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Comcast will start charging Xfinity customers fees for exceeding their usage cap

97 points by dudul 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
alexfromapex 6y ago
The upsetting part is the greed of it all and lack of any meaningful competition to switch to. If Elon’s Starlink works well it may be the nudge AT&T and Comcast need. Would also love to see a line of sight ISP and more towns start ISPs like there are in some states and other countries since laying the wires is too big of a startup cost for any new players that don’t have billions of dollars.
- stefan_ 6y ago
  The irony is that of all of these fraudsters, Starlink would be the most reasonable to have data caps to begin with.
  - wmf 6y ago
    It would be great if Starlink could innovate an alternative to data caps since they're a very crude way to manage congestion.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      Giving each customer a guaranteed bandwidth and a burst bandwidth should work. When the network is free you can use up to your burst speed, but the network is guaranteed to be large enough to support your minimum speed. During congestion, all packets beyond your minimum speed are at a lower priority and will be dropped as needed.
      - wmf 6y ago
        Minimum speeds tend to be tricky because they depend on the density of customers (if your neighbor signs up your minimum goes down) and they tend to be very low, like 1 Mbps.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  I'm not sure how much Starlink will help. Starlink will only be viable in rural settings. A popular saying on Ars Technica is "Starlink is for those who wish they had Comcast to hate, not those who hate their Comcast."
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > Would also love to see a line of sight ISP The problem with rural broadband, no matter if line-of-sight, FTTN, FTTB or even LTE/5G is that there will always be some sort of "concentrator point" needed which will need a high speed uplink themselves. And since we're talking about rural, this uplink is the expensive part as you will want to put it below ground so that random car crashes, forest fires, lighting strikes, wind damage, falling trees or anything don't take down the single uplink for days. You can link up such concentrators using directional wireless (this is how many LTE stations are uplinked, for example), but suffer from degraded performance in bad weather, lower total performance for the satellite stations/APs, and it isn't always possible (as it's line-of-sight based). Source: worked in constructions digging trenches for FTTN buildouts in Germany.
- tzs 6y ago
  The way Starlink works there is a certain amount of bandwidth available between a satellite and a ground terminal, and a certain amount available satellite to satellite. This means that there is a limit on how many customers they can handle per square kilometer without degrading performance. That limit is much lower than the number of customers the major terrestrial ISPs serve in urban and suburban areas. Their plans are to support 5 million customers total across the whole US. That’s less than 10% of the number of cable broadband customers.
vitalychernobyl 6y ago
The cap is high to begin with, but later they will begin to lower it and increase the cost. At this point, based on examples of other cable companies and wireless providers, it is almost a given. Unless of course you believe that Comcast is a benevolent company that tries to help its customers instead of trying to gouge them at every opportunity (former customer, lots of hard feelings) :/ Fingers crossed for Starlink to put a serious dent into their business.
- BitwiseFool 6y ago
  It's not that high to begin with, 1.2 Tb of data per month is fairly low in my opinion - especially if you have a family.
  - derekp7 6y ago
    To put this in perspective (Hopefully I got the numbers correct, assuming everyone follows the convention of B=Bytes, and b=bits, and 8 bits per byte) -- I believe it is 1.2 TB, not Tb (bytes, not bits). A quick google search shows that Netflix HD streaming is 5 Mbps (bits), which is 2.25 GB (Bytes) per hour. 1.2 TB per month is 40 GB per day. Which is about 17 hours of Netflix HD per day. Seems like a lot, but not if you have multiple family members each watching something different (so just over 4 hours of Netflix per family member). In our case, we have a little one in the house, and Netflix is going most of the day as background for him (against my better judgement, however...). So to help mitigate the bandwidth usage, I adjusted all the profiles on Netflix to use the lowest quality setting, turn off auto-preview, and turned off auto-play next episode -- which cut my monthly usage by 2/3. Also, a typical Linux ISO image may be about 5 GB (the one "large" item I typically download whenever a new CentOS or Debian/Ubuntu is released). So that is 8 Linux ISO's per day, so not too bad there. The only thing I haven't measured yet is when what the kid's Zoom class uses up, and my remote RDP sessions. However with two adults in the house and a little one, my usage hovers around 500 GB -- but for some reason back in July I hit about 1 TB, and last month was 800GB. Now if you have teens in the house, esp. if they are gamers, then I can easily seeing usage well beyond 1.2 TB.
    - 6y ago
mimikatz 6y ago
That isn't a very neutral headline...
- strictnein 6y ago
  That's because it's Gizmodo and this is what they do.
- davidgerard 6y ago
  It is, however, more informative than the veneer of neutrality would be.
- vangelis 6y ago
  Where's the lie?
showerst 6y ago
I'm one of these people, it's super frustrating. Because of where our building sits we can't even do fixed wireless, so despite living in a major US city my options are pay comcast or get 1mbps (!) dsl.
mfer 6y ago
