I hear that there’s a cap, I have even heard of it from one of the techs here locally, yet I know for a fact Ive exceeded it by 750Gb’s at any given time over last 2 years. One of their “Customer service personnel” told me it was surprising i hadn’t been contacted because my cap had been exceeded by almost 800Gb the previous month.

Of course i had to tell the poor rep that it was a good thing Comcast never contacted me about a cap since i have a service tech at my home trying to figure out the issue with the intermittent service in this area at least 3 times a month… In November of 2010 i tried the 50Mb uber speed and it worked for a whopping 10 days then the techs were at my home daily for 3 weeks in December trying to figure out why:

1. The Codes on the account were missing.
2. The Signal to the home was no higher than 3-4 Mbs
3. When they replaced the Modem nothing changed.

I went through this headache for a 200 dollar service that didn’t even work. I went back down to their basic services and ever since i have had nothing but problems with my Comcast internet.

If I have to pay ridiculous prices for crappy service ill risk the cap ever day.

I called Comcast amazing they gave me the same price with my choice of HBO or Showtime free for a year but no HD nor DVR on a 24 month contract. My wife is hesitant about switching as she wants to keep her comcast email, I know stupid. So I think I’ll accept their offer and see how long it take till they boot me.

I was worried but now I have another option I’ll bump my Netflix back to HD and not worry about my usage.

options

1-dialup -speaks for itself. thats what they get in hell
2-3g wireless plan – they all cap at 5gb a month or 20 with millenicom…all got crazy overage charges

3-satellite. expensive -useless for real time apps like gaming due to latency and ridicously low caps (200-400mb a day…). Hughes offers a 6 hour night time window which allows you to pull of 3-4gb a night for about 120 a month but you got to get used to using software and rippers to schedule everything for then. they bastardize plans where you supposed to get 200-250KB (1. something megs) downloads to 4-8KB..which is dialup or worse from 4pm-12pm due to heavy usage (my ass it is planned) and if you go over your small daily cap it goes to 800bytes to 2.2kb downloads which is a small fraction of dialup and virtually unusable.

Comcast and att are evil sob’s but keep in mind americans not living incongested areas are getting a far spikier shaft rammed up them then you guys.

They have the right to be as evil as they want -but when tax payer $ goes to them to provide service and infrastructure (and they squander/pocket it) all citizens get a voice. I dont know about you guys but my voice says douse them in gas and off with their heads. Fucking fuckers.

However why are we just bitching about this. Maybe if people took action, report it to the B.B.B and FCC.

This is antitrust!

Comcast is forcing you to watch on-demand at 6 dollars a shot, yes and that’s crappy 480i (the same price on Zune gives you 1080p). If you use Netflix, Amazon, Blockbuster ….etc. then you’ll hit that cap and get booted. I also use Vonage, I wonder if they count their VOIP against that cap?

I’ve had Comcast since 2002 I never “signed” or accepted anything on data capping when I joined. I will not be happy if they cut me off, I’ll probably seek legal action as well as contacting the b.b.b, fcc, local news and anyone who’d piss them off.

I was also interested if only the people who had the barebones internet package were being targeted here. Or if it was P2P users etc… If anyone has stats this would be good to hear.

It seems like this is happening more and more.

Now, I have a new envelope I got in the mail for the $19.99 deal for 6 months.. I’ll wait until I get a new 3TB external drive and then I’ll go to town for 2 months again!

1. Assume: 1″GB” = 1,073,741,824 bytes (I’m being very generous to Comcast here); also client can sustain avg download of 6MBpS = 6,000,000 bytes (My plan claims 12MBps, but I upgraded to the 18/20MBPs, so again, I’m being very generous to Comcast)
2. So, 250″GB” allowance / month would be 268,435,456,000 bytes (monthly balance)
3. By downloading 6,000,000 every second that gives us 44739.242666666666667 seconds of total download time (6MBps avg, no power boost) until we get abruptly cut off.
4. 44739.242666666666667 seconds is 745.654044444444444 minutes is 12.427567407407407 hours
5. Now, not being generous to Comcast, thus changing values in step #1 and keeping #2,#3,#4 unchanged (this time we are just using their own words/policy): (250GB per month) / (16MB per second) / (60 seconds per minute) / (60 minutes per hour), we are only allocated 3 hours and 51.48 minutes of our policy given internet time for an entire month.

