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Comcast should be sued...again.

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NaRu:
Comcast should be sued for their monthly bandwidth cap. Currently all resident users has a 250GB cap per month. They been doing this for a long time. Even bore they announced it to the world. Indirectly they are controlling the market because of a law "The fair Use Act." Most of you already knew this. The reason for this law made sense a decade ago. When high bandwidth first came out it was over crowed and speeds dropped below dialup speeds during prime hours. This law gave ISP the right to throttle connection or even charge extra for exceeding "the fair use" of the internet, but today things are different. Everything is done online now. The pipeline is very large and can handle a lot more. Bits are free. Comcast only has to pay for is the gateway between two computers. Example, you go to google from your desktop. Your computer sends out a packet of information through your ISP pipeline that connects to google's pipeline. Comcast only needs to do is maintain the gateway between each system. In the United States we are a third world country when it comes for internet. We spend too much money for slow speeds compared to the rest of the world.

I did some math trying to figure out how much "internet" I can use in 30 days until I hit my 250GB (I had unlimited for the longest time then my contract ended and for me to continue with the same agreement I had to pay $180 a month instead of $80.) My current speeds are 22Mbps down 5Mbps up for $80

250GB =  250,000MB
22Mbps = 2.8MB/s
250,000MB / 2.8MB/s = 89286 seconds
89286 seconds / 60 = 1488 mins
1488 mins / 60 = 25 Hours

So according to Comcast I have to pay them $80 a month for 25 hours of max speed downloading and uploading. If I spend more then 25 hours downloading they will cut me off for a year.

Now I also did the math for someone who has the max speed Comcast offers. 105Mbps down 10Mbps up

250GB =  250,000MB
105Mbps = 13.125MB/s
250,000MB / 13.125Mb/s = 19048 seconds
19048 seconds / 60 = 317 Mins
317 Mins / 60 = 5.3 Hours

So for someone who has the fastest speeds can only download and upload at max speeds is little over 5 hours every month.

Can anyone really hold back that much not to use there connection to prevent the 250GB cap. If there is going to be a cap they need to increase it. Not only it's too low but its way too low if you are paying for a high tier connection. 5 hours a month is something we can do in a single night. With my connection I can do that in a week. I normally don't download much but I do use my connection for netflix and hulu +. I believe comcast only goal with the cap is to scare people on using those services and force them to pay more for business or get there cable TV service instead. This is how they are controlling the market indirectly and it's wrong.

I'm done ranting.

Meomix:
With the way things are now i think there is a lot of money to be made in the ISP business, and get better internet speeds at the same time.

NaRu:

--- Quote from: Meomix on January 16, 2012, 03:28:18 AM ---With the way things are now i think there is a lot of money to be made in the ISP business, and get better internet speeds at the same time.

--- End quote ---

Someone needs to be a competitor towards Comcast. Once there is I believe they will stop the bull shit they try to do.

mgz:
things like streaming netflix are big in helping reverse this kind of shit.
Write letters to congressmen A LOT of letters and emails and get a trend going
because it is silly.

Fortunately ive got fios 35/35 unlimited use wooooo


And sadly naru comcast helps heavily slow the spread of competition mainly fios by having contracts with buildings in cities and things (thing apartments and developments) where comcast offers discount rates or services to the buildings or areas and then the utilities and shit are purchased at regular price through management company.

Pentium100:

--- Quote from: NaRu on January 16, 2012, 03:25:36 AM ---When high bandwidth first came out it was over crowed and speeds dropped below dialup speeds during prime hours. This law gave ISP the right to throttle connection or even charge extra for exceeding "the fair use" of the internet, but today things are different.
--- End quote ---
Stupid solution for the problem. The ISP should have upgraded the infrastructure to handle the load instead of overbooking 100:1. That or provide caching for most of the stuff users want to download. One ISP I used ~12 years ago did this - the limit was something like 100MB/day (which was enough in the days before Youtube and Steam, also, they kept increasing it over the years, IIRC in the beginning it was 20MB and before I moved away from that location it was ~20GB, now the ISP offers uncapped connections, like all other wired ISPs) but lots of games and movies were available in FTP (and NetBIOS) servers inside the LAN. I could download at 10-100Mbps from them and the data did not count. Also IIRC the data you downloaded at night did not count too.

For example, last year my ISP upgraded the plans to higher speeds (but did not increase the price and actually reduced the price for me). This was done only after the ISP upgraded its network to handle the increased load and while it is specified that overbooking is 30:1, my upload almost never drops below 40Mbps (connection speed 300Mbps, so the minimum is 10) and the 40Mbps is only for a couple of hours per day during work days and abut 9 hours/day in the weekend.

Having a 250GB/month cap is basically the same as having a 761kbps connection.

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