In plans submitted to FCC Friday, cable provider says it will use software to determine bandwidth hogs and will temporarily give them a lower priority status. (From Reuters)
The story "Comcast details changes for managing Web traffic" published September 20, 2008 at 9:30 AM is no longer available on CNET News.
There isn't any such thing as a 'bandwidth hog'. There is just a person who is using their service at the full rate that Comcast had guaranteed them all the time. If any of my downloads or uploads are slowed down because of this, Comcast is going to have a class action lawsuit filed against them quicker than you can say "Pin dropped!"
I agree with you 100%. How can they term someone to be a 'bandwidth hog' yet advertise that a particular rate of access is available at a particular price. If anything that must change there rate and access plans. I'm with you that a class action lawsuit sounds like it is in order.
Go back and read your AUP. This sort of limitation is allowed for in the terms of the contract you signed. If you didn't read it then that's your own problem.
Gotta love it how these companies are eager to take your money, and when it comes time to put out, they reneg. Read their Terms of Service Agreement and make sure they are not giving you the shaft. If I was with Comcast and heard this rubbish, they wouldn't see another dime from me again. If you continue to pay them and subscribe to them, you are just justifying their actions, so don't complain.
Hey, I really have no choice in the matter. Comcast is the ONLY high speed internet service where I live, but I will be watching them like a hawk and if I go over this 250GB amount..... I'm going to ask them how I did that when I only do 50GB's of Bittorrenting a month, and that the rest must be for HTTP or services such as Joost or Hulu.
So if you have unlimited cell phone plan and you make alot of calls, the cell phone company can put you on lower priority status during peak hours and you will have less chance of getting through?
Its the same exact anology yet the one outlines above sounds ridiculous. You pay for the service with Comcast, why are you being penaltiziled for actually using it? Comcast needs to stop punishing people who use the service and either reduce the bandwidth allocated to each user or upgrade their hardware to handle more traffic.
Wrong. Comcast advertised their service as unlimited, therealbean. If you like, I still have the flyers from 4 years ago saying that their service was unlimited.
COMCASTS REAL GOAL: PRESERVE THE "TV" CABLE BILL. HERE'S WHY:
Consumers pay an average of $60 per month on cable TV.
Comcast wants to limit your monthly data to 250 gigabytes = 2 hours of HDTV per day
NBC is using P2P to deliver its shows directly to you
If you can get your content directly from the networks instead of Comcast, then oops - Comcast is out a LOT of money.
Network Neutrality is a matter of national economic security.
Instead of the Fed using 700 Billion to bail out the banks and the homeowners that couldn't afford those inflated houses in places like Sacramento in the first place, they should invest it in national fiber to the home subsidies and regulate Cable and Phone companies' Internet service offerings.
You hit the nail on the head. Frankly, I watch a lot of what was once 'cable TV' one-line, including episodes of Disney shows, MacGyver, Bionic Woman, etc. I NEVER turn on my TV on a day-to-day basis anymore. Maybe once a week to watch a movie that is not available for streaming viewing online, but not on a day-to-day basis. In fact, we are only keep cable TV so that we can get: weather reports and sports viewing.
Because cable broadband uses shared bandwidth, the cable companies base their download/upload bandwidth capacity on an estimate of the actual number of subscribers who could be using the internet at any given time. When peak subscriber usage exceeds the estimated percentage, total bandwidth capacity can become reduced - the ISP cannot meet its claimed download/upload speeds, and to some the internet feels slower.
What can they do? Increase bandwidth capacity or throttle higher bandwidth subscriber in an effort to better load balance the system. Increasing bandwidth is pretty much out of the question as many cable systems are at capacity. Where I live, Comcast moved 5 analog cable TV channels to their digital cable because they needed the bandwidth for more digital TV channels. It can stuff 10 digital channels in the bandwidth occupied by 1 analog channel. Moving 5 channels allows 45 additional digital channels.
Many cable companies are almost bursting at the seams. I'm half expecting them all in 2009 to eliminate analog cable TV in favor of forcing everyone to rent a cablebox and pay the higher fee for (basic) digital cable. They can use the DTV conversion and subscriber demands for more digital channels as a smoke screen to get more money from the subscribers.
I can easily imagine that Verizon FIOS is just waiting for some of the more desirable markets to max out to the point where the municipalities will come begging to them when their cable contracts are up for renewal - just so they can ride in and come to the rescue (and get tax breaks and other goodies).
Wrong. Increasing bandwidth capacity IS possible because in most areas, they are still using copper wire. If they went to fiber-optic (which is more expensive but well worth the time of the companies in question, as Verizon and AT&T figured out long ago!), they would have MORE than enough bandwidth to allow everyone to download at their CONTRACTUAL RATE 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
Actually, I think this is reasonably fair. On a cable system, bandwidth hogs actually do hurt the performance of other people on their segments. It seems fair that these people need to be limited to some level of "fair" usage.
