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poonjahb
Premium Member
join:2005-06-01
East Moline, IL

14 recommendations

poonjahb

Premium Member

[IL] Threatened with throttling or disconnect for 1/2 data cap usage

Mediacom threatening throttling or disconnection for “above average” bandwidth usage

I’ve been a Mediacom internet customer for about 10 years. I pay full rate for their gig cable internet, which includes a 6 TB data cap, as I do IT consulting and have a family of four that is pretty much always streaming things on multiple devices. Since I’ve been working from home for almost the past year my data consumption increased so I upped my package to make sure we wouldn’t go over the cap. I’ve never gone over 4TB of usage in a month, but came close a couple of times, so I upgraded the 500Mb to the 1G.

So, got a call from the Mediacom fraud and abuse department today. The rep told me they were calling customers that have “higher than average” bandwidth usage as they are having network issues. I hurried up and checked my account and only used a bit over 2.5TB last month. He told me my upload was 450GB over their average and if I didn’t reduce my usage they would either throttle or disconnect me. I argued that I used less than half of the total data allowed by my plan, but he said my 1.2TB of upload was too much and that this was my warning.

I’ve not been able to find any reference to allowed upload vs total data usage and am pretty sure they can’t just arbitrarily decide that only 750GB of my 6TB allowance can be upstream traffic. Has anyone else had a similar experience?

If there were any other internet options other than horribly slow AT&T DSL, with a small data cap, I would switch in a heartbeat. Unfortunately with my job and working from home, going without usable internet is not an option.

I’m about to the point of finding an executive contact at Mediacom and/or raising a stink with the media, but can’t risk them cutting me off out of spite.
Brainbl33d
join:2016-02-23
Des Moines, IA

12 recommendations

Brainbl33d

Member

WTF..... Oh hell no...... If mediacom called me and said that BS to me, I would of been super pissed and caused all kinds of hell. You have a 6 TB cap whether that's download OR upload. This type of crap is the reason I use a VPN and different DNS servers for unencrypted traffic. My data, my business.
poonjahb
Premium Member
join:2005-06-01
East Moline, IL

11 recommendations

poonjahb

Premium Member

Unfortunately VPN and alternate DNS doesn't change total upload vs download, it just hides what it is from them. The traffic still goes the same direction, and there was nothing about the type of traffic, just the overall quantity that they were warning me about.

Anondf9f2
@173.26.186.x

6 recommendations

Anondf9f2

Anon

Are you sure it was truly mediacom?
poonjahb
Premium Member
join:2005-06-01
East Moline, IL

4 recommendations

poonjahb

Premium Member

Yes, I didn't recognize the number when they called so I let it go to voicemail. They left a message asking for a call back, so I verified the number they left was the Mediacom Fraud and Abuse department before I called it back.

MediacomChad
Mediacom Social Media Relations Team
Premium Member
join:2010-01-20
Gulf Breeze, FL

5 recommendations

MediacomChad to poonjahb

Premium Member

to poonjahb
Hello poonjahb,

I apologize for the frustration this is causing. The notification you received was to inform you that there is excessive bandwidth usage, not normal to the majority of our customers, coming from your connection. Mediacom certainly has seen an increase in bandwidth usage with recent events of the last 10 months. Either due to malware, virus activity or just simply your needs have changed, we need to have a conversation.

What we cannot do is let an issue persist that might eventually impact other customers, so that is why you were notified and requested to call us.

I hope that helps explain this communication. If you have any questions or concerns regarding this topic, please call 844-231-2037.
poonjahb
Premium Member
join:2005-06-01
East Moline, IL

16 recommendations

poonjahb

Premium Member

MediacomChad,

I did call and speak with someone in the fraud and abuse department, my major frustration is that the "average" that I am being expected to adhere to seems to be an arbitrary number that I have yet to get a good answer on. The rep that I spoke with simply told me that I needed to reduce my usage by 453GB below last month, claiming that was the amount that I was "above average." When I tried to push for more information on what the limit was, and how it was calculated he couldn't tell me. Is that the "average" for all Mediacom Cable internet customers in my area, nationally, or only for users with the gigabit tier service with the 6TB supposed data cap? I'd be happy to have a conversation with someone else that can actually explain and discuss these things with me, but the call center for your fraud and abuse department is apparently not who I need to talk to. While he was trying to be pleasant, it was quite apparent that the gentleman I spoke with was reading a script and had no actual information beyond what he was told to say.

Again, I would be happy to speak with anyone in management at Mediacom about this issue, preferably someone with a bit more technical knowledge of the issue that can speak to what expectations are.

