Comcast Enforces Invisible Broadband Caps
from the guess-we-missed-that-*-after-unlimited dept
Unlimited: not limited or restricted in terms of number, quantity or extent. Seems pretty straightforward, right? Apparently not to broadband providers, who seem to interpret it a bit differently. Because they've marketed their services as unlimited, then done a poor job of designing their networks, they get upset when people actually take advantage of those supposedly unlimited connections, and complain that they're screwing everything up for all their other users. Comcast is the latest to start giving people the boot for using too much bandwidth, even though they don't have a published limit. When pressed by a reporter, a company spokesman wouldn't give any specifics, just that it's "roughly the equivalent of 13 million e-mail messages or 256,000 photos a month", which is hardly helpful. While these companies are certainly well within their rights to put caps on the services they sell (even though it's an annoying practice for many consumers), they need to disclose them clearly to users, and not market their services as if they're unlimited. They also then need to give users ways to track how much bandwidth they've used -- for instance, Cox emails subscribers that go over its disclosed bandwidth caps, and in lieu of pointing them to tools where they can track their monthly usage, it just pushes them to get a more expensive "business" account. While caps may be an annoying way to cover up poor networks or to create tiered levels of service, they're not the real issue here. The real issue is the way broadband providers hide the caps and other restrictions on their services deep in the fine print -- if at all -- where they're far out of sight of their marketing materials.
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First!?!
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comcast doesn't suck
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Cap
With my pictures that equals about 475G a month. That's one hell of a cap. I don't think I've reached that yet, but I have tried.
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Re: Cap
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256,000 pics a little vague
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Grass is green
If we did saturate, say, a DSL line on average Mbit pricing, it would be a few hundred dollars a month at least.
However, overnight Bittorrent users slashed the hell out of the already razor-thin margins of such pricing and its only going to get worse as broadband speeds increase along with the size of the ISOs ( I imagine well be seeing raw HDDVD ISOs soon if not already)
So, they can either cap the heavy downloaders, or raise everyone's price. Those are really the only two options.
As for advertising the caps, that is completely impossible for any company to start without the industry as a whole cooperating, because it would kill them. No one wants to be reminded of AOL-style pricing.
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The only times I've understood ISPs to actively restrict a user is when other users in the local region begin complaining that their service is affected.
ISPs could do themselves a big favor by simply defining how this policy is implemented rather than hiding behind some mystical, top-secret number.
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As for advertising the caps, that is completely im
I don't think so!
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It's this false advertising?
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taken a look at their SEC financial reports on how much money they are making? lol
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legal if crooked
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Ye ole loophole
"subject to change without notice"
and lots of other legalease that we the consumer can never hope to understand short of a law degree.
Best believe that they have covered their legal tracks on that hidden cap value. If you try to terminate your service then they will hit you with some ungodly "contract termination fee" like a cell phone.
Quite the trap...
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Spitzer
Comcast stopped using the term unlimited in advertising a year or two ago after years of customer complaints and forum gripe sessions. The Globe is about three years late to this story, though the attention to Comcast's inability to come clean is always good....
From what I can remember the invisible cap is somewhere around 500GB per month, but that varies per market based on network capacity.
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Re: seaowl
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Re: Re: seaowl
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Re: seaowl by malhombre
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Re:
For the same reason I am happy that you cannot afford a gigabit internet connection. I pay $10k a month so that I can have wide open access to a data trunk. if I had everyone and their mother on trunks like that, they would be littering my pristine network. Stay out you poor shits... There is a reason some people are poor and complain about it. It is called self imposed poverty... no-one else is complaining about the ones that don't complain.
Piss off
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Fair enough they may have falsely advertised, but 99% of their subsribers will never hit 500 gig a month.
I think the case is here that someone wants something for nothing, there is no way that home broadband use will exceed 500 gb a month unless someone is hitting the bittorrent pretty hard.
if they are running a business off the connection, then they should be a bit less cheap and spring for a better connection.
at the end of the day you get what you pay for, and i would say that 500 gig a month is fair, considering that they are not upgrading their service any.
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False Advertising
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They hope that the fact of a possible looming cap would frighten some users into using their connection less.
Thing is, say on average the people in your area with cable internet download about 100gigs a month, and you download around 80. They won't care.
Now say you move to another neighboorhood, this one on average the people only download say, 20 gigs a month. Suddenly, you are now flagged as a bandwidth abuser and get sent one of these letters.
They purposely make the letters as incredibly vague as possible, they will NOT at all whatsoever give you an answer that comes anywhere close to determining this cap. They will claim its illegal, confidentinal, don't have the imformation, etc to disclose the cap, or try to be as vague as the letter. And that if you do it again, you will lose your service.
Questions about what you should do will give you the typical "You should only be using your connection for e-mail and webpages anyway" response.
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Comcast screwing customers
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heh i agree
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you on crack
further more
they aint doin jack sh*t b/c they think they know it all
as far as im concerned they can go blow themselves up the ass
lmao
if you smellllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll what the rock, Is cookin
lmao
lmao
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bandwidth, BT
I have no objection if they just tell me how much I can do on each service. I will comply if I know the exact numbers for each service.
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