The Comcast Banhammer. Welcome to insanity.

Ok, so we know two things:

1) Comcast offers residential plans up to 50Mbps download and 10Mbps upload. (At least in my area. I think in some areas they have rolled out their 100Mbps plans already.)

2) Comcast has a 250GB per month cap, covering combined upload and download. Supposedly it applies to all Comcast customers, but it is only enforced in certain areas. Is it enforced in your area? Who knows?

3) If you go over this limit, you get a phone call saying 'You went over the limit last month.* Don't do that again or we'll shut off your account.'


Now, let's do the math here. If you completely saturated a 50Mbps, you can hit that cap in 11 hours. ...last I checked, 11 hours is quite a bit less than one month.


Unbeknown to me, it turns out that the cap is actually enforced in my area. Who knew? :whistler: As a result of this, or more specifically, as a result of me recently upgrading my service to their 30M/7M plan, I discovered a fourth fact:

4) ...if you forgot to tell them about changing your cell number and they can't reach you on the phone, instead of sending a letter informing you of this, they just shut off your service until you call them.

Now, ok, I can kind of understand this. I can even understand them trying to protect their aging network by abusing their highest paying customers...wait...no I can't...

Anyways, long story short, I apparently hit 1,386GB of traffic in the last 3 weeks (HELLS YEAH!! :banana: :fight: :banana: ), so now I have 3 options:

1) Downgrade my Comcast connection and use the internet less.
(cheaper but crippling)

2) Get a Comcast Business line and pay more for a slower connection, but with no limit.
(very expensive)

3) Drop my Comcast connection and switch to a slower, cheaper Verizon DSL line with no limit.
(cheaper but still crippling..and pretty slow 3M/768k is the best I can get here)

4) Downgrade my Comcast connection (normal use) and get a separate Verizon DSL line (...abnormal use...).
(expensive)

Needless to say, none of these options is ideal. Of course, the ideal option would be to get FiOS, but aside from digging a hole in front of my apartment building and splicing myself in, that's not possible (yes, the line runs right outside my front door...but it doesn't go into the freaking building! :evil: ).

I'm trying to think of other options right now... Does anyone know of a good, cheap (ie, <= $50/mo) server collocation service with unlimited transfer?

my question to you is, how much dam pr0n do you download?!?! i have a 60gb cap at 10mbps/512kbps and rarely exceed that. though thankfully when i do, they charge a dollar per gb over up to $25 after that, it's unlimited.

I could definitely see someone using that much bandwidth if they do a lot of online gaming, streaming video (like from netflix), or maybe even hosting a website at home, hehe.

Oh this is just great news (not). ISPs are trying to take advantage of powerusers, it's ridiculous. I wonder how Google's attempt at getting optical networks in place will pan out. Granted even if that does happen it won't help most of the country.

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Originally Posted by Spawn-Inc

my question to you is, how much dam pr0n do you download?!?!

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Strangely enough, none. :P

Most of the traffic is from torrents and me downloading and re-uploading tables from the Free Rainbow Tables project to rapidshare. ...I had one torrent, I think it was for one of the CoW WPA tables, that was constantly pulling as much upload bandwidth as I would let it...

Oh, and no, unfortunately I'm not hosting a webserver...stupid user agreements.. :evil:

i think the most i've ever done was maybe 120gb's lol. and that's 3 people, not just me. though i did most of it. hopefully you find a better options, i'm wondering about bell's fiber optic stuff.

I don't use comcast out of principle alone. I have slow verizon here which does not have a cap and as long as there is one company without a cap I will choose them first.

The only exception would be if my connection was so slow that if I was using it 24/7 I could not reach the cap that the other company is enforcing, ie if 24/7 slow verizon only got me up to 125Gb a month, and comcast was cheaper and faster, I would then make the switch.

From all accounts, Comcast is the devil, and Bresnan (my area's cable provider) isn't any better. I went with a local company that offers microwave service to my area, which isn't nearly as fast as what you're used to, is faster than anything Bresnan offers. Go figure.

