4 ms·
So now you can blast through your monthly bandwidth quota in mere minutes? :P
by 0x0 11y ago
So now you can blast through your monthly bandwidth quota in mere minutes? :P
- msh 11y agoWhile I don't like quotas, I don't understand this kind of comment. Even people who don't use large amounts of bandwidth can't benefit from high speeds.
- ulfw 11y agoQuotas become more and more restrictive the higher the bandwidth is (e.g. a 1GB limit on a 2G mobile network is basically unlimited traffic due to how long it takes to fill it. The same 1GB limit on a 4G LTE+ network could be consumed in mere minutes). > Even people who don't use large amounts of bandwidth can't benefit from high speeds. What does that sentence mean? I don't understand this kind of comment.
- msh 11y agoSorry. There was a 't too much. It should be: Even people who don't use large amounts of bandwidth can benefit from high speeds. My point is, when I went from 50/10 cable to gigabit fiber there was no change in how much bandwidth I was using. The things I did just went faster.
- cptskippy 11y agoWell when someone can now use Netflix Super HD and don't know they need to go into their Netflix account and disable it, they'll suddenly be using a great deal more bandwidth than before.
- msh 11y agoyes, but unless they had so slow speeds that super HD would not work I dont see how it changes things.
- Gracana 11y agoThat's okay, you can just call up Comcast's customer service agents and they'll be super polite and friendly and make all sorts of wonderful promises while they fail to do anything useful at all.
- 5parks 11y agoI'm sure cable execs are kicking themselves for not implementing usage-based billing two decades ago. Nearly every other service is usage-based but no one complains, because they've always been usage-based.
- ju-st 11y agoCompetition existed in the past.
- 5parks 11y agoFrom who? Dial-up SLIP/PPP and ISDN could hardly be considered competitive with a DOCSIS product. The market is far more competitive now, with increased FTTP deployments and advanced wireless.
- nitrogen 11y agoBefore the frequencies were reallocated to mobile usage, Sprint ran a cable-modem-over-wireless product called Broadband Direct that was pretty nice for its time. The system had a 30+ mile range to the towers, so lots of area could be covered with few towers. The DSL/cable discrepancy also used to be smaller, and there were more, smaller cable providers.
- mhuffman 11y agoI think most other items are usage-based because when you use them they are gone. When you use electricity or water, more needs to be generated/cleaned. Not so with Internet. It is more like phone service. If I make a call, nothing needs to be rebuilt for another one. I believe it is obvious to people and that is why there is push-back.
- edude03 11y agoThe difference is that cable companies want it both ways. They charge you a minimum for a set amount of serivce AND they charge you if you use more than that AND you don't always get what you pay for (since it's "up to" xx mb/s) With water if I don't use it I pay zero. If I use xxxx gallons I pay for xxxx gallons and if I turn the tap and water doesn't come out I get a bill credit at the very least. With the internet I pay $50/ month whether I use it or not, if I pay for 100gb and I use 105gb then I pay $20 for the overage and if I have DOCSIS and everyone in my neighbourhood is using their internet then too bad for me that it doesn't work.
- RKearney 11y agoYou really have to appreciate how Comcast really tries to sound advanced with "World's First" in the headline. Assuming the upload will again be 1/5th the download speeds, you're looking at 1Gbps down / 200 Mbps up for a total bandwidth of 1.2 Gbps. That means in a 30 day month you can use up to 388,800 GB of bandwidth. Subtract your 300 GB "courtesy bandwidth" and you're at 388,500 GB over your courtesy limit. At $10 per 50GB you'll need 7,770 separate 50GB "packages" at $10 each totaling $77,700 per month in overages.
- 0x0 11y agoSo if someone were to ping-flood a Comcast user's home IP... that could get expensive quickly, and there is almost nothing the user could do about it. So weird, and quite unfair.
- rayiner 11y agoThat calculation really doesn't apply to 99% of what people use their internet connections for. It takes me 15 minutes to update Office over me 50 mbps connection. I'm not going to download twice as many updates because my net connection is twice as fast. I'm not going to buy twice as many iTunes movies or twice as many games on Steam.
- click170 11y agoPerhaps, but many people watch Netflix, and by default Netflix consumes as much bandwidth as it can in order to stream at the highest quality available. This is going to sting for those non-teksavvy Netflix users.
- pandaman 11y agoIf this had been true then Netflix should have been digitizing analog sources dynamically, which would be all over the news. So I doubt Netflix does that, they only can use as much bandwidth as there is in their sources.
- 5parks 11y agoThe majority of users already pull the top bitrate. The lower bitrates are only used by mobile clients and users on very bad connections.
- PhantomGremlin 11y agoblast through your monthly bandwidth quota in mere minutes It would take 40 minutes of gigabit download to hit the typical Comcast monthly limit of 300 GB. And then I guess you sit around and cry for 29 days, 23 hours, and 20 minutes. Perhaps they'll throw in a few extra GB if you sign up for this.