One of the reasons that I like T-Mobile as a company is that they realized that the correct answer to network management is de-prioritization.
If someone is downloading a lot at 2am, it doesn't harm anyone. Let them have fun! There's no reason to care about someone using capacity on your network when almost no one else is using the network.
During peak times, it makes sense to give priority to those who use less data while still offering an acceptable level of service to those who use a lot of data.
I'm really hopeful that the next few years will bring competition to the home internet space. T-Mobile has been adding a lot more areas to its home internet footprint recently. Their service certainly isn't perfect and might not be what people here would be looking for (given that wireless home internet is likely to be slower than wired for a bit). However, competition would put pressure on Comcast. When T-Mobile started offering better terms for their mobile service, a lot of people said that T-Mobile's coverage wasn't good enough for them to switch. It was good enough for enough people to switch that AT&T and Verizon vastly changed their offerings. They went from offering me 3GB of data for $30 to offering me unlimited. It's hard to remember the 2012-era data plans at this point. Verizon has started offering wireless home internet as well, albeit on a more limited basis than T-Mobile.
T-Mobile's mobile offering didn't work for a lot of people back in 2013-2016, but it provided enough competition that Verizon and AT&T reintroduced unlimited data. Even if people on here won't switch to wireless home internet, it could provide an excellent option for people looking for a bill without hidden fees and unexpected increases in price. The churn from those customers will put pressure on Comcast to offer better terms for their service.
My city (Fort Collins) is rolling out municipal fiber and I'm waiting with baited breath to jump the Comcast ship. No data caps, $40/mo cheaper, etc. I hope more places follow suit. These miserly ISPs desperately need competition. The broadband access available to rural folks like my Midwest rooted family is abhorrent.
It's amazing what competition can do. When our local ISP (Monkeybrains in the Bay Area) rolled out into our building, the Comcast customer service representatives didn't even bother trying to match what I was getting for the price (500/500, no data cap, $35 a month).
In theory they are rolling it out, after several years I am yet to know a single person who has it available. Frankly it's been far too slow and with far too little communications.
Seems smart -- if people are going to be WFH or going to Zoom school full time, might as well get an extra $100/month from them. They can't say no.
It'll be interesting to see whether broadband competitors match the offer or just siphon off a handful of switching customers. In Massachusetts many Internet markets are a monopoly (Comcast) or a duopoly (Comcast + Verizon or RCN).
There are also a tiny handful of municipal providers (including Braintree, Norwood, Whip City Fiber for Westfield and area, and Russell). If people are still heavily working/attending school from home in March I can imagine a bit of pressure on towns and cities to do the very hard work of starting up Internet as a utility.
Unlimited data with Comcast is only $30/month on top of your bill, having the overages upper limit be 3x the price of unlimited data though seems a little extreme.
The cap is high to begin with, but later they will begin to lower it and increase the cost. At this point, based on examples of other cable companies and wireless providers, it is almost a given.
Unless of course you believe that Comcast is a benevolent company that tries to help its customers instead of trying to gouge them at every opportunity (former customer, lots of hard feelings) :/
Fingers crossed for Starlink to put a serious dent into their business.
Or they can just wait for data usage to increase over time. Many AAA gaming titles can chew upwards of 250GB for install, and things like 4K streaming are becoming more common. They don't even need to adjust the cap down, just wait a few years to cash in as more and more people begin to hit the limit.
This cap is not high for many. I lived in a 4 person house with a 1 TB cap and for the last 3 months we lived there, we were over the cap routinely.
Editing to add context:
This happened in 2018. The cap started a couple of years before that and 1 TB seemed reasonable but content sizes grew and grew until we had to ration Netflix usage and game downloads. We were literally making the decision, "should I watch YouTube today or do I want to watch Netflix tomorrow." I don't think Comcast needs to lower the limit. Growing content sizes will be happy to reach the limit for them.
Get Comcast Business class if you can't switch to a reasonable ISP, reasons follow:
- No Data Caps
- You get priority on your node, and typically, there isn't more than a few others in the neighborhood that are also on business class, if at all (my technician who did the install told me I was the only one for my whole node, so I get priority over others in the neighborhood, all other things being equal)
- You get better uptime guarentees
- Frankly, their customer service is light years ahead of their consumer, but that isn't saying much
- extremely consistent speeds. I know a lot of people on the prosumer plans have this too (friends of mine on xfinity don't have a lot of speed dips) but I have never been under 75/30 (the base of my plan) and my router tests every day so I can have historical reports. I'm often over 100 down (always 30 up though)
The plans tend to be more than the consumer plans, of course, usually by 25-30 dollars, but you do get a little bit more than just no data caps, at least. Its been easier to deal with and I've had it for a few years.
