US Cable Support → Mediacom > New Data Caps

Re: New Data Caps

High consumption customers can be more trouble than they are worth if you oversell your service by as large of a margin as they do. I bet Mediacom wouldn't mind losing some of their top users. But I bet no more than 1% of their customers leave, and probably much less. The vast majority of people just don't have viable alternatives. There are a lot of places with ftth in Mediacom's service area. But the vast majority of them are slower than Mediacom or have even worse caps.

I am waiting to see how this goes down in Cedar Rapids, where there is a cable overbuilder present and Cedar Falls where they have unlimited internet up to 1Gbps from CFU. I have a hard time believing they will cap people in Cedar Falls.

So if Mediacom wants to put a cap on my 15Mbps Prime service, why not just just make my Prime service 0.77 Mbps (80% slower)?

While you're at it give me a 80% price cut to even everything out to 80% drop in service speed.

What happens when I don't agree to this intrusive popup? They just shut off my service?

I suspect this whole move is less about actual congestion and more about wanting to stop people from cord-cutting and dropping cable TV service. If people suddenly can't easily stream stuff without running over the cap (which would be a problem in households with multiple devices and people streaming video often) then they might be more inclined to pay for cable TV again.

I'd leave if I could. My alternative, however, is 1.5mbit DSL from Centurylink. I don't even hit the cap yet, I just loathe it on principle. I'd love to see some real competition in this market. Even up in Canada where most major players are capped there are still a few uncapped alternatives like Teksavvy.

This comes on top of getting double-dipped with modem fees for phone and internet, having to pay for digital adapters for older TV sets, having gotten screwed out of "free" voicemail and having to pay for it each month, having a weak selection of channels on the basic digital package. Every time I turn around, I feel like I'm either losing features or having them downgraded. Triple-play customers get absolutely no benefit that I can see anymore.

Oh well. End rant. Nothing I can do, which is a shame, because I'd be gone in five minutes if I had a viable alternative.
--
You're watching Sports Night on CSC so stick around...

Do the new data caps aggregate traffic both ways? I was looking at CenturyLink and their cap does not include upload.

In my case, I know what I'd be getting into. I had CenturyLink when they were still Qwest, and they couldn't maintain the 1.5mbit on my line during the last year or so of my time with them. They insisted the line couldn't handle the speed I'd had for years and wanted to provision me at 512/256.

I download video, and I game. 1.5 is almost unacceptable, anything lower than that definitely is. I ran into the Centurylink techs in my neighborhood when my neighbors were having issues, and they told me they wouldn't even get DSL if they lived in our neighborhood because of the issues. I'd gladly switch if it were 5mbit, uncapped, and guaranteed to be stable, but they seem hell-bent on not upgrading this neighborhood. Plus, CenturyLink has a cap of 150gb for 1.5mbit lines, and 250gb caps on everything else. So I'd just be going from bad to worse.
--
You're watching Sports Night on CSC so stick around...

I really doubt the caps have much to do with protecting TV revenues. A person can truly watch a lot of Netflix/Hulu per month with 250GB-999GB.

I know these caps all say "per month" but what happens if I'm slightly over on a 31 day "month" and slightly under on a 30 day "month"?

The plan with a 350GB cap is the highest plan available to me. I think i'm listed on the "Prime Plus" plan, only getting 20Mb down. How much more is the next step "Ultra" plan?

sean67854, I am showing that there are currently speeds up to 105 Mbps in your area. I will be happy to have a representative contact you to go over any offers in your area if you would like. Feel free to send me an IM with a good contact number and time at which you'd like someone to call.

Just so many issues with all of this...

1)The meter is unreliable as of me posting this.

2) Mediacom is promoting all the streaming services it offers for FREE, when with caps that is far from the case. Any streaming contact such as espn3, etc etc should not count against your cap.

3) if the reason for cap is protecting TV revenue, why NOT make people with TV plans get bonus bandwidth as a reward. Make it something that is savable in case they go over Even if it was something like 10GB a month, banking that against future overages would be a nice gesture.

4) Though I have never cleared 250GB to the best of my knowledge, the disturbing trend is over time bandwidth usage goes continually upward. I have no faith Mdiacom will ever adjust for this scope creep.

5) I was an early adopter of Cable internet. I got one introductory offer in 7 years...hmmm might be longer now. At any rate, appears Mediacom only cares about new customers, not throwing older users a bone.

6) I'm ticked, because Mediacom treats me like they have a monopoly. They take away features like FREE webpages and stuff all the time. Rarely do they overdeliver on the promise. Yet, I see commercials for Mediacom bragging about going the extra mile. We over provision all our internet. I wish Mediacom would put its money where its mouth was once in a while. I live in a city of 100,00+, but sadly few other viable options exist for internet.

What's the highest I can get in 66006?

Currently the highest tier in Baldwin City, KS is Ultra 50. If you would like for a representative to reach out to you to go over any offers for all tiers, please feel free to send me an IM with a good contact time and number.