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Originally Posted by x88x

I apparently hit 1,386GB of traffic in the last 3 weeks (HELLS YEAH!! :banana: :fight: :banana: )

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WIN

This is why I have FairPoint DSL (Verizon sold our landlines to a bankrupt company, woo). It's only 1.5/384, so it's pretty slow, but I can saturate it as much as I want.

I don't have the fastest connection, but that's by choice. (Decided by my wallet)
This cap idea scares me. I am always online, and I am always streaming movies. Be it Netflix or Hulu. Often I will have Netflix on my PC and PS3 at the same time. Plus my son that plays an online RPG all day. So yeah, we are very heavy users. If my ISP started enforcing a limit, I might just cry.

TBH, I would be fine if I didn't do any uploading. I'm a pretty heavy downloader, but even then I probably don't go over 200GB in a normal month. ...of course, when a new table set comes out, that goes out the window, what with the last couple topping 300GB. :P

I would say that probably about 800-900GB of that 1,386GB was upload traffic, and about 500-600GB of that was probably the Church of Wifi WPA tableset...a lot of people seem to want those. ;) That torrent always had upload traffic, and would use as much bandwidth as I would let it.

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Originally Posted by x88x

TBH, I would be fine if I didn't do any uploading. I'm a pretty heavy downloader, but even then I probably don't go over 200GB in a normal month. ...of course, when a new table set comes out, that goes out the window, what with the last couple topping 300GB. :P

I would say that probably about 800-900GB of that 1,386GB was upload traffic, and about 500-600GB of that was probably the Church of Wifi WPA tableset...a lot of people seem to want those. ;) That torrent always had upload traffic, and would use as much bandwidth as I would let it.

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oh god, you're the guy i leech off aren't you?

Hahaha! I might just be, yeah. I'm a firm believer in seeding everything as much as possible. :D Case in point, I'm actually a bit ashamed that my D******d ratio is only at 3.12 ...I normally try to seed things until I hit 10.0 :D ...that gives me an idea...find a cheap seedbox provider that will also let me run a webserver on it, and set up a thing where people can upload their torrents to, and then rotate torrents out by ratio when my storage gets too low. That way I have no control over what is seeded (read: limit my legal liability), and people can get a high speed seed for their torrent. ..hmmm... At the very least, it would be an interesting experiment to see what kinds of content people would use such a service for... I might just do that...I saw a few seedbox services for <$10/mo... :think:

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Originally Posted by x88x

Hahaha! I might just be, yeah. I'm a firm believer in seeding everything as much as possible. :D Case in point, I'm actually a bit ashamed that my Demonoid ratio is only at 3.12 ...I normally try to seed things until I hit 10.0 :D ...that gives me an idea...find a cheap seedbox provider that will also let me run a webserver on it, and set up a thing where people can upload their torrents to, and then rotate torrents out by ratio when my storage gets too low. That way I have no control over what is seeded (read: limit my legal liability), and people can get a high speed seed for their torrent. ..hmmm... At the very least, it would be an interesting experiment to see what kinds of content people would use such a service for... I might just do that...I saw a few seedbox services for <$10/mo... :think:

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I'm a firm believer in 'it's all illegal anyway, nobody has the right to the moral high ground' :twisted:

sorry

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Originally Posted by dr.walrus

I'm a firm believer in 'it's all illegal anyway, nobody has the right to the moral high ground' :twisted:

sorry

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Hey, not all torrent activity is illegal... :whistler: ..case in point, the stuff that really decimated Comcast's limit...

Haha! We all KNOW what it would be used for.

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Originally Posted by Trace

Haha! We all KNOW what it would be used for.

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Can't be sure until it's done, right? ;) And maybe I happen to set it up to send the contents of the torrent to my system before it deletes it.....you know, for backup, right?

Yes, of course. Wouldn't want to lose those IMPORTANT torrents.

I think we're all getting too friendly with the torrent talk. There are pretty strict rules about not talking about torrents here, even if they are from a legal torrent site that only has open source content torrents.

I think mentioning our bandwidth use is usually enough for people to get the idea of what we are talking about, and if they ask you can say 'downloads' or 'a very big WoW update'.

