US Cable Support > Comcast HSI > [Caps] What do you think Comcast should do now about its data ca

reply to tshirt

Re: [Caps] What do you think Comcast should do now about its dat

Yup, it all comes over the same hybrid fiber/coax wire. and that still in some places, at some times is marginal/inadiquite to handle the current traffic level (i.e. areas which have not yet recieved D3 or the number of channels for d3 usage are limited, or areas where virtual nodes are maxed out and plant upgrades/more physical nodes are still in progress are most effected)
But business users are frequently on seperrate sets of channels with much lower contention which assures full speeds and available bandwidth as needed for which they pay a modest additional fee (a extra bandwidth tier, if you prefer that term .)

reply to Mike Wolf

reply to telcodad

reply to telcodad
Let's not forget that Comcast is doing this same video type service with TiVo's, which also connect to the internet to access these videos so who knows how this is going to affect everything.

reply to telcodad
I voted for raise the cap...I know that from a technical standpoint, this is not needed (would prefer more of a throttling at peak hours to sustained downloads but whatever). If they want to put a cap on it to have it on people's minds, that's fine. However it should steadily grow every year to keep pace with increasingly heavy (and in general, more frequent) data needs.
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--psiu

reply to espaeth

reply to SpottedCat

reply to csiemers
But the measure isn't what YOU want, but what ComCast sells.
Some perfectly legit uses COULD greatly exceed the cap (go business/commercial/metroE/dedicated line, whatever is AVAILABLE to you the meet your needs.)
What CC residential sells is 250GB at speed X.

reply to telcodad
I did not vote because there are a few I would agree with.

I think it should be like this:

Economy -- 100GB
Performance -- 250GB
Blast! -- 500GB
Extreme 50 -- 1TB
Extreme 105 -- 2TB

And any overages should be billed linear to the base service. In other words if I was on Blast and used 550 GB of data, the overage of 50 GB would be billed at 10% ( the 10% comes from being 10% over the stated cap.) of the base price for Blast. In this case Blast is $58.95 so the overage charge would be $5.89 (or $5.90 if you round up). I believe this would totally be fair with respect to the customer and the company as well.

Sure, we would all prefer the cap to be removed but let's be realistic here, that costs the company more to provide. With this scenario, the company is making at least as much per GB (actually slightly more since the basic costs of providing the service are already paid by the base rate). I believe this is totally reasonable.

Sure, one could still get a business account, but that usually requires a contract and more install fees. This idea is a way for users to get what they want and let the company , who needs to make a profit, to still make money, without the headaches of setting up a business account or risking disconnection or outrageous overage fees.

That's just slightly under 12 cents per GB of overage which I believe is totally reasonable here. I actually could see some executives at Comcast reading this and maybe even putting it up on the table for consideration.

There should be an optional account setting to enable this feature, and when disabled, the connection gets throttled back to 128 Kb without overage fees after crossing the threshold and continues until the start of the new month (or billing cycle, which would be preferred.). The metering scenario would be much better if it was measured throughout the billing cycle rather than calendar month IMHO.

Bitch all you want about the cap, but why should Comcast just drop it? It is unfair to have that as the only option and I can see why any talks with Comcast upper level management would fail. My suggestion here is a much better compromise as it's give and take and actually gives the provider something to consider.

As overall average usage per customer goes up, then they should consider adjusting the cap up as necessary.

reply to telcodad
They could uncap everything inside their network, leave the 250GB cap for anything arriving/leaving their network, since that's the new choke point post docsis3 (»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering - is fair when traffic is roughly equal in both directions - which it isn't when the traffic is mostly one way - like Netflix.)

Then everyone would scream about net neutrality. Like with the xbox. Even though essentially content sources like Netflix are asking all comcast subs to subsidize the comcast users who also are netflix users, and stream more than 250GB of netflix a month.

Or, if you prefer, the backup providers like carbonite are asking grandma using 5 GB a month on email and the web to subsidize bob next door backing up 3TB of data a month.

Yeah, that sounds fair

Pure metered billing is the answer. Everyone pays for exactly what they use. We can see how much people LOVE that just by looking at AT&T Wireless.
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My place : »www.schettino.us

reply to telcodad

reply to JohnInSJ

reply to djcrazy
OK, rather than just "make up" the variable cap values for each tier, I decided to do some actual calculations to try and make them fair relative to each other.

I used the following logic:

Assuming that each tier gets to use their sustained downstream rate for the same amount of time each month, and that the current 250GB/mo. data cap is OK for the highest, current, Economy tier rate (3M/768K), I calculated that at a steady 375KB/s rate, you would reach 250GB in 8 days.

Figuring that there would also be some upstream data during that time, I decided to go with a figure of 7 days at the downstream rate, about 25% of the time each month, or an average of about 6 hours a day. That seemed reasonable to me.

Using the sustained, DOCSIS 3.0 rates listed in the DSLR's Comcast HSI FAQ »Comcast High Speed Internet FAQ »What are the actual Provisioned Speeds? (thanks Johkal!), I came up with the following tier caps:

Speed Tier -- Monthly Data Cap

Economy (3M/768K) -- 250GB

Performance (12/2) -- 1TB

Blast! (20/4) -- 1.75TB (round it up to 2TB for a nice number)

Extreme 50 (50/10) -- 4.5TB (5TB)

Extreme 105 (105/10or15) -- 9.5TB (10TB)

If you want to assume a different cap for the Economy tier, then the tier speed ratios are 1 / 4.4 / 7.33 / 18.33 / 38.66.

So, if the Economy tier is capped at only 100GB, as djcrazy suggested, the Performance tier cap could then be 400GB, Blast 700GB, Ex50 2TB and Ex105 4TB.

reply to JohnInSJ

reply to telcodad
The speed tier charges are justifable as higher speeds mean less concurrent users per channel.
you are not paying more for additional bandwidth.
on business tiers part of the extra cost goes towards additional bandwidth part for additional support costs.
BTW Business tiers are a bargain right now (building market share?) I wouldn't be supprised to see their rates rise faster than residential in the near future.