Comcast's Invisible Ceiling To Get A Paintjob?

Comcast's Invisible Ceiling To Get A Paintjob?

Wednesday, May 07, 2008 - by Gregory Sullivan
Comcast has taken a lot of heat for limiting their customer's P2P traffic based on vague references to traffic overload concerns. They confused and angered many of their customers by offering "unlimited" bandwith that was limited, and added a bit of insult to injury by never revealing what the ceiling on traffic actually was. Broadband Reports interviewed someone inside Comcast who says the company is poised to make explicit the limits on downloading -- and charging for exceeding that limit. Looks like P2P Comcast users are going on a 250 GB a month diet.

"The intent appears to be to go after the people who consistently download far more than the typical user without hurting those who may have a really big month infrequently," says an insider familiar with the project, who prefers to remain anonymous. "As far as I am aware, uploads are not affected, at least not initially." According to this source, the new system should only impact some 14,000 customers out of Comcast's 14.1 million users (i.e. the top 0.1%).

As a few of you may have noticed, Comcast received a public relations beating and is being investigated by the FCC for their use of Sandvine gear to throttle upstream P2P traffic. This practice of using forged TCP packets to "break" BitTorrent connections was discovered first in our forums in May of last year, some five months before the Associated Press story made national headlines.

I don't understand why Comcast didn't do this long ago. If 99.9 percent of your customers wouldn't even know if you instituted a limit at the digital buffet, is it really worth skulking around interfering with a few users'  P2P downloads of  Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo? You really only got in trouble for hiding the fact you were doing it. And if you download more than 250GB a month, you really should stop writing your congressman and go outside. Just once wouldn't hurt you, would it?
via: Broadband Reports | News Archive
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Comments

By Lev_Astov on May 7, 2008

lol, nice last line, there. That seems a rather reasonable limit. Downloading more than that would really begin to cost you on the storage front after a while, anyway.

By shanewu on May 7, 2008

daaaaaammmmnnnn, 250GB! i never even get close to that. i think 250GB is a very generous limit.

By AjayD on May 7, 2008

250GB is a fairly reasonable limit. Although, if I had the bandwidth I wouldn't have any trouble reaching it. Currently I only DL about 80GB a month.

By Crisis Causer on May 8, 2008

Hey, you could start downloading a few big torrents and then still go outside for even hours at a time.  Don't make fun of us downloaders.Stick out tongue

Although 250GB is a hell of a lot. 

By rapid1 on May 21, 2008

The only problem I have with this is they advertise it as even if only figuratively unlimted. Especially if you go over the 500 mbps window I thought false advertising was illegal how many years have they been doing it now lol. I use cable myself but always laugh when those commercials come on for direct TV at the cable board meetings where he say's we'll all go blog it up or suggest our's is the best or milk the premium consumers and get more business. 

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