I don't mind talking about legal torrents, although they are much rarer then the other stuff. So please just keep it to download speeds, etc, less focus on content of said downloads.

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Originally Posted by OvRiDe

I don't mind talking about legal torrents, although they are much rarer then the other stuff. So please just keep it to download speeds, etc, less focus on content of said downloads.

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I thought it was a big big no no, but searching through past threads I think I'm wrong. That's good to know because there is a lot of freeware, open source stuff that gets distributed through torrents.

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Originally Posted by OvRiDe

I don't mind talking about legal torrents, although they are much rarer then the other stuff. So please just keep it to download speeds, etc, less focus on content of said downloads.

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Good to know. All too often, the bittorrent protocol in entirety is treated as illegal. It really is an amazing system, capable of almost complete decentralization and theoretically infinite transfer speeds.

Also, in all honesty the vast majority of that 1,386GB was from various rainbow and precomputed hash tables...those things are entirely too big. :P

...I actually thought everyone was talking about pr0n?

I hear ya about the FiOS stuff. Apparently my city has it all over yet I can't get it at my apartment because they have some dealio with Comcast. I can get a lowly DSL line, but not fios, even though the Verizon station building is DIRECTLY across the street from the apartments.

For those with comcast you can monitor your monthly usage. Log into customers.comcast.com and it's under User's & Settings. It's nice that they actually let you see what your usage is, compared to before when they would just tell you that you went over and you had no way of knowing.

When I switched the fiance and my gaming rigs over to new OS' (mine to 7, her's to Vista), my laptop to 7, and the htpc to 7, I had to stop reinstalling our Steam games as just that alone on the gaming rigs was pushing the cap. Had to wait till the next month to install the rest.

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Originally Posted by NightrainSrt4

When I switched the fiance and my gaming rigs over to new OS' (mine to 7, her's to Vista), my laptop to 7, and the htpc to 7, I had to stop reinstalling our Steam games as just that alone on the gaming rigs was pushing the cap. Had to wait till the next month to install the rest.

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This is a great example of why it's completely ridiculous. :facepalm:

In the first month when we moved to our new place, we had 3 machines running (mine, wifes, roomates) and we moved 750gb in less than 30 days. We got a phone call. ;)

so stupid... havn't run into this as i live in wisconsin and have roadrunner at home, but god it sounds retarded...

The whole cap this is moronic. I had thee months where I lived in a complex with internet included, but torrents and internet gaming was blocked, which for me is the same as no internet.

Needless to say when I moved to Vegas I had some catching up to do. I had over 1tb of use a month and never got a call. I love big cities for that reason alone.

Also, NBC was using a bit-torrent client of their own so people could share HD content from their site. There were ads included in the client/player, but the system could have been really good. Where it failed was that after sharing my bandwidth to have HD content without buffering, they only let you watch it for a certain time and then it disappeared. That was where it got stupid for me. I shared my bandwidth and had to watch ads, but then I can only watch it for a two week period and it deletes itself.

If they were getting ad revenue each time I watched, then why not let me keep it forever? Ad revenue is why it was on TV in the first place right? Now I have TV on demand on my computer forever that I share with other people and they get the revenue! It could have been genius, but they messed it up.

**** you all. My connection is a Verizon aircard shared with 4 computers on a 5GB cap.

Guess who has a 400+ dollar phone bill.

DSL runs along the road, and they refuse to give it to us. REFUSE.

They refuse because you keep paying that crazy bill. J/k. That sucks.

Hey, you're back!

Ouch, that sucks man. I had a friend a while back who got a Verizon aircard because it was the only broadband he could get at his house...he hit the 5GB cap within hours. ...granted, that's because he found out about it after signing up for the card and was trying to max it out as fast as possible, but still... Also, I did some quick calculations, and I could max out their crappy 5GB cap if I saturated a 15kbps line... o_^

Are you in a apartment building? That's the only (good) reason I can think of why they wouldn't let you hook up.. If not, you could maybe try setting up a small business DSL line with them? It would cost more than a residential line, but probably less than the aircard, and they might be more willing to be flexible for a 'business'.