This is complicated for many reasons... A lot of people want wired connections (like gamers) for performance. For a company to have wired connections they typically need to be on the telephone poles. But, there are very restrictive laws in most states on who can even put things on there. For example, where I live it's utilities, telephone, cable, and municipalities. An internet only company can't get on the pole. This is very limiting. Data caps are going to get easier to go over as we get more 4k streaming. Comcast offers their own streaming service that doesn't count against the cap. This provides them a major advantage and 4k causes more cap issues for typical people. I don't personally notice the cap I have (I have comcast due to no real competition where I live). I've had a cap for years. I've hit the cap when I setup a new backup solution and it goes crazy doing uploads to a remote location. Otherwise I've not gotten into trouble. But, the more 4k shows we watch the more I see my house coming closer to it. What we need is more competitive situations and laws that enable that.
- BitwiseFool 6y ago
  Sadly, the district I live in has an Xfinity call center located in it and all my representatives seemingly adore Comcast for providing jobs. Thankfully, I do have a choice in ISP and wouldn't ever consider switching to Comcast.
localhost 6y ago
In Washington State they have already started enforcing this. I had to add $30 to my bill to cover the realities of WFH. Also you get to pay more to use your own equipment. It’s $25 to use their modem and router.
- tzs 6y ago
  To break that down a little, adding unlimited data is $11/month if you use their current modem, which is $14/month to rent. Hence $25/month. You can put their modem in bridge mode and use it with your own router. That’s probably what I would do if I needed unlimited.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - evan_ 6y ago
    You can also buy your own modem for less than $100
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      Yes, but this thread is about how doing so costs more than renting if you exceed the data cap.
      - evan_ 6y ago
        oh I misunderstood, that's obscene
  - jdeibele 6y ago
    Late to the conversation but I wanted to switch the DNS for parents-in-law and found that Comcast has DNS settings locked down (not user changeable) on their router. Since they're also using VoIP and cable from Comcast, I didn't go any further. I wanted to switch the DNS to AdGuard because my mother-in-law had a JavaScript pop-up that convinced her to call "Microsoft". I put uBlock Origin on Chrome and Edge. Users can set the DNS setting on their devices to use something else but I bet it's a tiny fraction that do. As somebody who worked at an ISP, I can sympathize a little bit with not wanting customers to f*ck up their DNS.
a_wild_dandan 6y ago
My city (Fort Collins) is rolling out municipal fiber and I'm waiting with baited breath to jump the Comcast ship. No data caps, $40/mo cheaper, etc. I hope more places follow suit. These miserly ISPs desperately need competition. The broadband access available to rural folks like my Midwest rooted family is abhorrent.
- fred_is_fred 6y ago
  In theory they are rolling it out, after several years I am yet to know a single person who has it available. Frankly it's been far too slow and with far too little communications.
  - briffle 6y ago
    A previous town I lived near took a few years to get started with Municipal fiber. First they wired up city offices/departments, schools, etc, in a traditional fiber network. They had a few years experiance with it. Then added a few commercial customers, and then a few apartment buildings downtown near their core. Once they decided to do municipal fiber, it took at least 2 years to see anything. They had to: - Test offering video/phone, and setup contracts to become a telco and TV provider with the state, regulators, etc - Negotiate video rebroadcast rights, find upstream telephony providers, etc - Hire some consultants to help them plan out their GPON network, and decide what equipment to buy, and where to locate it to cover the entire town. - Build the initial short fiber run to a brand new neighborhood that was getting built, and have them 'beta-test' the setup. - Hired some contractors that specialize in running data cables to do the runs through town, but they had to wait at least 7 months for them to be free of other major projects before they could get started - start building out the network from the central locations out to the suburbs. This meant larger building near downtown get first shot at access, as they are the first ones passed. Tunneling under streets, sidewalks, etc, rather than digging it all up is pretty spendy, and slow.
    - fred_is_fred 6y ago
      Since the approach they've taken here is more of a "We'd tell you but we'd have to kill you" there's not a lot of trust left - even from proponents. I'll probably still sign up but I already have GB fiber via C-link and it's fairly cheap, so I'm not super motivated. I also don't need any of the fluff you mentioned in point 1.
strictnein 6y ago
I wasn't aware that there even were Comcast customers without data caps anymore. I have 1Gbps service with them and pay for uncapped. With the cap you can break it three times before they start charging you extra. It's cool to hate Comcast, but it's not an unreasonable system - people who utilize 2TB a month probably should pay more than those who utilize 200GB. I think uncapped is $50/month, but I've had a friend mention that they were able to get it for $25/month if they leased their modem from Comcast, another $10 a month for a total of $35.
- shakezula 6y ago
  It’s not the data caps that really gets me heated. It’s their exclusion of their own services from the caps and the anti-consumer practices and the lobbying and the stifling of competition that really get to me. And to top it all off their customer service makes me want to run into traffic just at the thought of having to deal with them. It’s like volunteering to be gaslit.
  - strictnein 6y ago