Anyway, enough with the math drivel, onto the more “fun” and “interesting” points…
So, why the heck do I pay more to get higher bandwidth (side effect of higher quality / larger movies) just so I can use the internet less. I am paying more to use less service and be stressed about my quota. Also, why is Comcast being so harsh to their long-time and loyal on-time paying customers given that they have a:
***1*** Hard, un-wavering line cemented in the sand of this policy;
***2*** not quite real-time monitoring of usage (from the customer’s perspective);
***3*** Extremely strict adherence to its terms (e.g. user kicked off current plan and _banned_ for an entire year…really…wow?);
***4*** Inadequate process (user has to remember to periodically log on multiple times every month, while finding access to a computer, and to a public wireless network);
***5*** Inadequate tool (user has to go through too many steps just to access a single number; no break-down of data/process consumption; data is simply aggregated, not fine-grained enough (no day/time/process/file/program/KB usage));
***6*** Usage Cycle is completely different than billing cycle, with no way for customer to rectify;
***7*** MOST IMPORTANTLY, there is no (it would be nice if customer could configure this) courtesy warning (email/call/text) in the case throughput limit is being reached or breached. This seems super obvious and silly this solution does not exist. (e.g. send email if breached 75% capacity, send email if breached 90% capacity, send email/text if breached 95% capacity)
***7*** No customer options, how about: a) Pay a certain rate/GB when usage > 250GB for a particular billing cycle; or b) Offer different throughput plans/rates/tiers; or c) Allow customer’s to limit their download throughput; OR (my favorite) d) All the above. Customers pay for total throughput (or pay for different tier, or pay extra, or whatever, no one would really care) AND customer can update speed whenever they want (e.g. customer chooses to watch 50 crappy movies/month, or customer chooses to watch 20 super-hi-fi-hd movies/month as most online movie/show/clip/streaming services, even YouTube auto-majically adjust quality, even though very few actually allow quality to be set). If customer wants super fast connection to play games online or browse/email/chat/what-have-you the client will be okay with paying for content, they just want it fast (as it will be the same amount of content whether they get it slow or fast).

The way I see it is Comcast needs to charge for latency (speed in MBpS) and total throughput (250GB monthly limit). Ultimately, if they charge for one or the other, they are going to alienate a very large population of their customers. They need to allow customer’s to pay for the option of latency and throughput so people are being charged fairly (based upon their usage) and those with internet connections that simply do some browsing and emailing don’t get charged much.

I get close to the 250GB limit every month and would break it if it wasn’t there, so personally I feel like I am getting a great deal and passing off all my costs to sporadic internet users.

Another way to put Comcast’s foot in their mouth: “more than 99% – of our customers will not be impacted by a 250 GB monthly data usage threshold” [translated by me to be]: “more than 99% – of our customers will pay much more than they should for internet service due to users who reach or breach the 250 GB monthly data usage threshold”. In reality, these number’s that Comcast gives is crap, I’d like to see mean and median (although that will not be all that helpful as I am sure this distribution is bi-modal). So, in reality the comment is much close to this: “more than 99% – of our customers will pay much more than they should for internet service due to users who reach or breach the 250 GB monthly data usage threshold”

So much for my faith in XFinity. Great company, customer service, awesome routing and technology. I’m just sad the Finance and Marketing team turned a great service into a crappy experience. If I can’t keep under my 250GB limit without logging on an checking constantly and turning off the damn modem every month, I’m going to switch from a great service to a small company (which incidentally runs on Comcast’s fiber optics anyhow) that just happens to understand what XFinity has and how to present it to customers.

Please note that bandwidth is determined based on calendar month though. Odds are your bandwidth will reset on the 1st or 2nd, so you might want to just monitor things on your Comcast account until then.