
“In-browser and email notifications as you near the 300 GB per month limit” - SamWhited
http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/data-usage-plans-expansion-exceed-allowance
======
pstack
That's ridiculous.

I remember about six years ago, I got a notification from them for using too
much data. When I spoke with them, I said I needed more data (we get
everything over the internet, there are several of us here, and I also work
from home). I needed to know what my cap was. They wouldn't say. They just
said that I had gone over it and if I went over this non-specific cap again, I
would be banned from service for a year.

Fine, then how can I buy more bandwidth at the same price? Can I just buy a
second account and double my bandwidth? Whatever that cap might be? Nope. What
options do I have? Nothing. Sorry, we can't help you.

When I moved, a Comcast person came by to offer me service and told me about
their business offering. That is what I use. I have never had a problem with
it. Granted, it is much more expensive, but at least I can generally do what I
want.

I pay about $180/mo for 75Mbps down and 15Mbps up and generally use a couple
terabytes per month.

Gosh, you're so unreasonable! Why do you need so much bandwidth?

It's ridiculous that anyone would ask that question in this day, but they do.
And they ask it accusingly. How _dare_ you use a lot of bandwidth. What kind
of monster are you for wanting to use internet services? JUSTIFY YOURSELF!

First, we use Netflix. That is 2-4gb per hour per stream. With four people
living here, that's an average of maybe two hours per person per day or
750gb/mo.

Second, we use a remote backup service across six machines and that comes out
to between 50-500gb/mo.

Third, we consume a lot of podcasts, video podcasts (easily 1-2gb per
episode), streaming music, streaming radio, youtube, live-streams on
twitch.tv, two of us are constantly VPNed into work on at least one box, VOIP
(often with video), video games, and countless other things. Multiplied by the
several people that live here.

As more content is available over the internet and in better quality, this
consumption will only increase.

To live with 75Gb/mo per person in the modern age when you get all of your
entertainment and work and communication over the internet is ridiculous. And
charging obscene overage charges is abusive.

Especially after we have all already dispensed with the "but bandwidth is a
precious limited resource, like oil!" nonsense.

~~~
adrr
Off topic but $180 is cheap. We pay $450/m for 50/15 from Time Warner for our
business class cable which is a backup to our fiber which is 50/50 which we
pay $1500/m which is a Time Warner owned fiber but our service is with another
provider.

As for the bandwidth is precious, the cable loops are shared. It took over 6
months to get our fiber provisioned so we were on cable for those 6 months. We
did notice a huge drop in bandwidth around 6pm at our office. We correlated to
people getting home.

One thing I realized with last mile connectivity/bandwidth is that our
city/neighbors were partially to blame. We talked to Verizon about FIOS, they
said they would run us a line if we could get city to allow them to dig up the
roads. They said they've been trying to do it but the city won't grant them
permits. The city blocks them because people complain about noise and
construction. Without having an alternative we have no leverage to negotiate
pricing.

~~~
waps
The reason this happens is because of how ISP business models work and
specifically over-subscription. I'm not defending comcast, quite the contrary,
but you're going to hit this problem with every ISP, because of over-
subscription.

Consider the following:

1) you have to build out a certain type of network to provide a good
experience, and this includes a minimum bandwidth allotment that is quite
high.

2) because "normal" bandwidth usage is extremely bursty there is no reason
(almost) to ever upgrade the bandwidth to the edge nodes.

3) bandwidth to edge nodes is constrained, even for incumbents. There's 2
cases, non-incumbents have to buy it from a monopoly, which is expensive. The
other case is incumbents. They can get it cheap, until they hit a specific
point (the bandwidth initial buildout that was done decades ago). When they
hit that point it takes a massive investment to increase it.

4) the reason people go over bandwidth limits is peer to peer traffic. This
unfortunately has two properties. Firstly, it's a consistent download, not
bursty. Second it doesn't go out of their network (if it's a large network
that is), meaning anyone that does this creates a constant traffic flow in TWO
points of their network, and every component in between. This means that the
bandwidth needed to support p2p is a factor more than the bandwidth your
client actually reports to you, and exponentially more than needed to support
browsing (even youtube).

5) If some ISP decides against this (they're small for example, in which case
it all goes over cheap transit or even peering) that brings them extra costs,
but not extra customers (because only the expensive customers like you, which
can't be supported by the infrastructure, will switch over)

6) Most customers refuse to pay more. (e.g. switch to the business account)

7) Nobody is ever going to pay for a network that can support exponentially
increasing bandwidth. It's not possible, for obvious reasons. When you're as
big as comcast is, the investment for a 5% upgrade would require ridiculous
amounts of capital, so they don't want to.