    Data leaving their network is going to be more expensive for them. I also have cable through them and got rid of all of our cable boxes. This was because they noticed I wasn't using them and they contacted me about that. They have a really simple way to return hardware now - https://xfinity.com/returns https://xfinity.com/returns Now I just stream my cable to my TVs via the Roku app (my TVs are mainly TCLs, which have Roku built in) and that isn't counted against my cap. As a customer of theirs that has saved me ~$60 a month and my TV usage doesn't get counted against my data cap. That $60 basically covers the cost of uncapped service. This seems to be a pretty good deal to me.
    - dudul 6y ago
      How is it more expensive? The cap was lifted during the summer and as far as I know their infra was able to take it without problem. They claim that 95% of their customers would not be impacted by this new cap. So, why is it needed in the 1st place?
mherdeg 6y ago
Seems smart -- if people are going to be WFH or going to Zoom school full time, might as well get an extra $100/month from them. They can't say no. It'll be interesting to see whether broadband competitors match the offer or just siphon off a handful of switching customers. In Massachusetts many Internet markets are a monopoly (Comcast) or a duopoly (Comcast + Verizon or RCN). There are also a tiny handful of municipal providers (including Braintree, Norwood, Whip City Fiber for Westfield and area, and Russell). If people are still heavily working/attending school from home in March I can imagine a bit of pressure on towns and cities to do the very hard work of starting up Internet as a utility.
- bzb6 6y ago
  You don’t need 1.2 TB a month to wfh or use zoom I’m sure someone will come here and say “well my use case for wfh involves uploading 1 TB a day”, but no, that’s not normal
  - cybralx 6y ago
    > “well my use case for wfh involves uploading 1 TB a day”, but no, that’s not normal 1.2 / 30 = 40GB a day. Seems fairly low to me. Considering families with children attending online school as well, then clump in streaming services such as Netflix.
    - MivLives 6y ago
      Especially considering there's multiple games out there now that are 60+ gigs. My guess based on the unifi graphs of my connection for 7 people is that our biggest consumers are Netflix, and game downloads. One roommate alone ate over 150 gigs in game downloads in the last month.
  - prh8 6y ago
    WHF or Zoom only, no. But a normal household will also have streaming video and most of their phones on wifi while at home. And that's a quick pivot from 1.2/month to 1/day. Nobody is saying 1/day is normal, but no one is arguing the cap should be 30/month
cma 6y ago
Comcast, at least in the recent past, edits http responses to put in injected data cap alert messages, breaking all kinds of stuff.
gnicholas 6y ago
I'd feel better about this if they gave a discount (even a modest one) to everyone who isn't hitting the cap. Then it would feel like the plan was designed to be redistributive, not punitive. They'd get some additional revenue from high-usage customers and give up some revenue from their other customers. Instead it feels like a heads-I-win-tails-nothing-changes situation.
- slipheen 6y ago
  I totally admit and agree that the psychology of such things matters, but isn't that just the same thing with a different coat of paint? e.g. "Comcast announces that effective next June, prices will be raised by $30 for all customers. In order to mitigate this price increase, Comcast is also announcing that low-usage customers who are willing to have a 1 TB transfer cap are able to get a $30 discount."
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    In your example, yes. I was envisioning an actual discount from current pricing for all customers, so that low-usage customers would actually come out ahead compared to their previous pricing. In your example, there's no way for any customer to come out ahead, so it is just a different way of framing Comcast's existing plan.
tzs 6y ago
> Comcast says customers will be notified as they approach their monthly data limit, but the ISP currently doesn’t give its customers a way to independently verify meter readings. You can check your usage on their website or in their "My Account" mobile app. The app is particularly easy...open app, hit "internet", and scroll down a little. Yes, that's not "independently verified", and I've seen occasional complaints that it is wrong, but: • Those complaints are always that the Comcast number is too high, not too low, and since it is the Comcast number that will be used to determine if you've gone over, that's the one you want to use. • In most cases I've seen, the Comcast numbers turned out to be more accurate. The person claiming they were too high did something like fail to account for upload traffic, or their monitoring didn't include IPv6 traffic, or only covered wired traffic. You might think IPv6 would not be significant, but Disney+ definitely can stream IPv6 and Amazon Fire TV devices will use it when available. I watched several 4K UHD movies that way and according to the traffic stats on my TP-Link Archer A7 router the traffic to the Fire TV Stick was under a gig total. Next movie I used tcpdump while watching to verify that the stream was indeed IPv6, and reported not counting IPv6 as a bug to TP-Link. I'm pretty sure I also saw some of the apps on my Samsung TV using IPv6 streaming.
no_wizard 6y ago