I agree that Comcast has tried some stupid things but if we give a knee jerk reaction that Comcast is evil everytime they try to manage the network we never get progress. Why can't we all search for some middle ground?
If you're on a segment with a network hog I bet you'll really appreciate their efforts. The only other choice is for Comcast to be forced to build out more network and pass more costs onto us; a situation I know you'd all ***** about too.
Things like cutting off subscribers that go beyond some limit where you can't even track your limit is totally dumb and you all have every right to complain; but let's give some credit when they attempt to make a reasoned stab at the problem.
It does seem like the hogs are out of control. If I remember correctly, Comcast's limits were 250GB a month. That's a lot of traffic. If you are using that much (or even half as much) you are a hog (and probably stealing your ass off on the torrents) and deserve some slapping about.
PS I don't work for Comcast. I have their CableTV but have FIOS Internet because the cable was too slow and unreliable (maybe due to the hogs).
Totally, totally wrong. The fact is that 'bandwidth hogs' do NOT cause any harm, and in fact do not exist. You are only using THE SERVICE YOU PAID FOR ALL THE TIME..... nothing wrong with that, is there? I mean, if I rent a TV from say "Ray-O-Vac", they don't get to tell me "You are watching your rented TV too much every day!" If they did, I would have the right to throw their ***** out of my home!
Comcast is constantly throttling my connections. It is painfully obvious. The transfer rate will uniformly decrease. 500 kb/s...450 kb/s...400 kb/s, with each passing increment of 2 seconds. I am nowhere near what is considered a bandwidth hog. I do have programs that routinely (every few weeks) require a 150 mb or so update, but honestly it is with anything I am downloading. I have the 8 mb/s business class connection.
Thats not throttling. Throttling looks a lot different. What you are looking at is normal behaviour in TCP when it hits congestion or loss. If you want to know, in detail, what is going on capture a trace with tcpdump or packetmon, run it through TCPTrace, and then display the Time Sequence Graph with xplot. You can learn a lot about what is happening with your connections that way.
I do not think business connections is throttled, after all you pay a premium for it (you get a SLA right). If ypou are throttled even on a business connection, maybe you should go look for another provider.
I used to have Comcast. They are run by real SOBs. They had a database problem that would shut off my service. I went through all levels of help until I was talking to their resident guru. And this went on for weeks. I had a dual boot system with windows and linux. The guru told me the problem was linux killing my connection. She wanted me to keep windows on all night and see if it was up in the morning. Well I'm no fool and I had linux up all night logging all traffic. She had written a script to ping my ip every five seconds forcing the connection to stay up. Well I called her on it the next day. It was then that she admitted that their accounts payable department had made a mistake and closed my account. This is after two weeks of going round and round with them.
What they need to do to increase their band width is upgrade their system. I went to www.speedtest.net the other day to check my cable speed. They have a listing of what cable speeds are around the world. I looked up Tokyo and their broadband speeds are twice as fast as Comcast. Why can't Comcast run fiber as a back bone and divide their user base into subnets using existing cable? If they keep the subnets small enough there will be no "bandwidth hogs". If Comcast advertises a certain amount of bandwidth that is what they should deliver. Or they should refund some of your money. If an airline over books a flight and kicks someone off they give him something for their trouble why can't Comcast do the same? I mean if you tell them there are money hogs and you have a cash flow problem so they are going to be throttled back on how much you pay them I don't think they would hold still for that.
And the person that thinks Comcast's plan is a good idea has just been taking it for so long that he thinks the pain he is feeling is normal. Well it's not bud. You're taking it where it shouldn't be taken.
Well, I can give them a little bit of break (oh gosh, I feel so dirty sticking up for our broadband internet speeds) because Tokyo and Japan are LOTS smaller than the United States, so foot for foot they have more money than us to put into things like fiber optic cable. You have also hit the nail on the head that if Comcast would put in more access points for a certain number of homes, the 'bandwidth hogs' (which most of this is coming from TOO MANY PEOPLE BEING ON ONE ACCESS POINT!) wouldn't even pop up on their radar once.
As I keep saying, we're a country that's cutting back on Internet access while countries like South Korea have built universal broadband networks. Granted we're much bigger, but our GDP suggests we're the wealthiest, too. Then again, the nationalization of Wall Street shows how fake that is.
You hit the nail on the head. Comcast estimated how much their users would use wrong, and didn't account for the INEVITABLE increase in bandwidth usage and more and more video was available online.
As of Today COMCAST is still sending reset packets.
