Comments on: All About Comcast

By: HughesNet

HughesNet — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:24:00 +0000

There are also badwidth caps wioth satellite internet

By: partsman_ba

partsman_ba — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:12:28 +0000

This whole cap issue is so absurd. Comcast sells you a product that is “the fastest internet” (until FIOS came out) and “unlimited,” then when people buy this product and start using it in the way it was intended, they come back with “well, we didn’t mean UNLIMITED unlimited, we meant ‘reasonably’ unlimited.” Who decides reasonable? They do! Maybe they should have either 1) anticipated the growth of data utilization and put a cap on it in the beginning, or 2) expanded their system to meet the needs of their customers as that need grew.
Too bad in many parts of the country, not only is Comcast the only option for cable TV, but also the only option for high speed internet. Shoudn’t the Public Utility Commisions step in and apply some regulatory oversight?

By: Jim

Jim — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 19:38:57 +0000

Regarding the bandwidth cap, they should be careful setting a hard upper limit. Much like the Alternative Minimum tax’s 30-some thousand dollars per year income was going to target the extreme (ultra rich) when it was created in 1969 but then included more and more average users (middle class) due to rampant monetary inflation over time, so too will a 250GB cap aiming at the extreme impact more and more average users as time passes and “bandwidth inflation” due to bigger downloads, higher resolution versions of youtube-type video, etc., become the norm.

This is why they don’t have a solid upper bound now and they can never tell you exactly what the limit is. They want to target the upper percentile and that depends on the overall bandwidth use (or bandwidth supply if you want to continue the monetary analogy) of everyone.

This upper limit could be changed easily enough, but it might also be a lame ploy to squeeze extra fees out of more and more people as using more and more bandwidth becomes the norm. It’s a plot worthy of government! They know full well they are going to continue devaluing the dollar (or encouraging larger downloads), so any taxes (or “overage fees”) based on hard numbers will grab more and more people as time passes.

Anyway, a few months ago I was able to get a warning from Comcast for downloading several hundred GB in a month by using a download manager and archive.org. All perfectly legal. My father wanted to watch a lot of old out-of-copyright movies and I’d make DVDs for him after downloading them from archive.org.

By: Ted

Ted — Sat, 10 May 2008 13:52:49 +0000

Staying in my parents house for a bit. My Mom has junky Comcast DVRs, both are inconsistent in operation, and it feels like stepping back into the dark ages from my usual TiVo experience at home. My uncle finally gave up on them and went with Embarq DSL, has been happy ever since.

I have BrightHouse in the Central Florida area. A few weeks ago I received a letter from them stating they would start using SDV over the summer. It politely said that TiVo may or may not have the SDV attachment ready, and that they would be happy to switch me over to their DVR so I could still record all the channels.

Dirty pool if you ask me . . .

By: Glenn

Glenn — Fri, 09 May 2008 00:10:23 +0000

Not sure about this cap thing. According to the broadbandreports story, uploads aren’t counted, so those backups I do of my 160GB iPod classic to Carbonite won’t count. But if I lose my disk drive and restore my 160GB music collection off Carbonite one month, that would use 2/3rds of my bandwidth. At full bandwidth this would be done in less than a couple of days (not), and I’d have to be very careful with my internet usage for the rest of the month.

Like others I wonder if this cap is an issue if you try and switch from Comcast’s TV services to online. Say you use Apple TV or XBox 360 to watch all the shows you want. The average american watches 4 hour and 35 minutes of TV a day. At 6Mbps, which I think is what one of these devices uses for HD, thats over 12GB per day. Or 86GB per week. Or 346GB a month. Which would exceed the cap.

Lets try web surfing. The average page is apparently now something like 320KByes, up three fold since 2003. So you’d have to read 781,250 pages. Probably not an issue any time soon.

Assuming you are talking 192Kbps MP3’s, the average MP3 takes up about 5MB. So 250GB is 50,000 songs. Or about 3 months worth of continuous music? Probably not an issue. Streaming continuous music from last.fm or whatever wouldn’t get you close either.

Ditto phone calls. Not bandwidth intensive enough.

But that video thing…

By: Joseph

Joseph — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:41:48 +0000

Megazone:

Agreed. Far be it from me to defend Comcast, and this mailer is FUD-filled. At the top, it basically says you should bring your CCs down to the office for a swap, which you can’t actually do since anything involving CCs requires a truck roll. Then half way down the card they dangle a free converter (albeit for 3 months).

IMHO, they’re using this as an opportunity to get as many CCs out of the field as possible.

By: MegaZone

MegaZone — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:12:17 +0000

Joseph,

If this is indeed the case, a head-end swap out, then at least their ‘incompatible’ statement is true – but overall it is still FUD as they make it sound like CableCARD users have no choice but to switch to a STB. When all they really should need to do is swap Motorola cards for SciAtl cards.

A dirty trick.

By: Tom M

Tom M — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:01:42 +0000

I’m very interested in the SW Florida story. My in-laws got hooked up with a Tivo HD this past Christmas in Bonita Springs. They’re driving to MA for the summer this weekend, so it looks like they could find a unusable Tivo when they get back to FL in the fall. Great.

Wouldn’t it just be easier to switch to DirecTV and not ever have to deal with these Comcast yahoos?