Comcast to cap monthly consumer broadband starting Oct. 1

[thecoalman]

It's been a while since I've seen internet connections advertised as unlimited other than dial up. Might be point if you purchsed your service when they wer advertising it like that. As far as your contract you mention it doesn't list a limit but on the other hand does it say unlimited?

As for the "contract" itself I'm pretty sure its only for the billing period. e.g is there any stipulations for prices and more importantly how long? If the contact says its for 20 years and is unlimited then you might have case. Otherwise you're paying a monthly rental fee where the cost and amount of services would be subject to change at any time.

[JoeS99]

Well, at least they are defining a limit now. It used to be a percentage of the total traffic that passed thru your "local node". I was never sure if I would exceed some invisible limit and get the dreaded phone call.
I do hope they can implement a way to check your actual usage, I'm not sure if my bandwidth monitor will be in sync with their metering.

[minidv2dvd]

It's been a while since I've seen internet connections advertised as unlimited other than dial up. Might be point if you purchsed your service when they wer advertising it like that. As far as your contract you mention it doesn't list a limit but on the other hand does it say unlimited?

As for the "contract" itself I'm pretty sure its only for the billing period. e.g is there any stipulations for prices and more importantly how long? If the contact says its for 20 years and is unlimited then you might have case. Otherwise you're paying a monthly rental fee where the cost and amount of services would be subject to change at any time.

the contract says alot about nothing. the "general:" terms say they agree to provide the internet services ordered by the customer and the customer agrees to pay the fees, rates and charges which are subject to change from time to time.

not a single mention of abiding by any "AUP", and neither does it say limited or unlimited.

but the piece of pink paper i have from them is about 10 years old

[thecoalman]

I do hope they can implement a way to check your actual usage, I'm not sure if my bandwidth monitor will be in sync with their metering.

AFAIK they are not providing anything, do they have a meter if you log into your account?

There are tools available for it. I'm going to istall one myself. I know I' sell below the limit but they have me curious. Again unless you're running p2p 24/7 or watching downloading a lot of really high bandwidth video chances are you're not even close this limit. You'd have to look at 10 to 25 billion average HTML pages. No exaggeration

[minidv2dvd]

it's a little easier to get to the limit here. i pay extra for 4 separate ip numbers for 3 full time computers and a wireless broadband router that hosts extra comps, laptops and 4 game systems. not everything is on all the time but on average 4 system are using the net. all on one account so all under the same cap.

[minidv2dvd]

the comcast ad on tv just now said " download whatever you want, faster than ever" seems the advertising department doesn't communicate with the security department. someone may want to download the library of congress or every movie ever made!

[JoeS99]

AFAIK they are not providing anything, do they have a meter if you log into your account?

They have no bandwidth meter, only a Giganews Usenet Meter, at least at the moment.
I was just saying that their method of measuring may not match what my monitor measures, and if you run it up close to the limit, you may exceed it.

I'm a heavy Usenet user (I use a separate provider) and have been concerned for a long time ( I keep it below 200 GB/month).
I have no alternative at the moment, even DSL doesn't reach my area- waiting to see about FIOS.

I suppose 300 GB would have been better, but some of the other providers have limits less than 100 GB.
Maybe a better solution would be to charge extra for anything over a set amount, but the charge needs to be reasonable.

[thecoalman]

Maybe a better solution would be to charge extra for anything over a set amount, but the charge needs to be reasonable.

I would guess this would be the first step in that direction however they don't make money on very large bandwidth users. They offer these accounts because they know most of the users are not going to use anywhere near 250GB. You also see the same thing for hosting, the major operators will offer plans with ridiculous amounts of bandwidth of storage space but it comes down to being a marketing gimmick. They know a new website is not going to generate that amount of traffic nor will it need that amount storage space. If it becomes popular and they are using anything but static html pages and data files they hit the CPU limit which is in the fine print. If on the other hand you look at VPS or dedicated server plans the limits are much less because they know you are going to use it.

For example here's $4.95 plan I grabbed from a popular host:

Storage: 350 GB
Monthly transfer: 3000 GB

Here's what you can get for starter VPS with 128mb of ram, these prices are cheap compared to most hosts for VPS:

Price $19.97
Disk Space 10,000 MB
Bandwidth 150 GB


Big difference but they know if you are looking at VPS you're going to use the bandwidth.



So what the cost of plan with lot more bandwidth will probably not be cheap because they'll be expecting that you will use it.

[Bjs]

For those worried, unlike us aussies which get ripped off, grab netmeter > http://www.metal-machine.de/readerror/

I use to monitor bandwidth usage against isp monitoring services to help clients not get ripped off.