Surprise! Internet Users Dislike Broadband Cap

[blackened144]

[citation][nom]badboy4dee[/nom]It all sucks, gonna rent my own T1 for Bout $400 bucks and $crew them corporate legalized rapers!TSM[/citation]

Problem is T1 lines are only 1.5Mb/1.5Mb. I wouldnt pay more than $10 a month for that connection. I would maybe pay $400 for a T3, 45Mb/45Mb.

 

[Guest]

Hey Comcrap! Since I only used 25 of the 250 GB limit this month, I want reimbursed for the 90% of my bill I didn't use! Is my Cable TV going to be capped if I watch more then 10 hours of TV a month too?

Quest is starting to sound better and better now. Greedy bastards.

 

[Master Exon]

How do you find out your bandwidth usage out? I feel like you guys are making up random numbers like 100Gbs.

 

[blackened144]

The numbers I quoted were my transfer stats from Giganews Usenet service. 2234.74GB in the last 3.5 months, and thats only from the newsgroups. I probably downloaded another few gigs from other places, like ftp and irc. I almost never use p2p or torrents.

 

[knickle]

[citation][nom]DFGum[/nom]30Mbyte/hour in heavy areas in WoW and fps games.
If your in a no where zone, or sitting in some unused zone or something.
1-5Mbyte/hour.
Now you hafta remember you upload also.
Now imagine adding in your monthly WoW patch also. Whatever else you do in the net, and if your on a router with a family.
5gb will definately be eaten up, most WoW gamers would easily use up the 40gb, and the heavy raiders would probably need far more. Estimating 33GB used up in the month with WoW alone.[/citation][/citation]
Your numbers are off. I play WoW daily and my usage is no where near that. My ISP allows me to view my usage daily and monthly, both up and download. My highest use on a Saturday (probably one of my all day WoW "power sessions") was about 400MB. I typical week night of 4 hours of use averages around 70MB. Even if I were to take a months vacation from work, and play WOW 12 hours a day, it would still only come to around 12-15GB for the month.

My ISP has a 95GB cap, and I have never come even close to the cap. The average gamer really has no need to worry.

 

[Guest]

well i have hughes net so you all are living better then me. i get only 325mb/24hr not a day but a 24 hour period of time. thats only enough to surf the web and watch a few youtube videos. And if i go over that they slow your speed down so much that just loading google takes 5min if it even loads. Also you never come close to the rated speed of 1.6mb/s for $79.99/mo, not to mention the cost of all the equipment

 

[jqk]

Comcast has a cap for the future. 250GB is on the high end now but in 2 years this will be an issue and an advantage where comcast can up prices for their "PREMIUM" services. I am a heavy user and will not go over this as of today but as more content gets added like HD video you will find many will hit the limit. It is an easy way for comcast to change the way they charge now (letting us ease into this plan) so they can gouge us in the future. It will become the norm before comcast begins the money sucking.

 

[lopopo]

Capping is a joke. The internet has,is, and will continue to be the worlds nervous system. People demand more HD media, we download bigger files, streaming content constantly grows in bit rate, then you have companies like netflix who's steaming dvd's are part of their business model...Obviously we are still finding uses for the internet. Capping not only hurts the economy in general because it slows consumption it also retards what arguably is the greatest invention since the TV.

America is based on wall street greed and excess when combined with a uneducated consumer base there's no surprise we're seeing 250 GB caps.

 

[nekatreven]

I don't live that far from Beaumont and I can't believe Time Warner is 'testing' the caps there.

Its definately not in the middle of nowhere...but its not exactly another Dallas or Houston and it seems a little small for this test. That, and those people barely got done cleaning up hurricane Rita before Ike showed up, I'm sure they are worried about bigger things than how much porn and bootleg software they can download.

Yet I'm sure TWC will be like, "Well we tested it in Beaumont and no one seemed to care!"

 

[v12v12]

Bah either way, a limit is a limit and a problem, since you're initially paying for data service at a certain limited speed, NOT a total limit to *data* transfered. These companies are simply trying to get a piece of the pie. The Highway is mad that truckers are using their roads to transport already paid for goods and services to consumers. So what do they do? Blame the consumer for the demand, and also shift blame to the product providers supplying said services... so they say, HEY! You're getting rich off our roads (which you've already paid to use openly) and WE WANT some of it, even though YOU do all the work and production. We're just the middleman carrier, which is ALL they have been, now they are trying to inject themselves into the product & services relationship.