Living in CAPital country, let me tell you, capped plans suck, especially if you're charged $0.15 per MB over your limit. Most plans after a certain amount of bandwidth, move you to dial up speeds(64kbps/64kbps).

The only way you hit those huge limits if torrenting plain and simple. No way you watch that much in streaming movies.

In Australia I pay 56 USD and get 7mpbs down in real terms. I can use 15gb from 8am - 2am and 30 gb from 2am - 8am. It can get a bit tight with 15 gb but I don't see how you can be using more than 100gb a month legitematly. If I go over I get slowed to 128k or something.

You are all very lucky. At least though I can go online and track my usuage on an hourly basis.

Capped internet plans are a horrible idea. Just out of curiosity, does anyone know of any good utilities for self monitoring your internet usage. Ideally I'd like someway of monitoring bandwidth I use on each site I regularly visit, possibly via a plugin for Chrome.

I have a TV downstairs and never use it. I stream all my tv, and 90% of my music, and about 50% of my films, download all my software and just purchase the licenses, all 100% legit.

I use my computer a minimum of 8 hours and a maximum of 24 hours a day (curse of a compsci student / web designer / general hardcore geek), use about 50GB a month.

Oh yeah and streaming pr0n

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Originally Posted by simon275

The only way you hit those huge limits if torrenting plain and simple. No way you watch that much in streaming movies.

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Let's say I watch two 720p streaming shows a day, ten 720p youtube videos, and one 720p streaming movie.

2
+1.5
+4___
7.5 gigs a day. Multiplied by thirty you get 225gigs. Now, multiply that by the number of people in your home. It's really easy to legitimately go over a 250gig cap.

What is really horrible about it is that caps aren't the answer. People want to stream 1080p movies into their home through netflix, people want 1080p youtube streaming. I want to be able to download all my steam games onto a new computer without worry.

Caps slow progress because ISPs think that adding a bandwidth cap means they don't have to upgrade their infrastructure. It's not the answer. Internet use is going to increase and the only limit is the artificial one imposed by the ISP. There are possibilities we haven't even dreamed of, but they will never be possible unless we create a product opportunity gap for those technologies to fill. Increasing bandwidth 10 or 100 fold will create that space for new technologies.

Also, it really isn't about caps, but the fact that they advertise by speed (which is artificial considering increased money isn't what actually makes the internet faster, yet if I pay twice as much a month my speed goes up (it's the same wire people)). Why not give us all whatever speed we can get (let the demand on the system set the speed) and then have us all pay per mb?

I would be willing to pay $10 a month service fee and then $0.10 per gb if it meant I could have all the speed that the wire could give me. People downloading 250gb would have a bill of $35. People downloading 1Tb a month would have a $112.4 bill. It would be like electricity, water, and gasoline. If you use more you pay more.

As long as a reasonable price were set, I could see that being a great compromise. Personally, I would still want to have an unlimited plan, though, particularly upload.

I've been looking around, and since I'm going to be moving in August (lease runs out then), and both Verizon DSL and Comcast business require a 1 year contract, I'm just gonna downgrade my plan with Comcast (no sense paying more if I can't really use it), and wait and see what I can get wherever I move to. I'm hoping I'll be able to get FiOS (and it'll be a little higher priority this time around). There's a really sweet 35/35 FiOS business plan for $105/mo... /drools... For 35Mbps symmetrical, guaranteed speeds (unlike cable's 'up to' speeds), no usage cap, and no limitations on what I can do with it (read: public server! :D ), I would be more than willing to pay that much. ...a static IP isn't really worth the $35/mo more ($130/mo) to me though...I'm perfectly happy with dynamic DNS. :D

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Originally Posted by d_stilgar

I would be willing to pay $10 a month service fee and then $0.10 per gb if it meant I could have all the speed that the wire could give me. People downloading 250gb would have a bill of $35. People downloading 1Tb a month would have a $112.4 bill. It would be like electricity, water, and gasoline. If you use more you pay more.

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I like this idea. Lots.

indeed