Warning: Comcast is Now Throttling Broadband

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Not that I'm condoning them but...

1. You pay for "Up TO X", you don't pay for X. No connection service ever guarantees you'll get your max.

2. Downloading isn't what triggers the cap. It's uploading which does.

3. It's not how much you upload, it's how fast you're uploading. You can upload 50GB all you want, but you can't upload at say 100KB/sec, you'll only get 70KB/sec.
 
Comcast has done that already for years!
In fact, every connection has a 'throttling' on them to provide some sort of bandwidth cap!

My connection always downloads around 1,2MB/s, and after about 15 seconds it drops to 876KB/s.
 
I just kicked Time Warner to the curb. The FiOS guy comes on November 12th.

Apparently Time Warner is up to this same garbage as well.

I have a bunch of games on steam (Fallout 3, Half life Series, Borderlands etc) so if I'm on TW or Comcast and I need to reinstall one of them (3-6 gigs each), I'm going to get throttled?

Eat my shit cable companies.

I'm sure Verizon's corporate sleazebag swine will implement all kinds of rules just like the cable companies, at some point, but I'm glad to have dropped Time Warner.

My Internet didn't go out the whole time we had them (1 year), and our apartment was like 10 feet from a very main street, so the bandwidth never seemed to drop.

But their Cable service, the guide would take 10 seconds to respond to commands, the screen would shake and vibrate all the time intermittently and a whole host of other annoying problems.

 
I hate Comcast. I pay for the bandwidth...if I want to use if 24/7/365 they shouldn't be able to say a word about it, and what type of traffic it isn't shouldn't effect its priority. It's all top priority, because I payed for it and I want to see or do whatever i'm requesting at the time. Someone needs to sue them...class action style.
 
I'm living in Kiev, Ukraine and I have FiOs at home. $25/month, 20Mbit guaranteed, up to 100 Mbit of bandwidth. No traffic limits. No throttle.

If you don't know where Ukraine is, it is a post-Soviet country which had practically no internet just 10 years ago.

Have a good day in US. :) Maybe Comcast will start offering 56K dial-up for you, of course, if you overuse your speed, they'll throttle you to 14.4K

It's funny.
 
I don't like it, but I only have one alternative ISP (clearwire). Comcast isn't great but man is it leagues ahead from clearwire. At least I get close to if not advertised speeds while clearwire was usually around 40%.
 
[citation][nom]sidran32[/nom]I just read the PDF report. As they were previously using protocol specific throttling methods, which people were complaining adamantly about previously, I think this is a positive step. Congestion needs to be controlled. My only hope is that their threshold levels are correct. 70% seems a bit low to me, though the downstream is 80%. I also think that these should probably be more aggressively applied towards users who bought the higher tier services, as they would most likely be larger offenders of network congestion (though cumulatively, lower tier users can also be offenders, so they should not be exempt). Ultimately, though, they should work on upgrading their network so all users can have a better experience, without so much need for throttling.[/citation]

lmao 50gb "legally" haha!
 
[citation][nom]leetoranges[/nom]Sigh time to lower my upload speeds D: sigh if only internet was like in korea, or Japan, i dont think they have any problems there with throttleing their customers, and i think that over there, they have alot more freedom on the internet rather than us.[/citation]Move to Japan, stop sharing pirated software.
 
I am going to get flack for this, but my Comcast is incredible. I like in a semi-rural area and I pay like $30 a month for "6 Down, 2 Up" and I have tested it. 90% of the time I get 8.9 to 11 Mbps down and 2.5 to 4 Mbps up. It is blazing fast, disconnects maybe once a month for 15 minutes at most. And to top it off, I have violated their old and new rules, but since the network hub is never congested they have done nothing about it. So for people living in the middle or the city, sorry. For people like me, slightly outside the primary populated area. Comcast is awesome.

I will give them a thumbs up for making the throttling rules less restrictive. Hell these new rules seem more geared to ensure people in your area get the service they pay for by controlling one of two people who eat up everyone's bandwidth. The old rules were just plan wrong, stupid, and several words I will not say.
 
if you read the user agreement with comcast internet you are paying for a maximum speed. they only guarantee something like 60% of they speed you think your getting. here in Seattle we have 4 speed tears with comcast, 12mb, 16mb, 22mb and 50mb. prices start at $19.99 and go up around $10 per tear. 50mb however is a lot more. the max the closest competitor offers is 1.5MB at $19.99 a month.

so if you think about it, if you think of a going rate of $19.99 per 1.5mb/s of speed. 12mb/s would come to roughly $160/month? even if they throttle the speed comcast doesn't seem so bad to me. and yes customer service leaves something to be desired, but its much better then it once was.
 
no this does not mean you are not getting what you payed for. what you payed for is speeds "up to" but they guarantee speeds far slower. and i would not even doubt there is a statement saying speeds may drop lower if there is "congestion". you are paying for what the user agreement says NOT what the big flashy words say. and no its is not false advertising. here is a clip from the www.comcast.com website

"Performance

Downloads up to 12 Mbps with PowerBoost. A great value!"

download "UP TO" not at least, or at. up to.
 
Wow, a lot of people seem to be upset by this! I think there would be a lot fewer negative comments if the readers read the PDF linked to in the article (the link is bad, by the way. You will need to edit it in order to get to the document).

What Comcast is doing is not really throttling traffic. They are just using priority scheme similar to weighted fair queuing whereby the subscribers who are using a large amount of bandwidth have their packet's priority reduced when their cable segment is nearing saturation.

What this means is that you can use 100% of your provisioned bandwidth for as long as you like, unless lots of your neighbors are also using lots of bandwidth. Then your priority might be reduced if you are still able to exceed 70% of your provisioned bandwidth. And even if your traffic is set to run at a lower priority, you will only see a reduction in throughput when your cable segment is saturated.

I see this as a positive move on Comcast's part. It is a very fair and reasonable way to manage their network.
 
i agree with you and it may be bull. but a judge would agree with them. hell even fios does it. from the verison fios site

Fast

Download up to 15 Mbps / Upload up to 5 Mbps

and you don't think they have tons of layers checking and double checking this stuff? its like going to buy a advertised car and its gone because there was only 1 at that price. it may be bull, but its not illegal.
 
[citation][nom]hillarymakesmecry[/nom]I, for one, am glad I have comcast.Bandwidth throttling could be a good thing. If I'm trying to play some online games and the neighbors kid is slowing down my local internet down by up and downloading 1 tb or more a month and preventing me from playing my games on the connection I'm paying for. Then throttle away.I probably use 50gb a month.[/citation]

Toms should have a hall of fame for these comments. Does this guy even know what a what a terabyte is?

Its morons like you, with uncanny stupidity, that destroy what others have worked so hard to achieve. I imagine one day you will be waking up to a future world where you are being raped for throughput only to wonder what went wrong and blame it on others.

Go back under a bridge you chud.
 
pathetic it would be like saying to many people are using landlines at once lets throttle that so that the network doesn't slow down lets cap that for a maximum of 20hrs on weekends , only way they will back down is if they see a big ass hit by consumers going elsewhere but that will never happen people will just continue to use their services.

i wish i lived in Sweden or Europe, a 100mbit connection for half the price uncapped!!!
 
I just hope the families of Comcast employees or executives don't do any high-bandwidth tasks. That includes YouTube, Netflix, Hulu and multiplayer gaming.

Or would we see "special circumvention" be implemented for the families of executives...most likely. It's aggravating how the dirty corporations can get away with something like this.
 
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