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Ultimately it's an issue of deceptive advertising. Comcast sold me a 1Gbps plan. That was the upfront marketing, that's what we agreed to, the salesman certai
by dogleash 3y ago
Ultimately it's an issue of deceptive advertising. Comcast sold me a 1Gbps plan. That was the upfront marketing, that's what we agreed to, the salesman certainly didn't offer up any clarification, the cap is just buried in the fine print. If I were to max out my connection for 3 hours, I'd cross the limit. That's less than 1% of an actual 1Gbps link.
I don't know if any home markets still advertise "burstable cap" billing, but it existed in the early 2000s. Comcast doesn't want a small number and a "sometimes more" asterisk. They want a big number with an "always less" asterisk. And they don't want to make usage-based billing part of the messaging, customers already understand the pain of cellphone data caps.
It's just an argument about how much dishonesty they can get away with and for how long.
- aednichols 3y agoIt is not just an issue of deceptive marketing. If the FCC intervenes minimally and just mandates a data cap disclosure (that most won’t read), you will still be stuck with a cap.
- dogleash 3y agoYou're right, and I agree. I wouldn't consider such a disclosure requirement to be make it no longer deceptive. They might just enshrine the deception into law. Like how all the spam in my inbox is (or at least masquerades as) CAN-SPAM act compliant junkmail. Following the law doesn't make it not-spam to anyone but the advertisers that were able to get a favorable legal definition.
- mindslight 3y agoYes, it's an issue of price gouging as well. If a basic plan is say 10TB/mo for $100, then overages shouldn't be allowed to be greater than $10/TB. In general plans should have to be a linear (or sublinear) combination of connection fee and data used. (Not that I have a dog in this fight. Municipal fiber ftfw. Unless you live somewhere that already has 3+ competing providers, the only question you should be asking is "what will it take?")
- tristor 3y agoThe biggest problem for me is that Comcast does shitty things with the devices that they provide to customers. The CPE Comcast gives with their highest XFinity plan comes with "unlimited data", but if you refuse the device they charge an additional $30/mo to get "unlimited data", because they use the CPE to enforce customer-hostile QoS and throttling to negatively impact throughput and performance. When you use your own equipment you aren't impacted in the same way by this (with some exceptions, which you can workaround). The $30/mo fee is really just a "fuck you" from Comcast to try to get you to give up or abandon the idea, but is completely meaningless from a revenue perspective. Comcast's problem isn't that they can't afford to provide the service you paid for without the caps, it's that they're oversubscribing their backbone so heavily that they would never be able to do it from a technical perspective. The reality is most people don't hit that cap, so the cap is actually meaningless and does nothing for large consumers. It's just a consumer-hostile practice, where Comcast is trying to take ten miles where they were given an inch. This FCC is just going to codify it though, the FCC has been in the pocket of one provider or another for the last 15 years at least.
- betaby 3y agoAny proof of that? Especially 'customer-hostile QoS'. I don't like the monopolies like the other guy, but QoS/CoS has very technical meaning and this is a technical forum.
- jandrese 3y ago"Customer-hostile QoS" really only has one possible meaning. They de-prioritize your data after some threshold. The extra $30/month would be for "actually unlimited" since removing the QoS means you never get de-prioritized. This might be better than the alternative where there is no $30/month service but all data defaults to the lowest priority and you need the extra device to get reasonable performance when the network is busy. But then one wonders why someone couldn't just set up their home router to tag all packets at the highest priority, why do they need this device in the consumer's home at all instead of doing it in the CO?
- 3y ago
- criddell 3y agoIt’s yet another good reason to make sure you are using an ad-blocker. Don’t waste your limited bandwidth on ads!