For those working from home, pro tip: Get Comcast Business class if you can't switch to a reasonable ISP, reasons follow: - No Data Caps - You get priority on your node, and typically, there isn't more than a few others in the neighborhood that are also on business class, if at all (my technician who did the install told me I was the only one for my whole node, so I get priority over others in the neighborhood, all other things being equal) - You get better uptime guarentees - Frankly, their customer service is light years ahead of their consumer, but that isn't saying much - extremely consistent speeds. I know a lot of people on the prosumer plans have this too (friends of mine on xfinity don't have a lot of speed dips) but I have never been under 75/30 (the base of my plan) and my router tests every day so I can have historical reports. I'm often over 100 down (always 30 up though) The plans tend to be more than the consumer plans, of course, usually by 25-30 dollars, but you do get a little bit more than just no data caps, at least. Its been easier to deal with and I've had it for a few years. I don't like Comcast, but this arrangement made dealing with them much less painful. I've actually been impressed with the service levels. When I had xfinity (consumer Comcast, if you will) I had outages, speed dips, all kinds of things. Not since business class. Your mileage may vary, of course. I wish I could switch to a different ISP like Sonic, but alas, my alternative is dialup or very slow DSL, so this is the next best thing I could find.
- ben174 6y ago
  Just checked the pricing in Fremont, California (East Bay Area) - all require a 2 year agreement and some of them go up after the first year: 35 Mbps - $69.95/mo 100 Mbps - $109.90/mo 200 Mbps - $134.90/mo 300 Mbps - $164.90/mo 1 Gigabit - $499.95/mo Seems significantly more expensive than residential service.
  - no_wizard 6y ago
    Maybe its the plan I inherited or something like that, but I didn't have to sign a 2 year agreement and honestly 170 for 300 mbps isn't terrible (for Comcast) with the reliability I've been getting it'll be super consistent, at least, which isn't something to shake your fist at per say. Not sure why it is that I didn't have to sign a 2 year agreement (I did originally get this via my employer, though I transitioned out of that years ago). Maybe I'm on a legacy plan? I pay for 75/30, which maybe they don't offer in your area for some reason (I pay the low end of the spectrum here, 70 a month). Its always worked well for my household so I haven't thought to change it. Surprisingly, I'm tempted to see if I can get more speed for the dollars I'm paying.
mdasen 6y ago
One of the reasons that I like T-Mobile as a company is that they realized that the correct answer to network management is de-prioritization. If someone is downloading a lot at 2am, it doesn't harm anyone. Let them have fun! There's no reason to care about someone using capacity on your network when almost no one else is using the network. During peak times, it makes sense to give priority to those who use less data while still offering an acceptable level of service to those who use a lot of data. I'm really hopeful that the next few years will bring competition to the home internet space. T-Mobile has been adding a lot more areas to its home internet footprint recently. Their service certainly isn't perfect and might not be what people here would be looking for (given that wireless home internet is likely to be slower than wired for a bit). However, competition would put pressure on Comcast. When T-Mobile started offering better terms for their mobile service, a lot of people said that T-Mobile's coverage wasn't good enough for them to switch. It was good enough for enough people to switch that AT&T and Verizon vastly changed their offerings. They went from offering me 3GB of data for $30 to offering me unlimited. It's hard to remember the 2012-era data plans at this point. Verizon has started offering wireless home internet as well, albeit on a more limited basis than T-Mobile. T-Mobile's mobile offering didn't work for a lot of people back in 2013-2016, but it provided enough competition that Verizon and AT&T reintroduced unlimited data. Even if people on here won't switch to wireless home internet, it could provide an excellent option for people looking for a bill without hidden fees and unexpected increases in price. The churn from those customers will put pressure on Comcast to offer better terms for their service.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  We have the same system but with electricity here( cheaper bills during night use).
MrVitaliy 6y ago
So it comes down to something like this 1. Comcast cable internet - $65 2. Uncap monthly limit - $30 3. Fast VPN service[0] - $10 4. Netflix subscription - $15 [0] Comcast is known for injecting HTML/JS into http traffic So about $120/mo not too far from paying for cable 10 years ago.
maerF0x0 6y ago
Well, the good news is they rarely deliver their advertised speeds, so at least you have longer to hit the cap. At my current speed I could exhaust the data cap in 0.6% of a month if they gave me full speed down. (not to mention up).
dsr_ 6y ago
Family of four. 2 remote-schooled students, 2 WFH parents. Actual data from my firewall. month rx | tx | total | avg. rate ------------------------+-------------+-------------+--------------- Dec '19 482.56 GiB | 139.53 GiB | 622.09 GiB | 2.00 Mbit/s Jan '20 607.55 GiB | 139.11 GiB | 746.65 GiB | 2.39 Mbit/s Feb '20 497.22 GiB | 125.76 GiB | 622.99 GiB | 2.14 Mbit/s Mar '20 781.27 GiB | 162.63 GiB | 943.90 GiB | 3.03 Mbit/s Apr '20 794.96 GiB | 107.11 GiB | 902.06 GiB | 2.99 Mbit/s May '20 923.63 GiB | 88.38 GiB | 0.99 TiB | 3.25 Mbit/s Jun '20 907.10 GiB | 109.46 GiB | 0.99 TiB | 3.37 Mbit/s Jul '20 727.22 GiB | 100.19 GiB | 827.41 GiB | 2.65 Mbit/s Aug '20 649.34 GiB | 77.79 GiB | 727.13 GiB | 2.33 Mbit/s Sep '20 700.47 GiB | 108.37 GiB | 808.84 GiB | 2.68 Mbit/s Oct '20 1.02 TiB | 140.51 GiB | 1.15 TiB | 3.79 Mbit/s Nov '20 779.75 GiB | 82.85 GiB | 862.60 GiB | 3.61 Mbit/s November isn't over yet. We are clearly within spitting distance of that cap. Luckily, we aren't Comcast customers.
floatingatoll 6y ago
It’s really interesting reading these comments and mentally replacing “bytes” (Internet) with any of the other public utilities units such as “watts” (power) or “gallons” (water, trash).
johnklos 6y ago
It's too bad capitalism doesn't work the way we're told as children that it's supposed to work. The US has various captive markets with very limited competition. It's time to end this.