Anondf764
@97.125.16.x

18 recommendations

Anondf764 to MediacomChad

Anon

to MediacomChad
said by MediacomChad:

Hello poonjahb,

I apologize for the frustration this is causing. The notification you received was to inform you that there is excessive bandwidth usage, not normal to the majority of our customers, coming from your connection. Mediacom certainly has seen an increase in bandwidth usage with recent events of the last 10 months. Either due to malware, virus activity or just simply your needs have changed, we need to have a conversation.

What we cannot do is let an issue persist that might eventually impact other customers, so that is why you were notified and requested to call us.

I hope that helps explain this communication. If you have any questions or concerns regarding this topic, please call 844-231-2037.

Yes, we need to have a conversation.

What exactly are the bandwidth caps for, which customers pay for and are based on level of services, if they cannot be used? We've been told the data caps are in place to help protect the network.

This customer claims to have the 6 TB data cap. The data cap includes both Downloads and Uploads. If Mediacom cannot provide the 6 TB data plan, then why are the offering and selling it?

Anon60481
@134.29.173.x

12 recommendations

Anon60481

Anon

Keep a record of your communication and if Mediacom tries to cut you off for a service you are paying for, then I would recommend that you contact your State's Attorney General Office.

KA0OUV
Premium Member
join:2010-02-17
Jefferson City, MO

13 recommendations

KA0OUV

Premium Member

This may be of use as well:

»consumercomplaints.fcc.g ··· 02206106
Expand your moderator at work
kmccallister
join:2010-12-04
Moline, IL

10 recommendations

kmccallister to poonjahb

Member

to poonjahb

Re: [IL] Threatened with throttling or disconnect for 1/2 data cap usage

I got the exact same phone call and I received a letter yesterday as well.

The only difference for me is I was told I would only ever get throttled and would never get disconnected.

My concerns are the same as yours however. I am paying for 1gb/50mb plan with the 6TB cap. None of which I am exceeding but yet my usage is deemed “excessive”. I also was flagged because of upload usage and not download. Which should not be an issue. I should be able to use 5.9TB upload if I want and it shouldn’t matter. That’s what I pay for.

The excuse that my usage negatively impacts others on the network sounds like Mediacom oversold the network and they need to perform some upgrades.
poonjahb
Premium Member
join:2005-06-01
East Moline, IL

9 recommendations

poonjahb

Premium Member

My point exactly. If the network can’t support the speeds and data allowances they are selling, stop selling them until it can. The argument that I’ve heard that their network was put in before these speeds were released is totally invalid. If the network cannot handle them, stop selling them, simple answer.
poonjahb

13 recommendations

poonjahb to KA0OUV

Premium Member

to KA0OUV
Oh, I did that before I posted here. I got a response from the FCC today that my complaint and information have been forwarded to Mediacom, so I’m curious to see if they actually reach out with more info than the canned responses that I’ve gotten so far. No offense to MediacomChad, you’ve been helpful in the past when I’ve had issues, but the response you posted was almost verbatim copy of the response that MediacomOfficial posted on my Reddit thread. I understand that is probably the official company line that you are supposed to post, and I don’t fault you for it, but it still doesn’t answer any of the questions or complaints raised.
godofthunder
join:2021-01-07

7 recommendations

godofthunder to MediacomChad

Member

to MediacomChad
I was notified as well. I would love to have a thoughtful conversation with someone about this. Unfortunately my experience calling support is dreadful since the CSA is not equipped with the knowledge or tools to have that conversation. I would be willing to move to a business account, but the last two times i have requested a sales person call me, i never heard back. On the third attempt, I finally heard back, but the plans all have long contracts, extra fees, much much slower speeds, for twice the money per month. The only benefit is the support response.

So when Mediacom is ready to work together, I am ready. Otherwise, I will wait until Metronet lights up my house this summer, T-mobile home internet is available or Starlink exits beta.

Mediacom has competition, they better get used to it, because it is not going away.
DJboutit
join:2009-12-10
Columbia, MO

4 recommendations

DJboutit to poonjahb

Member

to poonjahb
I had the same thing happen to me for November and December I used 99% of 4TB I did not go over they are also saying is it affecting everyone one else in the neighborhood S M H. Look like Media wants every house hold to only use at max 70% of there monthly bandwidth. The bandwidth calculator on Mediacom's end was messed we will never know for how long. I read reports from a decent number of people say the were told their usage was 20% to 50% higher than it really was.
poonjahb
Premium Member
join:2005-06-01
East Moline, IL

5 recommendations

poonjahb

Premium Member

I only used 43% of my 6TB cap though, not even close to maxing out, but still got the threats. I have to work from home for the foreseeable future and have two kids in remote school, so I can’t go without internet, but also need to be able to use it in a reasonable manner, which I don’t feel I have been overdoing.
DJboutit
join:2009-12-10
Columbia, MO

1 edit

5 recommendations

DJboutit to poonjahb

Member

to poonjahb
Looks like the crap Mediacom is telling a lot of use could because we might have 500gb to 700gb or more upload in a month this might not have anything to do with downloading.