To bypass comcast reset packets you need to download NNAGENT.
COMCAST is killing my blizzard updates and at this download rate it will take me one month to finnish this patch!
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So if you have unlimited cell phone plan and you make alot of calls, the cell phone company can put you on lower priority status during peak hours and you will have less chance of getting through?
Its the same exact anology yet the one outlines above sounds ridiculous. You pay for the service with Comcast, why are you being penaltiziled for actually using it? Comcast needs to stop punishing people who use the service and either reduce the bandwidth allocated to each user or upgrade their hardware to handle more traffic.
Consumers pay an average of $60 per month on cable TV.
Comcast wants to limit your monthly data to 250 gigabytes = 2 hours of HDTV per day
NBC is using P2P to deliver its shows directly to you
If you can get your content directly from the networks instead of Comcast, then oops - Comcast is out a LOT of money.
Network Neutrality is a matter of national economic security.
Instead of the Fed using 700 Billion to bail out the banks and the homeowners that couldn't afford those inflated houses in places like Sacramento in the first place, they should invest it in national fiber to the home subsidies and regulate Cable and Phone companies' Internet service offerings.
I NEVER turn on my TV on a day-to-day basis anymore. Maybe once a week to watch a movie that is not available for streaming viewing online, but not on a day-to-day basis. In fact, we are only keep cable TV so that we can get: weather reports and sports viewing.
What can they do? Increase bandwidth capacity or throttle higher bandwidth subscriber in an effort to better load balance the system. Increasing bandwidth is pretty much out of the question as many cable systems are at capacity. Where I live, Comcast moved 5 analog cable TV channels to their digital cable because they needed the bandwidth for more digital TV channels. It can stuff 10 digital channels in the bandwidth occupied by 1 analog channel. Moving 5 channels allows 45 additional digital channels.
Many cable companies are almost bursting at the seams. I'm half expecting them all in 2009 to eliminate analog cable TV in favor of forcing everyone to rent a cablebox and pay the higher fee for (basic) digital cable. They can use the DTV conversion and subscriber demands for more digital channels as a smoke screen to get more money from the subscribers.
I can easily imagine that Verizon FIOS is just waiting for some of the more desirable markets to max out to the point where the municipalities will come begging to them when their cable contracts are up for renewal - just so they can ride in and come to the rescue (and get tax breaks and other goodies).
I agree that Comcast has tried some stupid things but if we give a knee jerk reaction that Comcast is evil everytime they try to manage the network we never get progress. Why can't we all search for some middle ground?
If you're on a segment with a network hog I bet you'll really appreciate their efforts. The only other choice is for Comcast to be forced to build out more network and pass more costs onto us; a situation I know you'd all ***** about too.
Things like cutting off subscribers that go beyond some limit where you can't even track your limit is totally dumb and you all have every right to complain; but let's give some credit when they attempt to make a reasoned stab at the problem.
It does seem like the hogs are out of control. If I remember correctly, Comcast's limits were 250GB a month. That's a lot of traffic. If you are using that much (or even half as much) you are a hog (and probably stealing your ass off on the torrents) and deserve some slapping about.
PS I don't work for Comcast. I have their CableTV but have FIOS Internet because the cable was too slow and unreliable (maybe due to the hogs).
If they did, I would have the right to throw their ***** out of my home!
What they need to do to increase their band width is upgrade their system. I went to www.speedtest.net the other day to check my cable speed. They have a listing of what cable speeds are around the world. I looked up Tokyo and their broadband speeds are twice as fast as Comcast. Why can't Comcast run fiber as a back bone and divide their user base into subnets using existing cable? If they keep the subnets small enough there will be no "bandwidth hogs". If Comcast advertises a certain amount of bandwidth that is what they should deliver. Or they should refund some of your money. If an airline over books a flight and kicks someone off they give him something for their trouble why can't Comcast do the same? I mean if you tell them there are money hogs and you have a cash flow problem so they are going to be throttled back on how much you pay them I don't think they would hold still for that.
And the person that thinks Comcast's plan is a good idea has just been taking it for so long that he thinks the pain he is feeling is normal. Well it's not bud. You're taking it where it shouldn't be taken.
You have also hit the nail on the head that if Comcast would put in more access points for a certain number of homes, the 'bandwidth hogs' (which most of this is coming from TOO MANY PEOPLE BEING ON ONE ACCESS POINT!) wouldn't even pop up on their radar once.
Comcast estimated wrong, and is penalizing their customers over their inability to provide what they've promised.
Not that I care, mind you, I switched to AT&T.
To bypass comcast reset packets you need to download NNAGENT.
COMCAST is killing my blizzard updates and at this download rate it will take me one month to finnish this patch!