“In-browser and email notifications as you near the 300 GB per month limit”

http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/data-usage-plans-expansion-exceed-allowance

by SamWhited • 13 years ago

35 51 13 years ago

customer.comcast.com

kareemm• 13 years ago

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.

mindslight3• 13 years ago

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.

ben1040• 13 years ago

For a lot of people, the telcos are your only realistic alternative, and they're just as bad. That 6Mbps DSL from AT&T also comes with a $10 charge for every 50GB in excess of 150GB.

mindslight3• 13 years ago

I really don't know how the complete landscape looks these days, but I'd imagine most reasonably metroish areas still have decent DSL providers (even if they're primarily targeting businesses), which will cover most people here. And I know there would be a lot more DSL build out by CLECs if people didn't automatically dismiss it "too slow" without doing a true comparison.

jpollock• 13 years ago

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!

jackinloadup• 13 years ago

Though with the power company at least you can buy more electricity. With my cable and DSL providers in my area going over is not an option. There are no plans above 350Gb. Going over starts insane overage charges. My relatives just moved into the area and were faced with a $900 bill with overages b/c they used 950Gb of data. Thanks FCC I didn't want competition anyway.

wmf• 13 years ago

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.

DerpDerpDerp• 13 years ago

I mean, that last statement is true in the areas with brown-outs because the electricity companies haven't provisioned enough generating capacity to handle the load.

No one would be complaining if Comcast had a 5TB/mo limit on 100Mbit lines.

The problem is that Comcast (and many other ISPs) haven't actually build networks that can supply internet at the levels people want, and they charge overly high rates for services which can't provide what people are told they can.

mindslight3• 13 years ago

The difference is that electricity storage is inefficient. Also, it's generally 240V split-phase.

glennos• 13 years ago

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.

xmonkee• 13 years ago

Yep, I would take that deal in an instant. Here in India I get a maximum starting limit of 80GB, after which they drop the speed down to a 256kbps crawl. And if I want extra data I have to pay around $10 (that's USD) for 5GB. Fuck.

wozniacki• 13 years ago

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?

picklefish2• 13 years ago

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

gergles• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

PhasmaFelis3• 13 years ago

Pretty good deal for little old granny who only uses the computer her son set up for her to send emails to her grandkids. That's my granny, BTW; it does happen.

pstack4• 13 years ago

$5 off a $70 bill is not "good" for your granny. Frankly, any broadband wired home should get a trivial "email access" style service for a minimal fee just to cover the accounting and maintenance. Your granny should be paying $5 or $10/mo; not getting $5 off.

venomsnake3• 13 years ago

We cannot roll DPI resistant technologies en masse soon enough.

schrodinger• 13 years ago

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

lupinglade• 13 years ago

Rogers in Canada does this

venomsnake3• 13 years ago

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

pstack4• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

waps2• 13 years ago

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)

e28eta• 13 years ago

I looked into Business class, but wasn't willing to sign a 2-3 year contract with Comcast for it. Maybe I'd be happier with business class, but I wish that 2 years from now I'll have a different provider.

This article was the reason I checked it out: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/why-i-...

markkanof3• 13 years ago

Depending on where you are the business plan might not be more expensive. I went from a Comcast standard to a Comcast business plan and pay the exact same amount per month. The only difference is that for the business plan they had me sign a two year contract.

sn0v• 13 years ago

Just out of curiosity, how much are you paying, what are you getting in return, and where are you staying?

keehun• 13 years ago

The most ridiculous.

Osiris• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

"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.

markkanof3• 13 years ago

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.

picklefish2• 13 years ago

Nashville and somewhere else where the cities with caps in 2012

bowlofpetunias• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

grecy2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

grecy2• 13 years ago

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

The great North.

perlpimp• 13 years ago

I thought rogers was caught doing "accidental" billing to accrue a certain amount every month. I think that was quite a while ago though. Good to know that they are up to their old tricks again!

rurounijones• 13 years ago

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...

venomsnake3• 13 years ago

Is it also https highjack? That would be worrying.

pstack4• 13 years ago

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.

PhasmaFelis3• 13 years ago

...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!

PhasmaFelis3• 13 years ago

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.

atteeela2• 13 years ago

$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

Want more?

$90 bux for 150 mbps / 10 mbps:

http://teksavvy.com/en/residential/internet/cable/cable-150

atteeela2• 13 years ago

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.

jocke76• 13 years ago

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.

“In-browser and email notifications as you near the 300 GB per month limit”

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