It's all bullshit posturing to fool people into thinking it's a different issue than the OBVIOUS one—GREED

Newer fiber optic technology/servers/chips etc... as technology progresses it makes operating costs CHEAPER, but according to the ISPs: Once the initial infrastructure costs are paid, it doesn't cost anymore to transfer 25GB than 250GB. As technological innovation increases, less and less human monitoring is needed = money saved. Also equip reliability and uptime increases = money saved... ALL of the hardware ISPs use has a warranty, has a MTBF rating, THUS the 25GB Vs 250GB price tiering is just overt greed. The machines will run and last as long as they are designed. It's all just greed.

 

[FriendlyFire]

Don't complain... Here we have a 20 down/10 up limit on a 7mbit line with like 8$ per gig afterwards. No other good alternative since the other ISP is based on very slow DSL which is no good for basically anything. Plus, they also have caps, and I'm not even sure if they couldn't be worse. And that's for 51$ per month!

 

[v12v12]

I feel for you bro, but statements like that only LOWER the acceptable standards for broadband access. While the rest of the modern/hightech world is moving to cutting edge speeds, you and I are being METERED and MILKED like cows with some slow ass 4-8mbps, while FiOS (Verizon) drags it's feet regarding installing to major cities aside from NY on the East. KOREA has damn 48mpbs standard or higher... KOREA—people...Geesh.

 

[DXRick]

What is rather insidious is that they have no intention of reducing the price structure for the casual users. This is just to increase the cost for those that are. So instead of charging everyone a flat $35 a month, they will charge the casual user $35 and increase the charge for others.

 

[hellwig]

I lived in Iowa for a year where the fastest DSL I could get was 256K/76k (or something like that). Needless to say I could barely check my email on that connection. The positive side was it was only like $15 a month for service. I eventually moved to Cable, which after the introductory price, was costing me $65 for 8Mb down and only 512K up. On the plus side MediaCom has no stated caps that I know of. Now I'm in Comcast's district where I pay about $30/mo for 20Mb down and 2Mb up, which sounds awesome. In my opinion, $30/mo for the first year for that kind of connection even with a 250GB cap is well worth it. I don't like caps, but it beats being restricted by transfer rate instead like DSL (i.e. 8Mb DSL or 15Mb DSL where available is damned expensive).

What I don't understand is why a CAP will solve their bandwidth problems. Comcast pays for bandwidth (how much data can be moved at a time). Limiting how much data can be transfered in total doesn't make sense. I guess once the big users run out of cap after the first couple weeks of the month, everyone else gets a week or two of fast email access, but starting with the next payment cycle, the big users will bombard the system again until their cap runs out. I guess the hope is that cap will cause big users to reduce their overall usage, but we know that won't happen.

 

[Guest]

What about my cable company's "unlimited internet access"?
THAT's what I pay for.. what about home servers and online backup systems that are supposed to clone (on average 500gb) home HDD's laced with All those hd pictures, videos & music (I only convert to lossless formats)..? This thing stinks- again, what about home networks that syncs up to the business that has the big quickbooks dbase, or the kid that wants to clone his friends /home/bin, or whatever...

My point is that restrictions limit freedom, and no one ever seems too concerned about that until they're bitten and can't ignore it.. back in the 80286 days, 2 megs was plenty for a 'hefty' file d/l that took hours- with the law of exponential increase applied to computing, with higher processing comes higher file size/volume, longer times are incurred for download, etc, the 250gb cap will Definitely be reached in the not-so-distant future, and what then?
We'd all be *forced* to pay the extravagant $$ to insure what then would be a daily download.. Viva la Resistance!!

 

[donkeypunch]

These caps really are ridiculous in the days where there's plenty of HD movies, music, and games all legally available. I completely understand that cable is a shared connection, but to pull a cap out of thin air and call their high usage subscribers abusive is just hogwash. My ISP has an 80GB down, 45GB upload policy and that's on a 15/2 line. Why keep increasing the speed if your severely limited in what you can download?

My ISP doesn't even offer an alternative to these caps, like charging extra if you go over. They just warn you twice, then the next time your disconnected! When I joined I was never even told of any caps. After two letters I finally called them and asked what the cap was, then they finally told me-but not before recommending upgrading to their business plan with no caps for only 5 times as much for 1/3 of the speed. And I would have to sign a 2 year contract!

If Verizon FIOS, Optimum Boost, and I'm sure other cable ISP's can offer such high speed with no caps in the US then it's surely profitable. Cable ISP's either don't want to upgrade their servers or they're just being greedy. Having extremely limited competition lets them get away with stuff like this.

