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Leaked Comcast docs prove 300GB cap has nothing to do with network congestion
- dudul 11y ago"When that happens, it’ll be interesting to see what type of excuse Comcast trots out to defend its seemingly arbitrary data cap." Why would they even have to come up with an excuse? They are in a position of monopoly almost everywhere, what do they care? "If you're not happy you can go to another internet company. Oh wait, there is none! Now suck my d*ck and pay up!"
- twoodfin 11y agoEh. This is lawyer-speak, probably more than a little bit influenced by all the trouble AT&T has had with the FCC over their grandfathered "unlimited" plans. If corporate documents are instructing reps to tell customers it's about congestion when there is no congestion, that doesn't look good at all when the government starts asking about these plans and policies. It's also probably not a good idea to be telling customers that the network you spend hundreds of millions of dollars marketing as super modern and awesome just can't handle their traffic. I'm not a fan of caps, either, but aggregate home bandwidth usage is going to go up and up, while more and more customers are going to have everything they need from IP services and thus want to cancel traditional TV. Should you charge an IP customer who uses 4TB/month streaming 4K the same as one who uses 200GB? How else do you discriminate?
- bbayles 11y agoThere are other ways to discriminate, but not many have been actually tried to my knowledge. One place where I worked studied a model with peak-load throttling. If you're trying to stream 4K video and the network isn't congested, you get full speed. If the network is congested, the subscribers who have been less active during previous peaks get priority and others get throttled. (Actually this was some years ago, before 4K video was a thing, but it's same idea) Another model I remember studying involved charging for "time using the service" and not "number of bits transferred." This is similar to how voice plans have "anytime" and "off peak" allocations of "minutes." So there are people thinking about this (or at least there were several years ago), but I'm a little surprised to not see any trials of alternative arrangements.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- thatcat 11y ago>How else do you discriminate? If you're not offering a competitive streaming option, you're not really eligible to receive that revenue anymore. You can't just invent a new way to monitize it with existing customers who have existing agreements for your services without offering them something to agree to, then allowing for their choice.
- ju-st 11y agoThere is no reason to discriminate as the TB's are basically free. The only problem is the shared medium on cable (Docsis)/GPON internet. And the evil ISPs who want to make more money because nobody wants their uncompetitive TV products anymore.
- sliverstorm 11y agoThe TB's are basically free- until you have to upgrade the equipment.
- Retric 11y agoNot really. It costs a lot to build and maintain a fiber network, the tech you put on endpoints is just not that expensive in comparison. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/fiber-its-not-all-created-equal/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/fiber-its-not-all...
- dtech 11y agoYou discriminate by partitioning up your bandwidth. Like they always have done. Data is free, bandwidth is not. You partition the bandwidth you have with a certain overbook factor and sell that. The Comcast cap has nothing to do with technical decisions, it is purely there to discourage video streaming in favor of Comcast's own options.
- bbayles 11y agoI previously worked in engineering at ISPs. There are two points to make: (1) Monthly data caps do not help manage congestion, at least not directly. However, non-engineers have a lot of trouble understanding this. (2) Telling customer support agents to say "this is not about congestion management" is a perception-management move. Cable companies are very sensitive to criticism that they are offering a "shared pipe" and that you're somehow not getting what you signed up for. On the first point: Congestion is problem during peak hours, not during the whole month. You could download a few terabytes over the course of a month and not cause a problem for anyone else, if you avoided peak hours. Data caps only work for congestion management if they discourage you from using services during peak hours. There's not a grand conspiracy by the cable or mobile companies about this, though - it's mostly a failure to understand this concept, or an unwillingness to go back to peak load pricing (e.g. different night/weekend rates like phone plans have/had).
- swiley 11y agoSatilite ISPs actually do this. The one I had when I lived with my parents gave us 18 GB a month with unlimited downloads between midnight and 5:00 am. Since I ran Linux I'd just throw my heavy downloads in crontab and go to bed and have my big shiny package the next morning.
- bbayles 11y agoInteresting! I did a search and found one example - Exede? It's encouraging to see some experiments with this.
- cypher543 11y agoExede seems to be moving away from this model, actually. Their new plans don't offer unlimited periods at all, but instead, some types of traffic are exempt from the caps. The problem with that is Exede won't say exactly what type of data is exempt other than "basic web browsing and email." No one really knows if that includes HTTPS, HTTP2, QUIC, WebSockets, etc.
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- Friedduck 11y agoThere've been a lot of reports locally of Comcast reporting an overage where none existed. Neighbors saying that nothing in their use suggested they were anywhere close to that kind of use and yet being charged. There were enough anecdotal reports that if I had Comcast I'd put my own router in front of theirs to have an independent measure. Unrelated: my experience with Comcast business over the last few months has been the worst customer service I've experienced in the last decade. Completely unreliable.
- rayiner 11y agoThe most sane pricing would probably be per bit with surge pricing during congestion periods. But customers would flip out at that.