97 points by dudul 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

The upsetting part is the greed of it all and lack of any meaningful competition to switch to. If Elon’s Starlink works well it may be the nudge AT&T and Comcast need. Would also love to see a line of sight ISP and more towns start ISPs like there are in some states and other countries since laying the wires is too big of a startup cost for any new players that don’t have billions of dollars.

stefan_ 6y ago
The irony is that of all of these fraudsters, Starlink would be the most reasonable to have data caps to begin with.
- wmf 6y ago
  It would be great if Starlink could innovate an alternative to data caps since they're a very crude way to manage congestion.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Giving each customer a guaranteed bandwidth and a burst bandwidth should work. When the network is free you can use up to your burst speed, but the network is guaranteed to be large enough to support your minimum speed. During congestion, all packets beyond your minimum speed are at a lower priority and will be dropped as needed.
    - wmf 6y ago
      Minimum speeds tend to be tricky because they depend on the density of customers (if your neighbor signs up your minimum goes down) and they tend to be very low, like 1 Mbps.
bryanlarsen 6y ago
I'm not sure how much Starlink will help. Starlink will only be viable in rural settings. A popular saying on Ars Technica is "Starlink is for those who wish they had Comcast to hate, not those who hate their Comcast."
mschuster91 6y ago
> Would also love to see a line of sight ISP The problem with rural broadband, no matter if line-of-sight, FTTN, FTTB or even LTE/5G is that there will always be some sort of "concentrator point" needed which will need a high speed uplink themselves. And since we're talking about rural, this uplink is the expensive part as you will want to put it below ground so that random car crashes, forest fires, lighting strikes, wind damage, falling trees or anything don't take down the single uplink for days. You can link up such concentrators using directional wireless (this is how many LTE stations are uplinked, for example), but suffer from degraded performance in bad weather, lower total performance for the satellite stations/APs, and it isn't always possible (as it's line-of-sight based). Source: worked in constructions digging trenches for FTTN buildouts in Germany.
tzs 6y ago
The way Starlink works there is a certain amount of bandwidth available between a satellite and a ground terminal, and a certain amount available satellite to satellite. This means that there is a limit on how many customers they can handle per square kilometer without degrading performance. That limit is much lower than the number of customers the major terrestrial ISPs serve in urban and suburban areas. Their plans are to support 5 million customers total across the whole US. That’s less than 10% of the number of cable broadband customers.

vitalychernobyl 6y ago

The cap is high to begin with, but later they will begin to lower it and increase the cost. At this point, based on examples of other cable companies and wireless providers, it is almost a given. Unless of course you believe that Comcast is a benevolent company that tries to help its customers instead of trying to gouge them at every opportunity (former customer, lots of hard feelings) :/ Fingers crossed for Starlink to put a serious dent into their business.

BitwiseFool 6y ago
It's not that high to begin with, 1.2 Tb of data per month is fairly low in my opinion - especially if you have a family.
- derekp7 6y ago
  To put this in perspective (Hopefully I got the numbers correct, assuming everyone follows the convention of B=Bytes, and b=bits, and 8 bits per byte) -- I believe it is 1.2 TB, not Tb (bytes, not bits). A quick google search shows that Netflix HD streaming is 5 Mbps (bits), which is 2.25 GB (Bytes) per hour. 1.2 TB per month is 40 GB per day. Which is about 17 hours of Netflix HD per day. Seems like a lot, but not if you have multiple family members each watching something different (so just over 4 hours of Netflix per family member). In our case, we have a little one in the house, and Netflix is going most of the day as background for him (against my better judgement, however...). So to help mitigate the bandwidth usage, I adjusted all the profiles on Netflix to use the lowest quality setting, turn off auto-preview, and turned off auto-play next episode -- which cut my monthly usage by 2/3. Also, a typical Linux ISO image may be about 5 GB (the one "large" item I typically download whenever a new CentOS or Debian/Ubuntu is released). So that is 8 Linux ISO's per day, so not too bad there. The only thing I haven't measured yet is when what the kid's Zoom class uses up, and my remote RDP sessions. However with two adults in the house and a little one, my usage hovers around 500 GB -- but for some reason back in July I hit about 1 TB, and last month was 800GB. Now if you have teens in the house, esp. if they are gamers, then I can easily seeing usage well beyond 1.2 TB.
  - 6y ago

mimikatz 6y ago

That isn't a very neutral headline...

strictnein 6y ago
That's because it's Gizmodo and this is what they do.
davidgerard 6y ago
It is, however, more informative than the veneer of neutrality would be.
vangelis 6y ago
Where's the lie?

showerst 6y ago

I'm one of these people, it's super frustrating. Because of where our building sits we can't even do fixed wireless, so despite living in a major US city my options are pay comcast or get 1mbps (!) dsl.

mfer 6y ago

This is complicated for many reasons... A lot of people want wired connections (like gamers) for performance. For a company to have wired connections they typically need to be on the telephone poles. But, there are very restrictive laws in most states on who can even put things on there. For example, where I live it's utilities, telephone, cable, and municipalities. An internet only company can't get on the pole. This is very limiting. Data caps are going to get easier to go over as we get more 4k streaming. Comcast offers their own streaming service that doesn't count against the cap. This provides them a major advantage and 4k causes more cap issues for typical people. I don't personally notice the cap I have (I have comcast due to no real competition where I live). I've had a cap for years. I've hit the cap when I setup a new backup solution and it goes crazy doing uploads to a remote location. Otherwise I've not gotten into trouble. But, the more 4k shows we watch the more I see my house coming closer to it. What we need is more competitive situations and laws that enable that.

