6 ms·

Comcast Internet throttling is up and running

29 points by mcantor 17y ago

dcurtis 17y ago
Why can't I just pay Comcast money and get a set exact pipe size that I can use? I didn't pay for 16mbits for 15 minutes. This is false advertising.
- maukdaddy 17y ago
  Unless you're in FIOS land, or until real competition steps in, you won't be able to. This is the sad state of broadband here in the US. =(
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
    - codexon 17y ago
      Wherever Verizon feels like laying down fiber.
- psadauskas 17y ago
  At least you get it for that long. I pay Qwest for 20Mbps, and get 5Mbps. (and an insulting 180kbits up!)
  - ars 17y ago
    180kbits? Are you sure? Because that seems to me to be the reason for your slow download - you need more upload than that to handle a fast download. (A download from a single server probably isn't being hurt, but if you connect to multiple servers then you need more upload to handle each download stream.)
  - talktoqwest 17y ago
    Hello there psadauskas, this is Brian with Qwest. Getting 180K upload speed when you're paying 5M isn't right. I'd be happy to take a look at your line for you, and see how we can get your upload speeds working right. Just send me an e-mail to TalkToUs@QWest.com if you would like my help. Thanks, B Consumer Affairs Manager Qwest Communications www.socialmedia.qwest.com
- wmf 17y ago
  Why can't I just pay Comcast money and get a set exact pipe size that I can use? Because the resulting pricing would be crazy high, like 512 kbps for $50/month and you really want bursty Internet service anyway because your usage is probably bursty.
  - enneff 17y ago
    So why don't they advertise it like the datacentres do? "512kbps burstable to 16mbit" or some such.
    - wmf 17y ago
      Because that would make it sound worse than all their competitors' services. The only way to get truth in advertising is going to be regulation, and even if that happened lots of people would ask why their speed "went down" (when it really didn't).
      - enneff 17y ago
        'lots of people would ask why their speed "went down"' I don't see that as a problem. It's just an education issue. Besides, better products thrive in a marketplace with educated consumers. If broadband providers were required to advertise their offerings in a consistent way (as they are here in Australia, although not in the way I describe upthread) choice for consumers would be a lot easier. The only people that lose are the big companies with big marketing budgets and inferior products.
  - holdenk 17y ago
    Where are you getting this 512kbs for $50 per month from? When I do a quick back of the envelope calculation using relatively recent wholesale bandwith costs and backhaul costs I get much more reasonable numbers. Wholesale bandwidth pricing isn't anywhere near that high, and back haul costs at most double it. $10 per mbs per month isn't uncommon for wholesale bandwith pricing from "on-net" buildings (and now days $2 to $4 isn't unheard of). The back haul cost to your local C.O. is probably roughly around $10 per mbs as well (admitedly I'm going of backhaul costs from Toronto to Waterloo up in Canada) and then your down to the local loop. We will assume the cost of the local loop is allready covered in the existing price paid, so if the user wanted N dedicated mbbits it should cost N[margin][12 to 20 dollars] per month more. Now are most users may not be willing to pay for this. A frequent way of dealing with the "bursty" nature for servers is 95th percentile billing where by you pay for the max of what you use, dropping the top 5%. Admittedly these numbers are very back of the envelope, but I think its a bit more realistic than $50/month for 512kbs.
- chadaustin 17y ago
  You want Speakeasy. It's much slower and much more expensive than you'll get with Comcast, but you can use all of your pipe all of the time with no strings attached.
- eli 17y ago
  Um, you can. Comcast Business Internet. It costs 2x to 4x as much and there's no throttling.
wmf 17y ago
Correction: has been up and running since January, when this was actually news.
yummyfajitas 17y ago
To be fair, this actually sounds like a reasonable throttling method. If the article is correct, throttling depends only on the volume profile of the user and not the content. Granted, there are issues of whether they are actually delivering the pipe they promised you (as raised by dcurtis), but at least the network is neutral.
- BearOfNH 17y ago