So in an IM with Chad I asked if the new usage charges started at the start of the new billing cycle and the reply I got was "Usage Based Billing is not set to start for customers that are not already on plans that have it until 9/7/13".
I recall reading Chad mention that the first overage would be credited. We've gone over the cap and have looked at our account to find that we have already been charged the overage, before 9/7/13, and have gotten the credit.

Seems that if the overage charges aren't set to happen for us until 9/7 it shouldn't have mattered if I went over the cap. We're getting close to 300gb so I wonder if we'll get another credit since it'll happen before 9/7.

If any of our customers changed their internet service as of 8/1/12 or later, then they are already on the Usage Based Billing that all customers will be on as of 9/7/13.

I pay $75/mo for Ultra50, 999GB cap, no contract. I'm happy with it.

If you're that upset about things, talk to MediacomChad; maybe he can help you.

Thanks Chad, I don't really want to change now until things settle down and I can evaluate the situation. I just assumed nothing higher than 20/2 was available to me since I hadn't been bumped to the 30Mb download speed.

wow, that's what I'm paying for the 20/2 service.

OK, so little concerned here… There's been nothing on my bills, no emails, no pop-ups… I only happened to see about this stopping by here… WTF is up with the overages now?? Anybody got a link to what I'm getting in to? I know that with over 10 years service, I was grandfathered in to whatever went on last round, but will I get some sort of notice of this before it happens?? I'm generally under the 250MB that shows on the Usage Meter page, but I have gone over a couple of times since I dumped the cable portion last year, and since Mediacom apparently won't be throttling, how much am I in for if they're throwing on flat fees? And I've always heard the meter isn't 100% accurate, how much leeway is there before getting charged?? (and I'm not sure of these overbuilders as I'm in CR and my only options for internet are Mediacom, Dish [though I don't want the TV stuff…], Quest [not an option due to our lines] or my mobile phone…)

Soooooo not thrilled to be only hearing about this accidentally by stopping by here to see if there's an easy fix for my more increasingly common modem resets…

psdp, I am in the exact same boat as you. I too had been with them for 10 yrs and had not changed my plan since the 20/2 first rolled out and knew I was grandfathered when they first rolled out this metering stuff, but unless I somehow missed it, I received no email and saw nothing on my statement, and only learned about it from this site, which I check just every so often.

I was an early cord cutter I guess a couple years ago and have been using it to watch netflix and itunes to keep up with the shows I even found worthwhile on tv but I learned with my usage I had to upgrade or I would go over the average month.

Perhaps the update info. for the members like us is coming still before 9/7? I dunno?

The thing is, this congestion stuff is a blatant lie. They have plenty of backbone bandwidth, they just won't update their nodes, and a few heavy users there don't cause the congestion. Individually, or statistically. They know this. Some of their low end customer facing wage slaves might buy the lies they're fed, but everywhere the decisions are made, this is known.

This is a money grab, pure and simple. They're abusing their relationships (read bribes) with local governments to keep out competition so they can milk their victims for all they can. I can name 3 specific instances where my city's corrupt officials blocked competition from coming in.

I wouldn't say Mediacom having congestion is a lie. They definitely have congestion in some areas. It is almost entertaining that a few heavy downloaders on ultra 50 can actually impact the neighborhoods internet speeds. However, the congestion issues could be eliminated with some network upgrades they should be doing but are not. Although Mediacom is doing a better job at maintaining speeds than some other cable companies, such as Time Warner.

I can't say Mediacom has kept competition out of areas here in Eastern Iowa, but there are some areas that seem to have kept Mediacom out.

Looks like Comcast's lowest cap is 50gb higher than Mediacom's. They have a 300gb cap.

well not that it will do any good with our corporate congress.....but I would think we rattle congress chains about dis-allowing media companies and cable tv owners to own internet services as what mediacom is doing is dishonest at best and protecting their cable tv bases as it will now cost us if we go over and bring a windfall to them and head off cable cutting as most of us have no other choice for internet and media companies should not control internet services as it is a conflict of interest.

You and I know damn well that congress, or any other government entity will NOT do anything since they pay lobby them to get what they want. Plus, most of these elected idiots know nothing about technology and go with what their told, usually by the cable companies. The only way this may change is when we finally get elected blowhards that understand technology. Sadly, Mediacom just did what all others are doing. Enraging, to say the least.

my solution as a single male is simply "btguard" ... rather than stream netflix, I torrent the movie in 4-6GB x264 MKV format so I never have to stream it more than once, and use the program "XBMC" to organize it all.

On months I don't download movies I rarely use more than 20GB however. Too bad you can't "bank" unused GB to the next month.

I can imagine regular netflix users would hit the cap quickly if there are multiple users using it for multiple hours a day. Oh well, the content providers want their pork. Such is the way of the world.

Caps aren't new, they've been going on for at least a year (??) now. In fact, looking at the pricing and plans, they've been the same for a good bit, from 150 to 999 gig.

Is it a good idea? No, it's a horrible one, one that allows for cable companies to basically monopolize internet usage, to try to deter individuals from legally streaming, from sites like Netflix, Hulu, etc. This, of course is by design.

Unfortunately, this is also industry standard when dealing with cable companies. They all do it (at least the major ones), and have done so for at least the past 2 years. Nothing new here.