- binarymax 11y agoI disagree, even if customers would not flip out. Charging per bit is an incorrect alignment to consumption of a finite resource (such as water, gas, or even electric). Data is not a finite resource, as receiving data does not deplete the source providing the data. The only sane way to charge for connectivity is to charge for operations and support, with a profit percentage.
- late2part 11y agoCommercial electricity is charged a lower rate at off-peak hours in many markets.
- harryh 11y agoAny given network can transmit only so many bits per second. That bandwidth is, in fact, a finite resource.
- wtallis 11y agoBut if you're operating below that limit, the marginal cost is zero.
- late2part 11y agoIt may or may not have anything to do with congestion. No Internet provider wants to advertise issues about congestion to their customers.
- late2part 11y agoSalient and relevant: http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/paris.metro.minimal.pdf http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/paris.metro.minimal.pdf
- deftnerd 11y agoMetered goods have a long history of having to have the meters certified by state bodies. For instance, grocery store scales, gas pumps, power meter manufacturers, etc. If we're going to lose the fight with Comcast over metered bandwidth, then perhaps we need to push for laws regarding inspection and validation of their metering systems themselves. If they're limiting consumers to a certain amount of traffic, I want the definition of traffic to be clearly delineated and for the measurement systems to be properly inspected and regulated. For instance, do they measure at the modem? At the local node? At the edge of the network? Does local traffic within Comcast's city-wide network count? If someone sends an IP traffic that their computer never requested and is filtered out, does it add to the traffic usage? Does a UDP broadcast in a subnet count towards everyone's bandwidth, even if the cable modem filters it out? Does this cover ICMP and UDP? Does Comcast's own "Are you there?" packets to cable modems count towards traffic allotments? Does Comcast's cable modem traffic to the registration and DHCP servers count? If they're going to screw-over customers, then there needs to be clear rules they have to follow so they can't just make up numbers. There also needs to be a way to make sure that DDOS attacks can't attack the bills of customers.
- Zelphyr 11y agoThe problem is two-fold: Comcasts lobbyists will make sure this never happens and even if I'd did, our members of Congress are CLEARLY not tech savvy enough to understand what any of this means.
- willglynn 11y agoAnecdote: back in 2009, I had a Comcast account in a metered market and didn't need cable service for a bit, so I tried an experiment. I plugged my cable modem into a dumb switch. It had a link, but there was nothing else attached; there was no router to act as a DHCP client, no frames being sent to the cable modem at all. In six days, my usage meter incremented by 0.5 GB. Plugging in a protocol analyzer revealed a constant stream of ARP requests for other subscribers' IPs. These were apparently counted against my cap, and presumably they were counted against everyone's caps, making 250 GB/month 1% smaller than advertised. Comcast sent me to a document describing their metering methodology: http://www.netforecast.com/documents/NFR5101_Comcast_Usage_Meter_Accuracy.pdf http://www.netforecast.com/documents/NFR5101_Comcast_Usage_M... Their reps defended the practice of counting Comcast-generated broadcast traffic against everyone, even though there's no way for subscribers to prevent it.
- darkr 11y agoI suspect that the 300GB figure comes as a result of (poorly) capacity planning for 1Mb/month @95th percentile per customer. If they can encourage people to stay within that limit, they can say: we have 1000 customers originating from PoP X, so we need to provision 1Gb bandwidth to cover that.
- drbawb 11y ago>Now Comcast claims that 98% of its subscriber base won’t even come close to going over the 300GB cap. I am the 2% !!! Date Download Upload Total 2015-10 419.63 GB 50.89 GB 470.52 GB 2015-09 601.49 GB 129.11 GB 730.60 GB 2015-08 1,011.83 GB 196.79 GB 1,208.62 GB 2015-07 504.28 GB 56.33 GB 560.61 GB 2015-06 398.04 GB 43.94 GB 441.98 GB 2015-05 305.05 GB 42.20 GB 347.25 GB 2015-04 375.06 GB 81.83 GB 456.89 GB 2015-03 215.10 GB 65.89 GB 280.99 GB 2015-02 316.11 GB 180.48 GB 496.59 GB 2015-01 413.11 GB 135.68 GB 548.78 GB 2014-12 457.10 GB 56.55 GB 513.65 GB 2014-11 270.25 GB 76.81 GB 347.05 GB 2014-10 311.27 GB 86.75 GB 398.03 GB 2014-09 381.53 GB 119.21 GB 500.74 GB 2014-08 237.63 GB 271.40 GB 509.03 GB 2014-07 277.23 GB 388.38 GB 665.61 GB 2014-06 213.32 GB 162.85 GB 376.17 GB 2014-05 223.88 GB 67.49 GB 291.37 GB 2014-04 258.21 GB 124.38 GB 382.60 GB 2014-03 205.78 GB 77.03 GB 282.81 GB 2014-02 315.23 GB 448.78 GB 764.01 GB 2014-01 342.07 GB 279.32 GB 621.38 GB 2013-12 128.54 GB 114.93 GB 243.47 GB
- paublyrne 11y agoWhat kind of things do you do that push you over a terabyte? I don't get anywhere near that. I'm just curious, and not in any way saying there is anything wrong with that.