  Maybe I missed it, but how does somebody know how much data they've pulled/pushed in a month? And is CC counting just payload bytes, or do they include packet overhead? What about retransmissions?
mustpax 17y ago
The Comcast two-tier traffic throttling system enforces different quality-of-service levels. Internet packets to and from a specific subscriber are assigned 'Priority Best Effort' (PBE) queueing by default, and the traffic rate is throttled by switching packets to lower priority 'Best Effort' (BE) queueing. So the throttled queue is called "Best Effort." The sweet irony.
- theBobMcCormick 17y ago
  That's standard network industry terminology for the lowest priority quality of service queue. See here for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_Service#QoS_Priority_Levels http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_Service#QoS_Priority... Or here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk543/tk757/technologies_tech_note09186a00800949f2.shtml#dscpandassuredforwardingclasses http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk543/tk757/technologies_tec...
zain 17y ago
In addition to the throttling, Comcast still enforces bandwidth caps. Two months ago, Comcast's fraud department left me a breathless voicemail asking to call them back urgently regarding an "important matter of security." When I called back, I was told, "We have a bandwidth limit of 250 gigabytes a month. Our records show that in August, you used 710 gigabytes." They told me that if I exceeded 250gb again, they'd cut me off for a year. Since then, I've started tracking my bandwidth to make sure I don't go over. If Comcast cuts me off, my only alternative is 5Mbps DSL through AT&T, and I wouldn't wish that upon anybody. So, Comcast has successfully used their monopoly position in my area to strong-arm me into lowering my bandwidth usage. I really hope Verizon FIOS shakes things up soon. It's somewhat depressing that FIOS is available in the boonies of Indiana but not in most of the Silicon Valley.
- chaosmachine 17y ago
  Wow, 710 gigs. That's probably more than all my usage since 2007. In Ontario, the highest cap available for less than $100 month is 95 gigs.
  - jamesbressi 17y ago
    I almost want to tell myself to not be so upset by the capping looking at how terrible it is in Ontario compared to you. But I refuse to be ok with the lesser of two evils. This madness must stop.
  - yurisagalov 17y ago
    Yes, but they charge at $1.50/gig up to a maximum of $25 above those 95gb. My neighbours upstairs regularly pull >500gb in a month, pay the extra $25/mo, and move on with their lives. Not a great solution, but better than being cut off :S
- shpxnvz 17y ago
  So, Comcast has successfully used their monopoly position in my area to strong-arm me into lowering my bandwidth usage. Look, I hate Comcast as much as the next guy, but they appear to have competition in your area, even if the competitive product isn't as good. You have a choice, but refuse to exercise it. The reason they can get away with this is because, like most other people, you won't cancel your service over it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not judging, and I would be paying Comcast too if they would let me, but it really doesn't seem they they are abusing a monopoly in this case.
jamesbressi 17y ago
I do agree with the idea of throttling, but the strict cap enforcement on top if it is ridiculous. There should be no cap with "throttling". I don't want to see capping options here in the U.S. at all. I cannot guarantee that there will never be a month that I don't exceed 250GB. I used to think that sounded like an insane amount, but it really isn't when you are dealing with legitimate large downloads and viewing media and that is just for business purposes. How about someone with Netflix? If you watch ONE standard definition movie a night, that is approximately 60GB/mo. of usage (estimate is from here: http://www.hackingnetflix.com/2008/09/comcast-to-cap.html http://www.hackingnetflix.com/2008/09/comcast-to-cap.html) or about 24% gone right there. I've never noticed if Comcast tells you how much bandwidth you use on your statement... anyone know if Comcast shares bandwidth usage with the customer?
mleonhard 17y ago
They're not throttling. They're deprioritizing the traffic of their heaviest users. This allows them to provide good service for the majority of their users. The alternative is to drop some percentage of everyone's packets.
- yellowbkpk 17y ago
  Or they could spend money on bandwidth...
dzlobin 17y ago
i am so glad to live in NYC and have my optimum online boost run at the advertised 25/5, 20 hours a day