BitwiseFool 6y ago
Sadly, the district I live in has an Xfinity call center located in it and all my representatives seemingly adore Comcast for providing jobs. Thankfully, I do have a choice in ISP and wouldn't ever consider switching to Comcast.

localhost 6y ago

In Washington State they have already started enforcing this. I had to add $30 to my bill to cover the realities of WFH. Also you get to pay more to use your own equipment. It’s $25 to use their modem and router.

tzs 6y ago
To break that down a little, adding unlimited data is $11/month if you use their current modem, which is $14/month to rent. Hence $25/month. You can put their modem in bridge mode and use it with your own router. That’s probably what I would do if I needed unlimited.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- evan_ 6y ago
  You can also buy your own modem for less than $100
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Yes, but this thread is about how doing so costs more than renting if you exceed the data cap.
    - evan_ 6y ago
      oh I misunderstood, that's obscene
- jdeibele 6y ago
  Late to the conversation but I wanted to switch the DNS for parents-in-law and found that Comcast has DNS settings locked down (not user changeable) on their router. Since they're also using VoIP and cable from Comcast, I didn't go any further. I wanted to switch the DNS to AdGuard because my mother-in-law had a JavaScript pop-up that convinced her to call "Microsoft". I put uBlock Origin on Chrome and Edge. Users can set the DNS setting on their devices to use something else but I bet it's a tiny fraction that do. As somebody who worked at an ISP, I can sympathize a little bit with not wanting customers to f*ck up their DNS.

a_wild_dandan 6y ago

My city (Fort Collins) is rolling out municipal fiber and I'm waiting with baited breath to jump the Comcast ship. No data caps, $40/mo cheaper, etc. I hope more places follow suit. These miserly ISPs desperately need competition. The broadband access available to rural folks like my Midwest rooted family is abhorrent.

fred_is_fred 6y ago
In theory they are rolling it out, after several years I am yet to know a single person who has it available. Frankly it's been far too slow and with far too little communications.
- briffle 6y ago
  A previous town I lived near took a few years to get started with Municipal fiber. First they wired up city offices/departments, schools, etc, in a traditional fiber network. They had a few years experiance with it. Then added a few commercial customers, and then a few apartment buildings downtown near their core. Once they decided to do municipal fiber, it took at least 2 years to see anything. They had to: - Test offering video/phone, and setup contracts to become a telco and TV provider with the state, regulators, etc - Negotiate video rebroadcast rights, find upstream telephony providers, etc - Hire some consultants to help them plan out their GPON network, and decide what equipment to buy, and where to locate it to cover the entire town. - Build the initial short fiber run to a brand new neighborhood that was getting built, and have them 'beta-test' the setup. - Hired some contractors that specialize in running data cables to do the runs through town, but they had to wait at least 7 months for them to be free of other major projects before they could get started - start building out the network from the central locations out to the suburbs. This meant larger building near downtown get first shot at access, as they are the first ones passed. Tunneling under streets, sidewalks, etc, rather than digging it all up is pretty spendy, and slow.
  - fred_is_fred 6y ago
    Since the approach they've taken here is more of a "We'd tell you but we'd have to kill you" there's not a lot of trust left - even from proponents. I'll probably still sign up but I already have GB fiber via C-link and it's fairly cheap, so I'm not super motivated. I also don't need any of the fluff you mentioned in point 1.

strictnein 6y ago

I wasn't aware that there even were Comcast customers without data caps anymore. I have 1Gbps service with them and pay for uncapped. With the cap you can break it three times before they start charging you extra. It's cool to hate Comcast, but it's not an unreasonable system - people who utilize 2TB a month probably should pay more than those who utilize 200GB. I think uncapped is $50/month, but I've had a friend mention that they were able to get it for $25/month if they leased their modem from Comcast, another $10 a month for a total of $35.

shakezula 6y ago
It’s not the data caps that really gets me heated. It’s their exclusion of their own services from the caps and the anti-consumer practices and the lobbying and the stifling of competition that really get to me. And to top it all off their customer service makes me want to run into traffic just at the thought of having to deal with them. It’s like volunteering to be gaslit.
- strictnein 6y ago
  Data leaving their network is going to be more expensive for them. I also have cable through them and got rid of all of our cable boxes. This was because they noticed I wasn't using them and they contacted me about that. They have a really simple way to return hardware now - https://xfinity.com/returns https://xfinity.com/returns Now I just stream my cable to my TVs via the Roku app (my TVs are mainly TCLs, which have Roku built in) and that isn't counted against my cap. As a customer of theirs that has saved me ~$60 a month and my TV usage doesn't get counted against my data cap. That $60 basically covers the cost of uncapped service. This seems to be a pretty good deal to me.
  - dudul 6y ago
    How is it more expensive? The cap was lifted during the summer and as far as I know their infra was able to take it without problem. They claim that 95% of their customers would not be impacted by this new cap. So, why is it needed in the 1st place?

