Users Say Comcast Broadband Usage Meters Don't Work, May Result in Hundreds Of Dollars Of Errant Charges
from the show-your-math dept
We've noted for years that usage caps on fixed line broadband connections are little more than a major, unnecessary price hike on uncompetitive markets. But while caps certainly are little more than a cash grab, there's another less talked about problem at play: nobody is making sure ISP usage meters are accurate. That has resulted in a number of instances where an ISP will bill users for consumption when the power is off, and even some instances where ISPs confused MAC addresses and billed the wrong customer for additional monthly consumption.As you might expect, Comcast is often at the heart of these conversations. This week, they're making the news once again for overbilling a customer $1500 for phantom bandwidth consumption, then refusing to provide any solid evidence this phantom consumption actually occurred. Like many users before them, the customers discovered a major discrepancy between their own router logs and and ISP's usage meter. But Comcast being Comcast, the company's historically-bad customer service usually only makes a bad situation worse:
"So far, despite all the calls we have made, no one is willing to even provide us with one shred of proof this data was consumed, by what method or website(s) it was used on. They just keep telling us to trust them, the data was used. We have asked for investigations of the Internet history to prove this usage, and they say they will do so, but they never do."As is so often the case, only once the media was involved was Comcast willing to "help." In this case, Ars Technica demanded Comcast prove the errant usage was actually happening, but the company not only couldn't provide any hard data whatsoever -- but it tried to claim the terabytes of extra consumption were being caused by an Apple TV unit that apparently became sentient and started downloading screensavers on its own (subsequently disproven). With Comcast charging hundreds of extra dollars and just simply refusing to show its math, Ars gets to the real meat of the problem:
"The months of testing, without any firm conclusions, raise one question with no straightforward answer. If Comcast, the nation's largest Internet provider, can't determine what's pushing its subscribers over their data caps, why should customers be expected to figure it out on their own? On top of that, few customers other than Brad receive such extensive testing. And even that testing would never have happened if his father hadn't contacted a journalist.For what it's worth, Comcast has long stated that it uses a firm by the name of NetForecast to measure its meter accuracy, and that this firm consistently finds that Comcast's meters are accurate to within 1%. But that's not the story coming from Comcast's actual consumers, who get to enjoy the one-two punch of first being charged hundreds of extra dollars for nothing, then having to navigate Comcast's horrendous and inflexible customer service to fix a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. And as Comcast keeps pushing its caps into new, uncompetitive areas, the volume of complaints will only grow.
There are two subjects that telecom regulators simply refuse to address. One being the misleading and often completely fabricated below-the-line fees ISPs use to jack up the price of broadband after a sale. The other being the punitive, unnecessary and potentially anti-competitive usage cap, not to mention the ISP desire to bill like utilities, but their total unwillingness to actually be regulated as such. As a result, no objective third party is ensuring that logged bandwidth consumption is accurate, a major problem as more and more ISPs look to usage caps to milk uncompetitive markets.
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Filed Under: broadband, broadband meters, competition, net neutrality, toll booth
Companies: comcast
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Pretty much everything sold by measure is supposed to be accurate, yet somehow despite clear evidence the meters are wrong and the income it generates keeps them from looking to closely.
There is no reason for the caps, other than to increase profits. Many people have started staying under the caps, so the next best thing is to just make up numbers & collect extra fees.
Once upon a time there were agencies who would oversee these things and correct them... pity the congresscritters were bought off, with such piddly amounts, to pull the teeth from the agencies that are supposed to protect us.
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why couldn't the states certify the speeds, usage, etc stats of online providers to determine their accuracy and reliability ? ? ?
i know i don't trust an ISP's speed test, unless/until i run it against 2-3 other online tests...
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A question of measurement units
The measurement in Comcast Megabytes was, if anything, favorable to the consumer.
Notice: the definition of Comcast Megabytes is subject to change without notice. Your bandwidth limit is also measured in Comcast Megabytes. Without doing this Comcast would be unable to properly manage its network operations.
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And honestly, if I'm going to pay for the megabyte then I will block everything that is not essential to a page load. Ads first. This can have serious cascade effects.
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https://twitter.com/gdead/status/771527795042385921
A 1 word article on the NYT took 6MB and 150 requests to load.
People wouldn't expect that much traffic for 1 crappy article, and with most of the major players playing the bandwidth cap game things are going to get uglier.
Advertising might make them pennies, but its costing consumers money as massive amounts of data are being used up displaying shit no one wants pushing them towards the caps sooner.
Ads are eating up the bandwidth, costing consumers.
Ads are serving up malware, costing consumers.
Pretty much consumers are being screwed on both sides of the equation, and it is only going to get worse.
There is no reason to have caps, other than to make even more money from the monopoly.
Lets see...
We have defacto approved monopolies.
We hand them huge amounts of money to provide service to people under the poverty line... and they lined their pockets while lying.
We hand them sweetheart deals, and they screw over entire states who sometimes notice they got screwed.
We allow them to let systems rot, to force consumers onto more expensive options that are less useful.
We have shitty broadband deployment, upgrading might hurt the bottom line for shareholders so we can't have them.
We have them buying laws to make sure no one can compete with them, because it might show people how much we are overpaying for how little we get.
We allow them to promise all sorts of things, and then start sneaking in addons and unexplained charges raising the prices well beyond the advertised price.
Its time to smash the monopolies, they aren't benefiting anyone except the CEOs. There are small services offering actual gigabit service for less than many people pay for the lowest tiers of speed in the monopolies. Something isn't adding up, and we should stop letting them hold the country hostage to pad their bottom line. For all of the talk about free markets, they keep the monopolies in place... time to force everything open and watch the market explode.