29 points by mcantor 17y ago

Why can't I just pay Comcast money and get a set exact pipe size that I can use? I didn't pay for 16mbits for 15 minutes. This is false advertising.

maukdaddy 17y ago
Unless you're in FIOS land, or until real competition steps in, you won't be able to. This is the sad state of broadband here in the US. =(
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
  - codexon 17y ago
    Wherever Verizon feels like laying down fiber.
psadauskas 17y ago
At least you get it for that long. I pay Qwest for 20Mbps, and get 5Mbps. (and an insulting 180kbits up!)
- ars 17y ago
  180kbits? Are you sure? Because that seems to me to be the reason for your slow download - you need more upload than that to handle a fast download. (A download from a single server probably isn't being hurt, but if you connect to multiple servers then you need more upload to handle each download stream.)
- talktoqwest 17y ago
  Hello there psadauskas, this is Brian with Qwest. Getting 180K upload speed when you're paying 5M isn't right. I'd be happy to take a look at your line for you, and see how we can get your upload speeds working right. Just send me an e-mail to TalkToUs@QWest.com if you would like my help. Thanks, B Consumer Affairs Manager Qwest Communications www.socialmedia.qwest.com
wmf 17y ago
Why can't I just pay Comcast money and get a set exact pipe size that I can use? Because the resulting pricing would be crazy high, like 512 kbps for $50/month and you really want bursty Internet service anyway because your usage is probably bursty.
- enneff 17y ago
  So why don't they advertise it like the datacentres do? "512kbps burstable to 16mbit" or some such.
  - wmf 17y ago
    Because that would make it sound worse than all their competitors' services. The only way to get truth in advertising is going to be regulation, and even if that happened lots of people would ask why their speed "went down" (when it really didn't).
    - enneff 17y ago
      'lots of people would ask why their speed "went down"' I don't see that as a problem. It's just an education issue. Besides, better products thrive in a marketplace with educated consumers. If broadband providers were required to advertise their offerings in a consistent way (as they are here in Australia, although not in the way I describe upthread) choice for consumers would be a lot easier. The only people that lose are the big companies with big marketing budgets and inferior products.
- holdenk 17y ago
  Where are you getting this 512kbs for $50 per month from? When I do a quick back of the envelope calculation using relatively recent wholesale bandwith costs and backhaul costs I get much more reasonable numbers. Wholesale bandwidth pricing isn't anywhere near that high, and back haul costs at most double it. $10 per mbs per month isn't uncommon for wholesale bandwith pricing from "on-net" buildings (and now days $2 to $4 isn't unheard of). The back haul cost to your local C.O. is probably roughly around $10 per mbs as well (admitedly I'm going of backhaul costs from Toronto to Waterloo up in Canada) and then your down to the local loop. We will assume the cost of the local loop is allready covered in the existing price paid, so if the user wanted N dedicated mbbits it should cost N[margin][12 to 20 dollars] per month more. Now are most users may not be willing to pay for this. A frequent way of dealing with the "bursty" nature for servers is 95th percentile billing where by you pay for the max of what you use, dropping the top 5%. Admittedly these numbers are very back of the envelope, but I think its a bit more realistic than $50/month for 512kbs.
chadaustin 17y ago
You want Speakeasy. It's much slower and much more expensive than you'll get with Comcast, but you can use all of your pipe all of the time with no strings attached.
eli 17y ago
Um, you can. Comcast Business Internet. It costs 2x to 4x as much and there's no throttling.

wmf 17y ago

Correction: has been up and running since January, when this was actually news.

yummyfajitas 17y ago

To be fair, this actually sounds like a reasonable throttling method. If the article is correct, throttling depends only on the volume profile of the user and not the content. Granted, there are issues of whether they are actually delivering the pipe they promised you (as raised by dcurtis), but at least the network is neutral.

