Comcast Data Caps and General Internet Curiosity

Hey duders,

So I was just listening to the most recent episode of the Bombcast. One of the e-mails brought up the 1TB monthly data caps and how games are becoming too big at basically the wrong time. My cable internet provider, which is not Comcast because they don't exist in my area of Wyoming, set caps on us at the beginning of the year. I pay roughly $80 a month for 40mbit down and 10mbit up. My provider states that capping certain users, like me, will allow 97% of the customer base to experience interruption free and stable speeds all day every day at peak hours. Basically, every day, between the hours of 5pm and 10pm, if you use an insane amount of internet during this block, your speed will be throttled. They don't surface exactly how much data use will cap you. I've ran some tests on my own and noticed that if I download about 100gb of data, I will be under a throttle. At 10pm, my speeds return and I can download as much as I want.

This throttle drops me from 40d 10u, to about 14d 8u. This is still plenty of speed to stream an HD show or movie, or play any online game. I feel like I'm lucky. Not because I pay an extreme amount of money for very low speeds, compared to the rest of the country, but because I only have daily caps. I am not charged any extra fees, nor will my internet be spotty and disconnect me. I set any downloads or updates to run between the hours of 10pm and 4pm. By doing this, I basically never feel the caps on my data.

What are you guys with Comcast or other providers with extreme caps doing? Are you moving to new companies? How much do you pay for internet? What are top speeds like in your areas?

I feel i want to move to Sonic but i'm getting very fast speeds right now and i would drop down to about your speeds not throttled. then again i could probably live with it and i'd rather not send the message to comcast that i'm ok with what they're doing. then AGAIN i'm a lazy lazy man and i like my current speeds so i might drop the extra $50/month anyway. but who knows, they could increase that again down the line.

guess i should be lucky to have this sort of internet regardless but it's still a bit frustrating.

My ISP added a cap a year and a half ago, much to my annoyance. Our original allotment of data (250 GB a month) wasn't enough, so we had to eat the additional $50 a month cost of a higher plan (with a higher speed, at least). Our current cap is 1 TB, which is usually enough (admittedly, much of that is me downloading games/videos), but the extra cost is a bit hard to deal with. As far as I know, there isn't any throttling going on during peak hours; however, I also live in a relatively small area of about 30-40 thousand people. If we go over, which we have once or twice, it's just an additional fee for each chunk of data over. It's not optimal, but we make it work, especially since there are no other high-speed providers in our area.

I will admit that I had much the same attitude towards data caps as most of the Internet did before my ISP added one: why did it matter when so few people had to deal with it? Of course, I obviously changed my tune once I had to deal with it. My hope is that wider data caps will make more people realize how ridiculous they are and enact a widespread pushback against them, maybe getting them to go away entirely.

I think this is Comcasts way of getting back at people who left their TV plans for online streaming services. Especially those that stream at 4K resolutions.

Or more likely just the fact that they don't want to improve their infrastructure and keep shoehorning more people into the same network.

I live with Comcast caps. I have 350 gigs or I pay $10 more per fifty gigs over -i don't get a nastygram, I get a bill-. With Netflix, YouTube, GiantBomb, game downloads (and updates) we go over, a lot. The thing of it is, if I don't want DSL, I don't have a choice. Tucson, in all of its wisdom, signed a deal where if you live in within the city limits, you get Cox; however, if you live outside the city limits, you get Comcast. It's corporatism at its worst. I moved five miles and lost Cox and gained Comcast. I've complained to the FCC several times to no avail. It's pretty fucked.

This is the first time I've heard of daily data caps, and that particular one sounds fairly reasonable. 14/8 throttled is still decent speed. Monthly caps for slower connections are the worst...

Being American must be worse than I imagined

I've got Comcast. It's kind of bullshit that there are any caps at all but on the other hand one terabyte is pretty generous. I've been monitoring my usage ever since they put a bandwidth counter on the account page and this has been my heaviest month at 534GB so far.

We only got our comcast notice this month. Our usual usage hasn't been going over 1TB or even getting that close to it, but it's still disgusting. We pay higher rates than all the towns around us because there's no competition but ATT, which doesn't compete at all, and now we're getting capped because hey, why not. I'm only going to monitor our usage at a basic level and if starts to become an issue I'm going to use our pfSense router to monitor traffic to see if theirs is accurate.

If it's STILL an issue because we stream so much, I download so many games (Downloaded DOOM last night, 70 fucking Gigs), and we torrent shows we can't find elsewhere then we'll probably move to the next town. 20 miles away is a town with half the population of ours and 4 or 5 internet options, including 100mb fiber for about 60/month.

Fuck Comcast in the face

Sounds like Comcast is taking the Australian internet experience world wide. Except with much higher speeds and caps haha.

So weird to see people complaining about 1 TB data caps. Here in Canada I've got 30 Mbps internet with 400 GB per month data cap and I rarely exceed that limit. I download most of my games and stream constantly through MLB TV, Netflix, YouTube, and the rest. I mean, I'd prefer no data caps, but how do people consume so much media to exceed 1 TB in a month? Is it all 4K content?