 

[blackened144]

[citation][nom]donkeypunch[/nom]If Verizon FIOS, Optimum Boost, and I'm sure other cable ISP's can offer such high speed with no caps in the US then it's surely profitable. Cable ISP's either don't want to upgrade their servers or they're just being greedy. Having extremely limited competition lets them get away with stuff like this.[/citation]

The thing is if they begin to implement the caps and enough people switch to another provider it could convince them the caps are a bad idea. Now the problem would them be if the companies get together and decide that they should all institute the cap it wouldnt matter. But thats the same "price fixing" scheme that ATI and Nvidia are getting banged on the head with right now.

 

[frozenlead]

[citation][nom]v12v12[/nom]Newer fiber optic technology/servers/chips etc... as technology progresses it makes operating costs CHEAPER, but according to the ISPs: Once the initial infrastructure costs are paid, it doesn't cost anymore to transfer 25GB than 250GB. As technological innovation increases, less and less human monitoring is needed = money saved. Also equip reliability and uptime increases = money saved... ALL of the hardware ISPs use has a warranty, has a MTBF rating, THUS the 25GB Vs 250GB price tiering is just overt greed. The machines will run and last as long as they are designed. It's all just greed.[/citation]
You said it. It doesn't cost them anything but the power to run those systems longer to move 25GB of data versus 250GB. They're just in it for the extra cash they can make. They don't have any reason to put a cap in place and charge you for going over.

 

[randomizer]

[citation][nom]FriendlyFire[/nom]Here we have a 20 down/10 up limit on a 7mbit line with like 8$ per gig afterwards.[/citation]
$8? That's nothing, it's $150/GB over here for the cheaper plans, the more expensive ones just throttle you to 64-128kbps and the really expensive ones sometimes go to an amazing 256kbps throttle speed!

 

[jimmysmitty]

Bleh caps are stupid. And considering we, the largest country for computer technologies, are behind most other countries in connection speed I would think that they would be smart enough not to cap it.

I wish Verizon had their FiOS here. For what I pay for my 7MB/s DSL I would be getting 15MB/s FiOS.

 

[Guest]

JQK has it right. Comcast is doing this for future business relations. They have an insanely high cap for a reason. They want you to get use to captivity then they will lower the cap while the demand goes up. Just so they can introduce premium packages that will ultimately be worst than what we have now. HD and internet shows are coming and the bandwidth usage will be tripling over the next couple years. 250gs will be a drop in the buck.

 

[dreamer77dd]

i do not understand a cap either. if most people never reach the cap then why put one in. Is it to scare peopel and worry about how much bandwith their using. where i live their is one company, cable company and which can change anything it wants. i wish i had higher download and upload speeds with no cap. i be willing to pay for that. I thinka bout all the things i use on the daily bases.
internet backup
internet radio, podcast
news feeds,
webcam/messager
netflix
photos, video of family (facebook)
windows updates/anti-virus updates/video game updates/ driver updates.
i want me computer to be my intercative entertainment home theater system and i can not do that with low speeds and a cap. the more HD or big data. like downloading adoe photoshope. people want to buy digital things but now one more thing to worry about, internet cap. sort of like having unlimited use on your phone when really it means you have 300 talking minutes. I would change to FIOS if it was here, i do not need headaches

 

[jalek]

Is it possible to hit the cap with Comcast, after the outages at the same time every day that they'll never acknowledge is happening?

How about the "update" my modem received recently, so if I multibox, my modem reboots within 60 seconds?

I think they're just saving you all from my selfish destruction of the internets with my dual boxing and even watching YouTube vids at the same time sometimes. Thank God for Comcast!

Still waiting for FiOS, then Comcast will be relieved of the burden of two residential and one business account. We can only pray they can hold up that long.

 

[dreamer77dd]

i hope Fios is hearing this as they could make some big money and have a lot of customers if they just put the effert into it. come on Fios, you can do it. lol like the customers are waiting for the product already, their is demand. i would love to download a HD movie but my internet is way to slow and it be not logical to try as the signal would just stop or drop. The future... hmmm

 

[Guest]

I live in Romania. I pay 10 euros/month for 10mbps symmetrical FTTB connection. The ISP offers a 50mbps privileged connection within its network ( the so-called metropolitan connection). No caps whatsoever, I usually upload more than 100GB/day. I just can't understand why bandwidth is such a problem in the US. You guys invented the Internet! Maybe there is no real competition between ISPs.