BearOfNH 17y ago
Maybe I missed it, but how does somebody know how much data they've pulled/pushed in a month? And is CC counting just payload bytes, or do they include packet overhead? What about retransmissions?

mustpax 17y ago

The Comcast two-tier traffic throttling system enforces different quality-of-service levels. Internet packets to and from a specific subscriber are assigned 'Priority Best Effort' (PBE) queueing by default, and the traffic rate is throttled by switching packets to lower priority 'Best Effort' (BE) queueing. So the throttled queue is called "Best Effort." The sweet irony.

theBobMcCormick 17y ago
That's standard network industry terminology for the lowest priority quality of service queue. See here for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_Service#QoS_Priority_Levels http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_Service#QoS_Priority... Or here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk543/tk757/technologies_tech_note09186a00800949f2.shtml#dscpandassuredforwardingclasses http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk543/tk757/technologies_tec...

zain 17y ago

In addition to the throttling, Comcast still enforces bandwidth caps. Two months ago, Comcast's fraud department left me a breathless voicemail asking to call them back urgently regarding an "important matter of security." When I called back, I was told, "We have a bandwidth limit of 250 gigabytes a month. Our records show that in August, you used 710 gigabytes." They told me that if I exceeded 250gb again, they'd cut me off for a year. Since then, I've started tracking my bandwidth to make sure I don't go over. If Comcast cuts me off, my only alternative is 5Mbps DSL through AT&T, and I wouldn't wish that upon anybody. So, Comcast has successfully used their monopoly position in my area to strong-arm me into lowering my bandwidth usage. I really hope Verizon FIOS shakes things up soon. It's somewhat depressing that FIOS is available in the boonies of Indiana but not in most of the Silicon Valley.

chaosmachine 17y ago
Wow, 710 gigs. That's probably more than all my usage since 2007. In Ontario, the highest cap available for less than $100 month is 95 gigs.
- jamesbressi 17y ago
  I almost want to tell myself to not be so upset by the capping looking at how terrible it is in Ontario compared to you. But I refuse to be ok with the lesser of two evils. This madness must stop.
- yurisagalov 17y ago
  Yes, but they charge at $1.50/gig up to a maximum of $25 above those 95gb. My neighbours upstairs regularly pull >500gb in a month, pay the extra $25/mo, and move on with their lives. Not a great solution, but better than being cut off :S
shpxnvz 17y ago
So, Comcast has successfully used their monopoly position in my area to strong-arm me into lowering my bandwidth usage. Look, I hate Comcast as much as the next guy, but they appear to have competition in your area, even if the competitive product isn't as good. You have a choice, but refuse to exercise it. The reason they can get away with this is because, like most other people, you won't cancel your service over it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not judging, and I would be paying Comcast too if they would let me, but it really doesn't seem they they are abusing a monopoly in this case.

jamesbressi 17y ago

I do agree with the idea of throttling, but the strict cap enforcement on top if it is ridiculous. There should be no cap with "throttling". I don't want to see capping options here in the U.S. at all. I cannot guarantee that there will never be a month that I don't exceed 250GB. I used to think that sounded like an insane amount, but it really isn't when you are dealing with legitimate large downloads and viewing media and that is just for business purposes. How about someone with Netflix? If you watch ONE standard definition movie a night, that is approximately 60GB/mo. of usage (estimate is from here: http://www.hackingnetflix.com/2008/09/comcast-to-cap.html http://www.hackingnetflix.com/2008/09/comcast-to-cap.html) or about 24% gone right there. I've never noticed if Comcast tells you how much bandwidth you use on your statement... anyone know if Comcast shares bandwidth usage with the customer?

mleonhard 17y ago

They're not throttling. They're deprioritizing the traffic of their heaviest users. This allows them to provide good service for the majority of their users. The alternative is to drop some percentage of everyone's packets.

yellowbkpk 17y ago
Or they could spend money on bandwidth...

dzlobin 17y ago

i am so glad to live in NYC and have my optimum online boost run at the advertised 25/5, 20 hours a day