mherdeg 6y ago

Seems smart -- if people are going to be WFH or going to Zoom school full time, might as well get an extra $100/month from them. They can't say no. It'll be interesting to see whether broadband competitors match the offer or just siphon off a handful of switching customers. In Massachusetts many Internet markets are a monopoly (Comcast) or a duopoly (Comcast + Verizon or RCN). There are also a tiny handful of municipal providers (including Braintree, Norwood, Whip City Fiber for Westfield and area, and Russell). If people are still heavily working/attending school from home in March I can imagine a bit of pressure on towns and cities to do the very hard work of starting up Internet as a utility.

bzb6 6y ago
You don’t need 1.2 TB a month to wfh or use zoom I’m sure someone will come here and say “well my use case for wfh involves uploading 1 TB a day”, but no, that’s not normal
- cybralx 6y ago
  > “well my use case for wfh involves uploading 1 TB a day”, but no, that’s not normal 1.2 / 30 = 40GB a day. Seems fairly low to me. Considering families with children attending online school as well, then clump in streaming services such as Netflix.
  - MivLives 6y ago
    Especially considering there's multiple games out there now that are 60+ gigs. My guess based on the unifi graphs of my connection for 7 people is that our biggest consumers are Netflix, and game downloads. One roommate alone ate over 150 gigs in game downloads in the last month.
- prh8 6y ago
  WHF or Zoom only, no. But a normal household will also have streaming video and most of their phones on wifi while at home. And that's a quick pivot from 1.2/month to 1/day. Nobody is saying 1/day is normal, but no one is arguing the cap should be 30/month

cma 6y ago

Comcast, at least in the recent past, edits http responses to put in injected data cap alert messages, breaking all kinds of stuff.

gnicholas 6y ago

I'd feel better about this if they gave a discount (even a modest one) to everyone who isn't hitting the cap. Then it would feel like the plan was designed to be redistributive, not punitive. They'd get some additional revenue from high-usage customers and give up some revenue from their other customers. Instead it feels like a heads-I-win-tails-nothing-changes situation.

slipheen 6y ago
I totally admit and agree that the psychology of such things matters, but isn't that just the same thing with a different coat of paint? e.g. "Comcast announces that effective next June, prices will be raised by $30 for all customers. In order to mitigate this price increase, Comcast is also announcing that low-usage customers who are willing to have a 1 TB transfer cap are able to get a $30 discount."
- gnicholas 6y ago
  In your example, yes. I was envisioning an actual discount from current pricing for all customers, so that low-usage customers would actually come out ahead compared to their previous pricing. In your example, there's no way for any customer to come out ahead, so it is just a different way of framing Comcast's existing plan.

tzs 6y ago

> Comcast says customers will be notified as they approach their monthly data limit, but the ISP currently doesn’t give its customers a way to independently verify meter readings. You can check your usage on their website or in their "My Account" mobile app. The app is particularly easy...open app, hit "internet", and scroll down a little. Yes, that's not "independently verified", and I've seen occasional complaints that it is wrong, but: • Those complaints are always that the Comcast number is too high, not too low, and since it is the Comcast number that will be used to determine if you've gone over, that's the one you want to use. • In most cases I've seen, the Comcast numbers turned out to be more accurate. The person claiming they were too high did something like fail to account for upload traffic, or their monitoring didn't include IPv6 traffic, or only covered wired traffic. You might think IPv6 would not be significant, but Disney+ definitely can stream IPv6 and Amazon Fire TV devices will use it when available. I watched several 4K UHD movies that way and according to the traffic stats on my TP-Link Archer A7 router the traffic to the Fire TV Stick was under a gig total. Next movie I used tcpdump while watching to verify that the stream was indeed IPv6, and reported not counting IPv6 as a bug to TP-Link. I'm pretty sure I also saw some of the apps on my Samsung TV using IPv6 streaming.

no_wizard 6y ago

For those working from home, pro tip: Get Comcast Business class if you can't switch to a reasonable ISP, reasons follow: - No Data Caps - You get priority on your node, and typically, there isn't more than a few others in the neighborhood that are also on business class, if at all (my technician who did the install told me I was the only one for my whole node, so I get priority over others in the neighborhood, all other things being equal) - You get better uptime guarentees - Frankly, their customer service is light years ahead of their consumer, but that isn't saying much - extremely consistent speeds. I know a lot of people on the prosumer plans have this too (friends of mine on xfinity don't have a lot of speed dips) but I have never been under 75/30 (the base of my plan) and my router tests every day so I can have historical reports. I'm often over 100 down (always 30 up though) The plans tend to be more than the consumer plans, of course, usually by 25-30 dollars, but you do get a little bit more than just no data caps, at least. Its been easier to deal with and I've had it for a few years. I don't like Comcast, but this arrangement made dealing with them much less painful. I've actually been impressed with the service levels. When I had xfinity (consumer Comcast, if you will) I had outages, speed dips, all kinds of things. Not since business class. Your mileage may vary, of course. I wish I could switch to a different ISP like Sonic, but alas, my alternative is dialup or very slow DSL, so this is the next best thing I could find.

