics of the situation. If I were a startup this is the issue I'd fix; Pricing models that do not match the economics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10525574
So it's really no question that any cap that doesn't double at least every few years is a business case and has nothing to do with technological constraints.
Here's the link to the original reporting: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Leaked-Comcast-Talking-Po...
I'm using their base plan (15Mbps) and can stream HD movies with no problem
Seriously if you still have a local DSL provider, patronize them before it's too late. National policy is explicitly based around competition between DSL and cable, so when you ignore DSL because cable advertises fraudulent peak-rate speeds, you're saying that competition does not matter to you.
Telco infrastructure is even still regulated such that smaller companies can be ISPs, leading to great customer service and even pro-privacy attitudes such as these: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/06/22/ceo-of-...
Granted, I live in Chicago which actually has something resembling competition (AT&T is rolling out GigaPower and as far as I know we're a test market for DOCSIS 3.1) so the Internet metering on the Comcast website just straight up doesn't work and throws up an error.
Hopefully your competitive market continues.
Cable companies know that they can sell you data twice unless you convert your internet data to be your TV.
They don't want to give their customers the means to free themselves from half of their monthly bill.
They have every incentive to make their internet service not work for video.
Someone who ran a local ISP said that bandwidth is becoming basically free. People can only consume so much. Even with a fast connection no one is going to be using it all the time.
I also get 2gb/s. Pretty happy im not being gouged by those conpabies over there.