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I grew up being taught monopolies were illegal, so wdf happened? Did the laws change or is it anarchy? when can I start?
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If a business sells a product by some metric, then I can't imagine why it would not fall under this department's jurisdiction. I wrote in complaints about AT&T Wireless charging me for megabytes of data that didn't make any sense.
I fail to see why mobile cellular data, minutes on calling cards, internet data caps, whatever, are exempt from regulation. There is something very wrong with allowing a merchant to control the "meter" for their product.
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But it does work
The problem is that, for Comcast, this is working exactly as intended.
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Re: But it does work
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* theater capacity is 3,000 seats
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What if they weren't "errant"?
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Perhaps ....
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Re: Perhaps ....
That is charging them extra for poor service, and we all know that Comcast would look at that and choose to make everyone's service worse instead of trying to fix it. They are not worried about network quality, they are only worried about income quantity.
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Re: Re: Perhaps ....
I haws a personal experience with this (poor signal blamed on me when it was Comcast).
I had for months major issues with poor quality internet and cable signal. Had techs come out numerous times to troubleshoot. Everyone had a different answer that all somehow evened up being my fault. "You are using a splitter on one room, Comcast does not allow splitters in the house" (seriously had one tech say this to me). "You are using a substandard modem" (I was using a high quality modem I bought that is still on their recommended list today years later). Story after story of that. Finally I had a competent tech come out. He did not even step inside the house and found the problem. The wire coming from our distribution box to our house was really worn down (he said several parts were exposed) and not sufficient for both internet and cable requirements. He installed a new line and instantly my issues went away.
I wouldn't be surprised if that happened to me today I would have been in a similar problem as the OP.
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Or it might be that little el cheapo home router.
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In the world of Comcast, not only would you be charged for it, but for the extra "toppings"; the dirt, germs, maggots and cockroaches added when it was dropped, picked up, and handed to you.
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So if a router just happened to 'mysteriously' have one bit flipped in a checksumed packet, making that packet useless, you could count any NAK and retransmission against the customer's bandwidth? Cool!
I wonder if Comcast's routers could one day have a statistically improbable number of cosmic ray events causing 1 bit packet errors?
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* people more privileged than regular customers use a separate internal network which actually works.
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Up Next:
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Pathological liar
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Re: Pathological liar
Out of context Hillary is a liar. *In* context - other politicians - she'd compare favorably to anyone in the 2016 or 2012 Republican primaries.
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Re: Pathological liar
I'm sure that Hillary carefully considers and ponders most lies.
Trump says whatever lies are convenient at the moment, without regard to previous things said, or earlier commitments, or any intention of actually honoring what he says. Stream of consciousness lying. Like how the wind changes direction on a whim.
I'm not sure which style of lying is more similar to Comcast.
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Re: Pathological liar
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COMCAST Opens up their Wireless Modems
So, if you see a random xfinitywifi station broadcasting on 2.4g and 5g know that it is YOUR Com(munist)cast XFinity wireless cable modem letting other John Q. Public members who have an account with Comcast access the internet through your cable modem. (And they supposedly don't count the traffic against your usage.....)
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Re: COMCAST Opens up their Wireless Modems
Install it yourself (most are plug and play and walk you through the setup process). All comcast will need is the mac address for your modem. If they tell you they must install it or you must use their rented modem, they are lying.
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Don't worry though, if they eventually get caught, they'll have to pay a fine that is a fraction of what they made from the practice...soo...ya know, justice.
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Which is it?
followed by
So, which is it?
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Re: Which is it?
In statistics class in college they proved to us that if you graduated from our college you would be guaranteed to make 3 million per year immediately. The professor picked a sample size of 3 recent grads, one of which got a 5 million dollar contract with the NFL. The two others got $50k. (I may be getting these numbers wrong). The point being that sampling 29 households out of the millions upon millions is not a large enough sample size to prove anything.
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Re: Which is it?
'...nobody that can be trusted to provide an unbiased assessment is making sure ISP usage meters are accurate'
In this case this is Comcast we're talking about, you can be sure that if the company they hired to make sure the meters were accurate said that no, they were not even remotely close to accurate the response would not be to spend the money to fix the meters, it would be to fire them and look for a new company to provide a more 'accurate' assessment.
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55 out of ~24 million
is a meaningful sample size.
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Not just Comcast...
So while I know the router isn't entirely accurate, I'm fairly sure my bandwidth hasn't quadrupled overnight. I'm guessing Mediacom changed something on the backend, or or I'm a victim of the a mac address clone.
Coincidentally, we too were gone in the hospital for a week the first month our usage skyrocketed, and we somehow used 4x the bandwidth in a 3 week period?
Unfortunately, there seems to be nothing we can do to combat the ISPs on this stuff. The net neutrality stuff is a good start, but I don't think it went far enough. They're now utilities, and utilities need to be MASSIVELY audited when they're metering their customers. Every other utility is. But ultimately I figure it'll all get thrown out next year anyway. My assumption is whoever the new president is will throw Wheeler out and put an industry loyalist back in.
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Comcast counts infrastructure data -- it happened to me!
At one point, I hooked up a unix box directly to the modem (no router) and used wireshark to watch what was happening -- 20GB/day of Broadcast ARP PING traffic being received by my modem for random IP addresses all across the place. All of which was counted as my usage.
I complained, but of course found nobody who understood what I was talking about, nor interested in finding someone who understood. After a couple of years of 600GB of extra traffic a month, it just stopped. I guess someone fixed it.
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Comcastic not fantastic
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maybe but
Even now it' still a pig, over the last 30 days apple tv 4 has used 159G, only 4.3G is directed to Netflicks. Net flicks and plex are the ONLY two apps used on it.
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