(replacing the current infrastructure with fiber MAY fix this, however the
people who control the current infrastructure like Comcast have an interest in
blocking that for obvious reasons. However there are problems with fiber too,
the root of the problem is the constant light -> electrical -> light
conversions that are necessary at lots and lots of points and make the capital
investments quite high)

~~~
pstack
The tax-payers have subsidized massive broadband expansion that never
happened. Many of the players pocketed the savings and just never followed up
with their end of that deal.

Also, network congestion has nothing to do with bandwidth limits (data caps,
really). If you are transferring large amounts of data at 3am on a Tuesday
when the rest of the network usage is almost non-existent, then you are not
impacting anything. If you are doing it at 8pm on a Friday night, you probably
are contributing to network congestion. So, why apply the concept of a limited
resource (data) across the board?

We are done with the lie from telecoms that data is somehow a precious
resource. It is an artificial constraint used to justify both lack of
infrastructure investment and jacking up prices on customers. This is no
longer a point of contention as it is finally known industry-wide and covered
by the press (finally) as of a couple years ago.

Think of data caps in relation to a freeway. That freeway can carry a certain
number of cars at one time. That is the only constraint. Cars that are driving
at 2am when the freeway is empty are not eating into tomorrow's rush-hour-
drive freeway traffic capacity. It is a constant. Likewise, it is not your
300gb of data per month that is impacting the network. It is when you are
transferring that data.

And, finally, since the telecoms claim that "only two percent of users use a
lot of bandwidth" and that something like 95% of users do nothing but check
their email and watch one or two youtube videos a week, then there should be
PLENTY of bandwidth left over for these bandwidth hogs. The solution is simple
if that is the reality (which it isn't): Make email the highest priority in
your traffic shaping. That way, those horrible people consuming a ton of
bandwidth are not impacting the flow of those 12 kilobyte messages passing by
here and there.

Oh, and finally, people do not go over their bandwidth limits because of p2p
traffic. They go over it because it is 2014 and Netflix movies run several
gigabytes per hour and people consume a lot of movies/tv shows every month and
multiple people live in a single home. They go over it because they listen to
lots of podcasts or watch video podcasts which run a gigabyte an hour. They
watch streaming online networks, listen to streaming music, use remote online
backup services, use VOIP, watch youtube, watch twitch.tv, stream to
twitch.tv.

Youtube and Netflix account for just over 50% of traffic. P2P accounts for
10%.

~~~
waps
> The tax-payers have subsidized massive broadband expansion that never
> happened. Many of the players pocketed the savings and just never followed
> up with their end of that deal.

All I can say is that subsidies -believe it or not- do not exempt anyone from
mathematics. If you are unable to see that packets travel more than one
"freeway" there is nothing to say at all.

Hell, even freeways don't work like that. Believe it or not, cars on a freeway
come from somewhere and go somewhere. This affects the capacity of the freeway
for obvious reasons. If people did on freeways what they do with p2p, random
any-to-any travelling, there would be no possible way to keep freeways
uncongested, and yet there'd be loads and loads of "free" space. And yes, we
would all be talking about making more intense users pay more, or get them off
the roads alltogether. Hell, we're doing that now.

------
gergles
They also use the HTML injection (which I assume is why this was posted to HN)
for the "five strikes" "Copyright Alerts" bullshit too; if you have an
allegation flung against you, all of your HTML will have a Comcast popup
injected into it until the account owner logs in and acknowledges that they
were bad.

As an aside, check out the "Flexible Data Option" linked from that page for
some other laughs - a $5 discount to drop your quota from 300 GB to 5, and
also your overages suddenly become five times more expensive ($1/GB vs.
$.20/GB). That's some nice math.

~~~
timothyb89
To be fair, the "Flexible-Data Option" seems to only be available on the
"Economy Plus" plan, which is their $20/m @ 3Mbps option. Still an annoyingly
small quota, though.

~~~
TeMPOraL
This is scary. What the hell are they using to move bits around, avian
carriers? In Poland I can get _20Mbps for $3 /m_ (and no data limit!), not the
other way around.

------
PhasmaFelis
...Okay? You just linked to a random corporate policy FAQ page; I'm not sure
what I'm supposed to be thinking here.

Is your point that 300GB/month is not enough for your needs? Well, I agree,
which is why I haven't signed up for 300GB/month service. If I _had_ signed up
for a service like that, I think I'd really appreciate that they offer
flexible and customizable notifications and are up front about where the limit
is and what happens if you cross it (you pay $10/50GB overage, no additional
throttling). You hear so many horror stories about folks being suddenly
threatened with nebulous consequences for crossing invisible lines, and
apparently XFINITY doesn't do that, so good on them!

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I finished reading the comment thread, and I now think maybe you're
complaining about the "in-browser notifications." That was clear as mud,
thanks. I know Hacker News is pretty strict about headlines, but there's a
comment thread right here. This HN habit of linking to random pages with an
interesting tidbit in paragraph 5, and leaving it to us to figure out why
we're supposed to get huffy, is tiresome.

------
rurounijones
I am kind of shocked that, on HN, most of the comments are talking about the
300GB limit rather than the HTTP and SMTP (or IMAP/POP3) injection...

~~~
pstack
Because they have been doing the injections for at least a couple years now
and it was widely covered in the press when it started.

There's nothing, therefore, for people to do in this thread beyond devise
their own discussions around what element of the old-news that they are most
interested in.

------
Osiris
That's odd. According to the terms of service for my Comcast service in
Denver, the "bandwidth limit has been temporarily suspended". Over the last 6
months I have used between 350GB and 600GB of traffic each month and I have
never received any sort of notice.

In fact, I could have gotten 40mbps DSL for $35 (special deal) but they had a
250GB/month cap and the only option to have no cap was a $175/mo for the same
speed (but a dedicated link).

So I'm using Comcast specifically because the lack of a limit on bandwidth.