I don't like Comcast, but this arrangement made dealing with them much less painful. I've actually been impressed with the service levels.
When I had xfinity (consumer Comcast, if you will) I had outages, speed dips, all kinds of things. Not since business class.
Your mileage may vary, of course. I wish I could switch to a different ISP like Sonic, but alas, my alternative is dialup or very slow DSL, so this is the next best thing I could find.
In Washington State they have already started enforcing this. I had to add $30 to my bill to cover the realities of WFH. Also you get to pay more to use your own equipment. It’s $25 to use their modem and router.
Honestly this is the biggest farce of the whole caps situation.
Forcing people to overpay to rent their crappy modems because it's $5/month LESS than using your own equipment which doesn't get benefits such as particular customer support or replacements. (If something is wrong with your service they'll likely blame your equipment)
Doesn't cost any more to turn off data metering on your own modem, it's just an incentive to kill the market of people having their own (often better) modems which otherwise would cost less in the long term.
I suspect it's just so they have a higher chance of padding their "xfinitywifi" network spamming more than anything.
I've had a 1TB monthly cap here in Minnesota for several years now. Luckily I live alone and I rarely hit the cap, and they give me one "courtesy" month a year where I can exceed the cap without penalty. Sad to see them rolling it out to more states, that must mean it has been a "success" for them. I'd love to switch away from Comcast but the only other option for me is significantly slower DSL.
The upsetting part is the greed of it all and lack of any meaningful competition to switch to. If Elon’s Starlink works well it may be the nudge AT&T and Comcast need. Would also love to see a line of sight ISP and more towns start ISPs like there are in some states and other countries since laying the wires is too big of a startup cost for any new players that don’t have billions of dollars.
I'm not sure how much Starlink will help. Starlink will only be viable in rural settings. A popular saying on Ars Technica is "Starlink is for those who wish they had Comcast to hate, not those who hate their Comcast."
The problem with rural broadband, no matter if line-of-sight, FTTN, FTTB or even LTE/5G is that there will always be some sort of "concentrator point" needed which will need a high speed uplink themselves. And since we're talking about rural, this uplink is the expensive part as you will want to put it below ground so that random car crashes, forest fires, lighting strikes, wind damage, falling trees or anything don't take down the single uplink for days.
You can link up such concentrators using directional wireless (this is how many LTE stations are uplinked, for example), but suffer from degraded performance in bad weather, lower total performance for the satellite stations/APs, and it isn't always possible (as it's line-of-sight based).
Source: worked in constructions digging trenches for FTTN buildouts in Germany.
The way Starlink works there is a certain amount of bandwidth available between a satellite and a ground terminal, and a certain amount available satellite to satellite.
This means that there is a limit on how many customers they can handle per square kilometer without degrading performance. That limit is much lower than the number of customers the major terrestrial ISPs serve in urban and suburban areas.
Their plans are to support 5 million customers total across the whole US. That’s less than 10% of the number of cable broadband customers.
A lot of people want wired connections (like gamers) for performance. For a company to have wired connections they typically need to be on the telephone poles. But, there are very restrictive laws in most states on who can even put things on there. For example, where I live it's utilities, telephone, cable, and municipalities. An internet only company can't get on the pole. This is very limiting.
Data caps are going to get easier to go over as we get more 4k streaming. Comcast offers their own streaming service that doesn't count against the cap. This provides them a major advantage and 4k causes more cap issues for typical people.
I don't personally notice the cap I have (I have comcast due to no real competition where I live). I've had a cap for years. I've hit the cap when I setup a new backup solution and it goes crazy doing uploads to a remote location. Otherwise I've not gotten into trouble. But, the more 4k shows we watch the more I see my house coming closer to it.
What we need is more competitive situations and laws that enable that.
Sadly, the district I live in has an Xfinity call center located in it and all my representatives seemingly adore Comcast for providing jobs. Thankfully, I do have a choice in ISP and wouldn't ever consider switching to Comcast.