@darth_navster: Personally, it's less that I'm worried I'll hit the cap and incur fees and much more about the fact I have no options, pay too much, and pay for a speed that they've arbitrarily decided to place a cap on. This isn't a scarce resource, this is them exercising their monopoly.

I get that your connection is worse and TONS of people in the US have worse connections with even less availability than I do. That doesn't mean I'm going to be happy to have substandard pricing as well as data caps just because some deals were made that I had no say in and no choice except for where I bought a house.

Edit:

And since I'm still mad about it I'll add that this is probably why they chose 1 TB - everyone says "well that's huge, my caps are this" or "Well that's nuts my cell phone cap is 3 GB" or any variation of that. It makes it seem ridiculous to be concerned about. And of course I'm not mad that you're questioning it, I'm mad that five years from now they'll throw me in the same boat you're in because why not.

When they come out years from now saying "98 percent of our customers never even break the 500 GB barrier, so we're lowering our caps to better serve the majority of our customers" that's when I start to get even MORE screwed than I already am.

@beanswater: Thanks for explaining. I didn't mean to come off as critical of the complaints, more that I just didn't understand the situation all that well.

@darth_navster: Just looking at my gaming system (also hooked up to a TV so does a reasonable amount of my streaming but excluding when I'm watching stuff via the PS4's apps or my laptop or tablet and excluding any console downloads of games) then it's registering 540GB in the last 30 days (Windows 10 tip: it tracks this so everyone can see how their machine is doing).

Not 4K content, barely even 1080p (Netflix, YouTube, Prime etc) and I've not even been downloading much game related stuff recently (if we scroll back the window a few days then it would include downloading Forza Horizon 3 but this most recent 30 days didn't and I've not grabbed any big PC games since).

This has been a quiet month. But I don't watch TV over the air so everything I'm watching (like the episode of Arrow I'm currently watching on my second monitor) comes via my ISP. I could easily imagine a heavy month where I hit 1TB.

My ISP is somewhat like the OP (I think basically all consumer fast broadband is like that in the UK) and so I get language about unlimited and so on but realistically there are contention issues at peak times so there are times when we're effectively capped by backbone limitations in our local grid. We used to get basically identical to the OP here, with explicit policies about how much you download and which hours are considered peak and how far you got dropped down the rates if you exceeded. Most ISPs have moved away from that recently (at least in my experience shopping round for fibre* deals - that just means we don't get to know what the traffic management policy is; note the above linked policy is something you can pay extra to avoid with their top package).

* UK broadband is: ADSL2+ = 24/1.4 Mbps; Annex M variant = 20/3.3 Mbps; fibre (VDSL2) to cabinet = 40/10 or 80/20 Mbps [limit is imposed by ISPs not limit of tech]; Vivid fibre (installed before cabinets got fibre updates) = 50 or 100 or 200 Mbps down (up to 20Mbps up).

Comcast's caps were worse before at 300 gig monthly caps. I had to bitch them out when I kept going over and they kept giving me credits to cover the overage charges. Even those fuckheads know that the caps are bullshit hence why they will fall back when you call them out on their shit. Them boosting it up 1 TB is nice and all but caps of any kind are fucking stupid.

Wireless caps are the only ones that will probably never go away because they got people used to them early. I can see Comcast eventually getting rid of wireline caps in order to compete against wireless services once they start beating out wireline services quality in both speed and latency.

I have a 350GB cap on my Internet and everytime I got over it costs 10 dollars per 50GB. It's real fucked, so I mostly download videos on my phone and through tethering since I have unlimited phone data. That mostly clears the way for streaming services and downloading games, but some months I'm still over. They have even threatened to up my plan to a business plan that costs double my current one and they've actually done it to a few of my neighbors and friends. ISPs in America are the most fucked up thing and there's kind of nothing we can do about unless we just don't want Internet.

I actually stuck with Comcast, but instead of home service I switched to their business class internet. I actually pay less for nearly the same speed, no cap, and 24/7 local customer support.

The Bombcast was the first time I'd heard that Comcast had rolled out the caps to most households. I looked into it, and it turns out where I live, Northern Virginia, is one of the few places where the caps were not implemented.

In fact, it looks like the cap was implemented almost everywhere except in states along the I-90 corridor running from Boston-NYC-Philly-Baltimore-DC, aka where most of the national media who might report on something like this live.

Well, with XFinity (Comcast), they start to make notifications pop-up when you visit some websites to let you know that you are close to/have exceeded your data limit. I find this to be intrusive and kind of bullshit. Additionally, the 1 TB limit is horseshit. I'd rather pay the extra $50/mo to get unlimited internet than deal with that or the pop-ups. I have a room mate, a home-office (with 4 people that work here regularly,) and a bunch of other shit that uses bandwidth. I hit that limit every single month, and exceed it by nearly another TB some times. That would cost me the actual $200/mo limit they have.

I'm moving to fiber as soon as we get the money to get it installed. It's a little pricey, but totally worth it, and the unlimited data will be nice.

Basically, fuck Comcast. This is no different than a $100/mo price hike to me. If I can avoid ever giving Comcast another dime, I will.

I have comcast. But, I'm not in an area covered by the cap. Plus, I',m not even close to the terabyte limit.