- joesmo 11y agoSo it's just about charging $30-35 more for the same "unlimited" service. I don't understand how that's not false advertising when taking into account the real definition of "unlimited" and the fact that you have to read some obscure FAQ / TOS to find out that "unlimited" is not "unlimited."
- username223 11y agoI can't help but chuckle and shake my head in amazement at the script their flacks came up with to say "we're starting to charge people an extra $30 to use more than 300GB": Current policy: Don't say "unlimited data," say "250 GB data, but not enforced." New policy: Don't say "300 GB data," say "we gave you 50 GB more data for free!"
- maerF0x0 11y agoIMO a big part of the issue is the consumer. Consumers know very little about internet other than "buy the one with the biggest number". So internet is advertised like flow rate (L per minute) and restricted like water (Cubic M). I think they should goto a connection + volume model. $10 a month just to be connected, maybe 500MB free download or whatever. And then you pay per GB, variable rates based on time of day. $1 per GB at 7pm, $0.01 at 3am. Like how industrial electricity rates work (if i understand correctly). Pricing models will screw consumers over until the pricing model matches the economics of the situation. If I were a startup this is the issue I'd fix; Pricing models that do not match the economics.
- nitrogen 11y ago$1 per gigabyte is an exorbitant price even if everyone on the planet was using the network at the same time.
- SilasX 11y agoWhat about having users "pay" by thinning their pipes (in favor of other users) in proportion to their peak hour usage? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10525574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10525574
- brodie78382 11y agoThe problem with this is, generally speaking, it doesn't cost an ISP much more for everyone to be using their connection versus everyone not. All the infrastructure runs 24/7 regardless if you're using it or not (if you really get into the math, yes it costs slightly more electricity for equipment to use more hardware resources, but again it's pennies). The real costs come from upgrading the infrastructure to keep up with your top demand, and paying humans to maintain it all.
- nathanvanfleet 11y agoWhen I worked at a University I constantly overheard that the bandwidth was doubling every year because the costs were coming down so rapidly. So it's really no question that any cap that doesn't double at least every few years is a business case and has nothing to do with technological constraints.
- late2part 11y agoI ran a $150 million Internet P&L for several years. The general trend is that customer use of data doubles every year and actual cost of goods sold halve every year. This trend has gone on for much longer than most people thought reasonable.
- NelsonMinar 11y agoThis link is to a Yahoo News republication of a BGR rewrite of a Consumerist story that was a rewrite of a DSLReports scoop. Here's the link to the original reporting: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Leaked-Comcast-Talking-Points-Admit-Caps-Not-About-Congestion-135577 http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Leaked-Comcast-Talking-Po...
- msoad 11y agoIf you have to get Comcast, sign up for their business plans. The speed is precisely what they advertise for. The regular plans have a spike in speed when you start downloading something and slow down afterwards. I'm using their base plan (15Mbps) and can stream HD movies with no problem
- mindslight 11y agoEnjoy your 1Mbps connection, Comcast suckers. My DSL connection has ten times the bandwidth! Seriously if you still have a local DSL provider, patronize them before it's too late. National policy is explicitly based around competition between DSL and cable, so when you ignore DSL because cable advertises fraudulent peak-rate speeds, you're saying that competition does not matter to you. Telco infrastructure is even still regulated such that smaller companies can be ISPs, leading to great customer service and even pro-privacy attitudes such as these: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/06/22/ceo-of-internet-provider-sonic-net-we-delete-user-logs-after-two-weeks-your-internet-provider-should-too/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/06/22/ceo-of-...
- GhotiFish 11y agoI've found that if you're savvy enough, you can adopt habits that deal with low bandwidth situations well. I would drop metered plan in an instant if I could just have an unlimited symmetric 5Mbps. That's enough to gradually download libraries of 1080p video. It's not enough for real time, but real time isn't necessary, even when companies insist that it is.
- selectodude 11y agoUnfortunately, my DSL provider can deliver me 6Mb/s. Comcast promises 75Mbit and actually delivers me 90Mbit. Granted, I live in Chicago which actually has something resembling competition (AT&T is rolling out GigaPower and as far as I know we're a test market for DOCSIS 3.1) so the Internet metering on the Comcast website just straight up doesn't work and throws up an error.
- mindslight 11y agoWell sure, if you don't have this 1Mbit/sec usage cap then Comcast's instantaneous line speed is pretty great. Hopefully your competitive market continues.
- awqrre 11y agoComcast is trying to get that cable money from somewhere else...
- CyberDildonics 11y agoOf course it doesn't. Cable companies know that they can sell you data twice unless you convert your internet data to be your TV. They don't want to give their customers the means to free themselves from half of their monthly bill. They have every incentive to make their internet service not work for video. Someone who ran a local ISP said that bandwidth is becoming basically free. People can only consume so much. Even with a fast connection no one is going to be using it all the time.
- marak830 11y agoWe dont have caps here in Japan. There is a lot more people in a lot smaller area, and i dont have issues with my connection. I also get 2gb/s. Pretty happy im not being gouged by those conpabies over there.