I'd feel better about this if they gave a discount (even a modest one) to everyone who isn't hitting the cap. Then it would feel like the plan was designed to be redistributive, not punitive. They'd get some additional revenue from high-usage customers and give up some revenue from their other customers.
Instead it feels like a heads-I-win-tails-nothing-changes situation.
> Comcast says customers will be notified as they approach their monthly data limit, but the ISP currently doesn’t give its customers a way to independently verify meter readings.
You can check your usage on their website or in their "My Account" mobile app. The app is particularly easy...open app, hit "internet", and scroll down a little.
Yes, that's not "independently verified", and I've seen occasional complaints that it is wrong, but:
• Those complaints are always that the Comcast number is too high, not too low, and since it is the Comcast number that will be used to determine if you've gone over, that's the one you want to use.
• In most cases I've seen, the Comcast numbers turned out to be more accurate. The person claiming they were too high did something like fail to account for upload traffic, or their monitoring didn't include IPv6 traffic, or only covered wired traffic.
You might think IPv6 would not be significant, but Disney+ definitely can stream IPv6 and Amazon Fire TV devices will use it when available. I watched several 4K UHD movies that way and according to the traffic stats on my TP-Link Archer A7 router the traffic to the Fire TV Stick was under a gig total. Next movie I used tcpdump while watching to verify that the stream was indeed IPv6, and reported not counting IPv6 as a bug to TP-Link. I'm pretty sure I also saw some of the apps on my Samsung TV using IPv6 streaming.
I wasn't aware that there even were Comcast customers without data caps anymore.
I have 1Gbps service with them and pay for uncapped. With the cap you can break it three times before they start charging you extra. It's cool to hate Comcast, but it's not an unreasonable system - people who utilize 2TB a month probably should pay more than those who utilize 200GB.
I think uncapped is $50/month, but I've had a friend mention that they were able to get it for $25/month if they leased their modem from Comcast, another $10 a month for a total of $35.
It’s not the data caps that really gets me heated. It’s their exclusion of their own services from the caps and the anti-consumer practices and the lobbying and the stifling of competition that really get to me.
And to top it all off their customer service makes me want to run into traffic just at the thought of having to deal with them. It’s like volunteering to be gaslit.
But the caps are setup to extract as much money as possible which isn’t fair. They’re scaring people who might not ever hit it into paying, as I have friends that do. If what they say is correct in only a small percent hit the cap then why even bother if it isn’t really about money?
Because of where our building sits we can't even do fixed wireless, so despite living in a major US city my options are pay comcast or get 1mbps (!) dsl.
It’s really interesting reading these comments and mentally replacing “bytes” (Internet) with any of the other public utilities units such as “watts” (power) or “gallons” (water, trash).
It's too bad capitalism doesn't work the way we're told as children that it's supposed to work. The US has various captive markets with very limited competition. It's time to end this.
[+] [-] mdasen|5 years ago|reply
If someone is downloading a lot at 2am, it doesn't harm anyone. Let them have fun! There's no reason to care about someone using capacity on your network when almost no one else is using the network.
During peak times, it makes sense to give priority to those who use less data while still offering an acceptable level of service to those who use a lot of data.
I'm really hopeful that the next few years will bring competition to the home internet space. T-Mobile has been adding a lot more areas to its home internet footprint recently. Their service certainly isn't perfect and might not be what people here would be looking for (given that wireless home internet is likely to be slower than wired for a bit). However, competition would put pressure on Comcast. When T-Mobile started offering better terms for their mobile service, a lot of people said that T-Mobile's coverage wasn't good enough for them to switch. It was good enough for enough people to switch that AT&T and Verizon vastly changed their offerings. They went from offering me 3GB of data for $30 to offering me unlimited. It's hard to remember the 2012-era data plans at this point. Verizon has started offering wireless home internet as well, albeit on a more limited basis than T-Mobile.
T-Mobile's mobile offering didn't work for a lot of people back in 2013-2016, but it provided enough competition that Verizon and AT&T reintroduced unlimited data. Even if people on here won't switch to wireless home internet, it could provide an excellent option for people looking for a bill without hidden fees and unexpected increases in price. The churn from those customers will put pressure on Comcast to offer better terms for their service.
[+] [-] HeadsUpHigh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a_wild_dandan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] some-guy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fred_is_fred|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egwynn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsr_|5 years ago|reply
Actual data from my firewall.