~~~
dangrossman
"This information applies only to customers in Huntsville and Mobile, AL;
Atlanta; Augusta and Savannah, GA; Central Kentucky; Maine; Jackson, MS;
Knoxville and Memphis, TN; and Charleston, SC"

These are the only markets with caps right now. Which is up from 2012, when
there were only two.

~~~
markkanof
Portland, OR also has caps. I remember trying to research this about a year
ago when I was running into the then 250GB cap with Comcast. None of these
lists seem to include my region, but I was still receiving warnings, and could
see a maxed out bandwidth usage meter when logging into the Comcast account
management site.

------
kareemm
I was surprised to see a notification injected into the HTML of the page I was
browsing when my parents' went over their limit in December. Never seen it
before.

ISP = Rogers in Toronto.

------
grecy
Wow, I was reading this thinking how great it is, but the comments here are
the opposite.

Up here in Northern Canada, a 100Mbps plan has a 250GB cap for $140/mo and a
50Mbps plan has a 150GB cap for $110/mo.

Overage charges? $5/GB !

People up here that are getting multi-thousand dollar overage bills are
thinking about a class action lawsuit against the sole telco because they
believe it's intentionally over-counting data used to drive up revenue....

~~~
shinji97
I feel your pain... $10 for extra 50G sounds so much reasonable than what we
are paying...

btw if you are with Rogers, I believe they can give you unlimited data for
$30/month, or $10 if you are also using their TV and home phone.

~~~
grecy
There is no Rogers here, and no such thing as unlimited.

The great North.

------
bowlofpetunias
If an ISP can give you "in-browser notifications", you don't have an internet
service. You're just hooked up to a corporate intranet.

This is why commercial services need regulation. Intercepting and tampering
with your data should be illegal, and not just a little bit.

A country where mail fraud is a major crime but this is considered normal
business has completely forgotten its fundamental values and principles.

~~~
tadfisher
Haven't you heard? ISPs are "information services". Not some sort of
socialized public utility, i.e. a "common carrier" of bits.

------
jocke76
I'm so happy I live in Sweden =) About $33/mo for 100/10 mbit no cap. $42/mo
for 100/100\. For $150/mo I could get 1/1Gbit with no cap. (Above are prices
for fiber connections. DSL connections are generally more expensive, but no
where near the prices you are discussing.)

It's kind of crazy that there isn't more competition between ISPs in the u.s.

------
atteeela
$52/month (plus tax) for 300 GB/month here in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada from
Teksavvy.com.

35 mbps / 3 mbps -
[http://teksavvy.com/en/residential/internet/cable/cable-35](http://teksavvy.com/en/residential/internet/cable/cable-35)

Want more?

$90 bux for 150 mbps / 10 mbps:

[http://teksavvy.com/en/residential/internet/cable/cable-150](http://teksavvy.com/en/residential/internet/cable/cable-150)

~~~
atteeela
Oh, forgot to mention: It's 50 cents per GB for overages.

I feel sorry for my friends that have a Rogers/Bell/Telus connection. But then
again I don't: because they're too lazy to switch but keep complaining about
their huge bill.

------
glennos
50GB free for 3 months a year and then $10 per 50GB over... how very
reasonable. The typical ISP in Australia "shapes" down to between 128-512kpbs.
I've thankfully never experienced it, but I dread the day.

If the topic here is HTML injection, that's pretty creepy. What else are they
using that technology for? Surely the cost isn't justifiable purely for excess
usage notifications.

~~~
wozniacki
_50GB free for 3 months a year_

So you are allowed 3 hits of 50GB or in excess of 50GB a year?

Is that what you meant? 3 violations?

~~~
picklefish
Yes, in Nashville you get 3 50gb overages you can use them all at once or
spread out.

------
mindslight
Just for reference, 6 Mbit/sec (ADSL) is 1500 GiB/mo, five times that.

Stop patronizing the cable monopolies. They sell only the illusion of
bandwidth.

~~~
jpollock
Your house probably has a 100A main line, at 110V, that's 11kw. Do you use
7920KWh per month? No?

The power companies are only selling the illusion of electricity!

~~~
wmf
ISPs have kind of painted themselves into a corner with flat rate pricing sold
on the basis of peak bandwidth. They can't afford to let people saturate their
connections, but any change to the pricing (like caps) makes customers feel
like they're getting less for their money.

~~~
supergauntlet
I wish we all had unlimited lines and paid by the gigabyte. It would honestly
probably be cheaper for most people and makes more sense as at the network
levels everyone pays by bandwidth consumed anyways.

------
keehun
The most ridiculous.

------
schrodinger
This kind of seems fine to me. What do others think?

~~~
venomsnake
If you find notice for unpaid ticket stapled to the postcard granny send you
inside the envelope will this be fine too?