ben174 6y ago
Just checked the pricing in Fremont, California (East Bay Area) - all require a 2 year agreement and some of them go up after the first year: 35 Mbps - $69.95/mo 100 Mbps - $109.90/mo 200 Mbps - $134.90/mo 300 Mbps - $164.90/mo 1 Gigabit - $499.95/mo Seems significantly more expensive than residential service.
- no_wizard 6y ago
  Maybe its the plan I inherited or something like that, but I didn't have to sign a 2 year agreement and honestly 170 for 300 mbps isn't terrible (for Comcast) with the reliability I've been getting it'll be super consistent, at least, which isn't something to shake your fist at per say. Not sure why it is that I didn't have to sign a 2 year agreement (I did originally get this via my employer, though I transitioned out of that years ago). Maybe I'm on a legacy plan? I pay for 75/30, which maybe they don't offer in your area for some reason (I pay the low end of the spectrum here, 70 a month). Its always worked well for my household so I haven't thought to change it. Surprisingly, I'm tempted to see if I can get more speed for the dollars I'm paying.

mdasen 6y ago

One of the reasons that I like T-Mobile as a company is that they realized that the correct answer to network management is de-prioritization. If someone is downloading a lot at 2am, it doesn't harm anyone. Let them have fun! There's no reason to care about someone using capacity on your network when almost no one else is using the network. During peak times, it makes sense to give priority to those who use less data while still offering an acceptable level of service to those who use a lot of data. I'm really hopeful that the next few years will bring competition to the home internet space. T-Mobile has been adding a lot more areas to its home internet footprint recently. Their service certainly isn't perfect and might not be what people here would be looking for (given that wireless home internet is likely to be slower than wired for a bit). However, competition would put pressure on Comcast. When T-Mobile started offering better terms for their mobile service, a lot of people said that T-Mobile's coverage wasn't good enough for them to switch. It was good enough for enough people to switch that AT&T and Verizon vastly changed their offerings. They went from offering me 3GB of data for $30 to offering me unlimited. It's hard to remember the 2012-era data plans at this point. Verizon has started offering wireless home internet as well, albeit on a more limited basis than T-Mobile. T-Mobile's mobile offering didn't work for a lot of people back in 2013-2016, but it provided enough competition that Verizon and AT&T reintroduced unlimited data. Even if people on here won't switch to wireless home internet, it could provide an excellent option for people looking for a bill without hidden fees and unexpected increases in price. The churn from those customers will put pressure on Comcast to offer better terms for their service.

HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
We have the same system but with electricity here( cheaper bills during night use).

MrVitaliy 6y ago

So it comes down to something like this 1. Comcast cable internet - $65 2. Uncap monthly limit - $30 3. Fast VPN service[0] - $10 4. Netflix subscription - $15 [0] Comcast is known for injecting HTML/JS into http traffic So about $120/mo not too far from paying for cable 10 years ago.

maerF0x0 6y ago

Well, the good news is they rarely deliver their advertised speeds, so at least you have longer to hit the cap. At my current speed I could exhaust the data cap in 0.6% of a month if they gave me full speed down. (not to mention up).

dsr_ 6y ago

Family of four. 2 remote-schooled students, 2 WFH parents. Actual data from my firewall. month rx | tx | total | avg. rate ------------------------+-------------+-------------+--------------- Dec '19 482.56 GiB | 139.53 GiB | 622.09 GiB | 2.00 Mbit/s Jan '20 607.55 GiB | 139.11 GiB | 746.65 GiB | 2.39 Mbit/s Feb '20 497.22 GiB | 125.76 GiB | 622.99 GiB | 2.14 Mbit/s Mar '20 781.27 GiB | 162.63 GiB | 943.90 GiB | 3.03 Mbit/s Apr '20 794.96 GiB | 107.11 GiB | 902.06 GiB | 2.99 Mbit/s May '20 923.63 GiB | 88.38 GiB | 0.99 TiB | 3.25 Mbit/s Jun '20 907.10 GiB | 109.46 GiB | 0.99 TiB | 3.37 Mbit/s Jul '20 727.22 GiB | 100.19 GiB | 827.41 GiB | 2.65 Mbit/s Aug '20 649.34 GiB | 77.79 GiB | 727.13 GiB | 2.33 Mbit/s Sep '20 700.47 GiB | 108.37 GiB | 808.84 GiB | 2.68 Mbit/s Oct '20 1.02 TiB | 140.51 GiB | 1.15 TiB | 3.79 Mbit/s Nov '20 779.75 GiB | 82.85 GiB | 862.60 GiB | 3.61 Mbit/s November isn't over yet. We are clearly within spitting distance of that cap. Luckily, we aren't Comcast customers.

floatingatoll 6y ago

It’s really interesting reading these comments and mentally replacing “bytes” (Internet) with any of the other public utilities units such as “watts” (power) or “gallons” (water, trash).

johnklos 6y ago

It's too bad capitalism doesn't work the way we're told as children that it's supposed to work. The US has various captive markets with very limited competition. It's time to end this.