November isn't over yet. We are clearly within spitting distance of that cap. Luckily, we aren't Comcast customers.[+] [-] mherdeg|5 years ago|reply
It'll be interesting to see whether broadband competitors match the offer or just siphon off a handful of switching customers. In Massachusetts many Internet markets are a monopoly (Comcast) or a duopoly (Comcast + Verizon or RCN).
There are also a tiny handful of municipal providers (including Braintree, Norwood, Whip City Fiber for Westfield and area, and Russell). If people are still heavily working/attending school from home in March I can imagine a bit of pressure on towns and cities to do the very hard work of starting up Internet as a utility.
[+] [-] ripply|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bzb6|5 years ago|reply
I’m sure someone will come here and say “well my use case for wfh involves uploading 1 TB a day”, but no, that’s not normal
[+] [-] vitalychernobyl|5 years ago|reply
Unless of course you believe that Comcast is a benevolent company that tries to help its customers instead of trying to gouge them at every opportunity (former customer, lots of hard feelings) :/
Fingers crossed for Starlink to put a serious dent into their business.
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Forbo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyleo|5 years ago|reply
Editing to add context:
This happened in 2018. The cap started a couple of years before that and 1 TB seemed reasonable but content sizes grew and grew until we had to ration Netflix usage and game downloads. We were literally making the decision, "should I watch YouTube today or do I want to watch Netflix tomorrow." I don't think Comcast needs to lower the limit. Growing content sizes will be happy to reach the limit for them.
[+] [-] no_wizard|5 years ago|reply
Get Comcast Business class if you can't switch to a reasonable ISP, reasons follow:
- No Data Caps - You get priority on your node, and typically, there isn't more than a few others in the neighborhood that are also on business class, if at all (my technician who did the install told me I was the only one for my whole node, so I get priority over others in the neighborhood, all other things being equal)
- You get better uptime guarentees
- Frankly, their customer service is light years ahead of their consumer, but that isn't saying much
- extremely consistent speeds. I know a lot of people on the prosumer plans have this too (friends of mine on xfinity don't have a lot of speed dips) but I have never been under 75/30 (the base of my plan) and my router tests every day so I can have historical reports. I'm often over 100 down (always 30 up though)
The plans tend to be more than the consumer plans, of course, usually by 25-30 dollars, but you do get a little bit more than just no data caps, at least. Its been easier to deal with and I've had it for a few years.
I don't like Comcast, but this arrangement made dealing with them much less painful. I've actually been impressed with the service levels.
When I had xfinity (consumer Comcast, if you will) I had outages, speed dips, all kinds of things. Not since business class.
Your mileage may vary, of course. I wish I could switch to a different ISP like Sonic, but alas, my alternative is dialup or very slow DSL, so this is the next best thing I could find.
[+] [-] ben174|5 years ago|reply
35 Mbps - $69.95/mo 100 Mbps - $109.90/mo 200 Mbps - $134.90/mo 300 Mbps - $164.90/mo 1 Gigabit - $499.95/mo
Seems significantly more expensive than residential service.
[+] [-] localhost|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|5 years ago|reply
You can put their modem in bridge mode and use it with your own router. That’s probably what I would do if I needed unlimited.
[+] [-] iotku|5 years ago|reply
>It’s $25 to use their modem and router
Honestly this is the biggest farce of the whole caps situation.
Forcing people to overpay to rent their crappy modems because it's $5/month LESS than using your own equipment which doesn't get benefits such as particular customer support or replacements. (If something is wrong with your service they'll likely blame your equipment)
Doesn't cost any more to turn off data metering on your own modem, it's just an incentive to kill the market of people having their own (often better) modems which otherwise would cost less in the long term.
I suspect it's just so they have a higher chance of padding their "xfinitywifi" network spamming more than anything.
[+] [-] MrMember|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexfromapex|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|5 years ago|reply
The problem with rural broadband, no matter if line-of-sight, FTTN, FTTB or even LTE/5G is that there will always be some sort of "concentrator point" needed which will need a high speed uplink themselves. And since we're talking about rural, this uplink is the expensive part as you will want to put it below ground so that random car crashes, forest fires, lighting strikes, wind damage, falling trees or anything don't take down the single uplink for days.
You can link up such concentrators using directional wireless (this is how many LTE stations are uplinked, for example), but suffer from degraded performance in bad weather, lower total performance for the satellite stations/APs, and it isn't always possible (as it's line-of-sight based).
Source: worked in constructions digging trenches for FTTN buildouts in Germany.
[+] [-] stefan_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|5 years ago|reply
This means that there is a limit on how many customers they can handle per square kilometer without degrading performance. That limit is much lower than the number of customers the major terrestrial ISPs serve in urban and suburban areas.
Their plans are to support 5 million customers total across the whole US. That’s less than 10% of the number of cable broadband customers.
[+] [-] mfer|5 years ago|reply
A lot of people want wired connections (like gamers) for performance. For a company to have wired connections they typically need to be on the telephone poles. But, there are very restrictive laws in most states on who can even put things on there. For example, where I live it's utilities, telephone, cable, and municipalities. An internet only company can't get on the pole. This is very limiting.
Data caps are going to get easier to go over as we get more 4k streaming. Comcast offers their own streaming service that doesn't count against the cap. This provides them a major advantage and 4k causes more cap issues for typical people.
I don't personally notice the cap I have (I have comcast due to no real competition where I live). I've had a cap for years. I've hit the cap when I setup a new backup solution and it goes crazy doing uploads to a remote location. Otherwise I've not gotten into trouble. But, the more 4k shows we watch the more I see my house coming closer to it.
What we need is more competitive situations and laws that enable that.
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnicholas|5 years ago|reply
Instead it feels like a heads-I-win-tails-nothing-changes situation.
[+] [-] tzs|5 years ago|reply
You can check your usage on their website or in their "My Account" mobile app. The app is particularly easy...open app, hit "internet", and scroll down a little.
Yes, that's not "independently verified", and I've seen occasional complaints that it is wrong, but:
• Those complaints are always that the Comcast number is too high, not too low, and since it is the Comcast number that will be used to determine if you've gone over, that's the one you want to use.
• In most cases I've seen, the Comcast numbers turned out to be more accurate. The person claiming they were too high did something like fail to account for upload traffic, or their monitoring didn't include IPv6 traffic, or only covered wired traffic.
You might think IPv6 would not be significant, but Disney+ definitely can stream IPv6 and Amazon Fire TV devices will use it when available. I watched several 4K UHD movies that way and according to the traffic stats on my TP-Link Archer A7 router the traffic to the Fire TV Stick was under a gig total. Next movie I used tcpdump while watching to verify that the stream was indeed IPv6, and reported not counting IPv6 as a bug to TP-Link. I'm pretty sure I also saw some of the apps on my Samsung TV using IPv6 streaming.
[+] [-] cma|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrVitaliy|5 years ago|reply
1. Comcast cable internet - $65 2. Uncap monthly limit - $30 3. Fast VPN service[0] - $10 4. Netflix subscription - $15
[0] Comcast is known for injecting HTML/JS into http traffic
So about $120/mo not too far from paying for cable 10 years ago.
[+] [-] strictnein|5 years ago|reply
I have 1Gbps service with them and pay for uncapped. With the cap you can break it three times before they start charging you extra. It's cool to hate Comcast, but it's not an unreasonable system - people who utilize 2TB a month probably should pay more than those who utilize 200GB.
I think uncapped is $50/month, but I've had a friend mention that they were able to get it for $25/month if they leased their modem from Comcast, another $10 a month for a total of $35.
[+] [-] shakezula|5 years ago|reply
And to top it all off their customer service makes me want to run into traffic just at the thought of having to deal with them. It’s like volunteering to be gaslit.
[+] [-] tzs|5 years ago|reply
1. Data cap for capped plans is 1.229 TB/month.
2. You can go over once every 12 months without penalty. After that it is $10 per 50 GB over.
3. It's $30/month to uncap if you are not renting a modem from them.
4. It's $11/month to uncap if you are using their modem. The modem rental is $14/month.
[+] [-] dawnerd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] showerst|5 years ago|reply
Because of where our building sits we can't even do fixed wireless, so despite living in a major US city my options are pay comcast or get 1mbps (!) dsl.
[+] [-] floatingatoll|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] maerF0x0|5 years ago|reply
At my current speed I could exhaust the data cap in 0.6% of a month if they gave me full speed down. (not to mention up).
[+] [-] johnklos|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mimikatz|5 years ago|reply