If you get 4TB or 6TB a month you should be able to use 1TB to 1.5TB or even 2TB of uploads a month sounds like Mediacom is kinda cheap and does not want to upgrade the infrastructure to handle the faster upload speeds

IowaMan
Premium Member
join:2008-08-21
Grinnell, IA

2 recommendations

IowaMan

Premium Member

I know what all of this is about which is crap is you ask me, Is it because they are concord of the upstream capacity of the 50Mb?

In 6 months ill have MCG fiber in town so by the end of this year (i hope ill cancel Mediacom so quick it won't be funny
YuRi
Premium Member
join:2008-11-04

2 edits

9 recommendations

YuRi to MediacomChad

Premium Member

to MediacomChad
said by MediacomChad:

Hello poonjahb,

I apologize for the frustration this is causing. The notification you received was to inform you that there is excessive bandwidth usage, not normal to the majority of our customers, coming from your connection. Mediacom certainly has seen an increase in bandwidth usage with recent events of the last 10 months. Either due to malware, virus activity or just simply your needs have changed, we need to have a conversation.

What we cannot do is let an issue persist that might eventually impact other customers, so that is why you were notified and requested to call us.

I hope that helps explain this communication. If you have any questions or concerns regarding this topic, please call 844-231-2037.

How is it considered "excessive bandwidth usage" if you are not even using 50% of your monthly quota allowance? You know a lot of ISP's have Unlimited bandwidth quota's themselves.. so when they started doing this monthly quota years ago, it was purely to make more money. How much money you need? Why not invest some of this scam cash back into the network and add more bandwidth instead of pocketing it all?
DJboutit
join:2009-12-10
Columbia, MO

5 recommendations

DJboutit

Member

Seems like Mediacom is spending a crap load of money on TV ads promoting the new 10Gbit service. When most of that money should be used to upgrade the service to handle all the uploading. When Covid goes 80% or more away 99% of people are not going to stop using their webcams. Webcam use will still be like 40% more than precovid webcam usage. So it time to upgrade to the service to handle more uploading. The new normal will be more people using their webcam zooming and gaming more.
YuRi
Premium Member
join:2008-11-04

9 recommendations

YuRi

Premium Member

Click for full size
said by DJboutit:

Seems like Mediacom is spending a crap load of money on TV ads promoting the new 10Gbit service. When most of that money should be used to upgrade the service to handle all the uploading. When Covid goes 80% or more away 99% of people are not going to stop using their webcams. Webcam use will still be like 40% more than precovid webcam usage. So it time to upgrade to the service to handle more uploading. The new normal will be more people using their webcam zooming and gaming more.

You know they say their network is stressing but yet these emails were sent out in December 2020~. So WHY would you up speeds IF your networking is stressing? Makes ZERO SENSE.
poonjahb
Premium Member
join:2005-06-01
East Moline, IL

13 recommendations

poonjahb

Premium Member

That is my problem. They’re upgrading speed for a ton of customers, but my 1.2TB of upload last month, which calculates to a sustained 3.6Mbps over the 31 days in December, is too much and they threaten to cut me off... If the network is that fragile then stop giving away more speed that people can’t use.
YuRi
Premium Member
join:2008-11-04

3 recommendations

YuRi

Premium Member

said by poonjahb:

That is my problem. They’re upgrading speed for a ton of customers, but my 1.2TB of upload last month, which calculates to a sustained 3.6Mbps over the 31 days in December, is too much and they threaten to cut me off... If the network is that fragile then stop giving away more speed that people can’t use.

If one has lets say 6TB of monthly quota that counts all traffic going in and out and it should be a issue when you hit the quota even then why we even need a quota? oh wait.. It's about money. I have no idea where they are trying to pull these "invisible caps" at.

tsduke
Premium Member
join:2006-03-04
Waterloo, IA

11 recommendations

tsduke to MediacomChad

Premium Member

to MediacomChad
This is beyond stupid. Why is Mediacom selling these packages if they are going to penalize customers for using paid for data caps?????
poonjahb
Premium Member
join:2005-06-01
East Moline, IL

9 recommendations

poonjahb to MediacomChad

Premium Member

to MediacomChad
MediacomChad,

Not to call you out on anything, as I understand you are relaying corporate information, but I logged into my account this morning to check my consumption so far this month, and had a banner at the top titled "Special Alert: Keeping you connected through the holiday season and beyond!"

Imagine my surprise to open it and read the message and see the below excerpt from the Mediacom EVP of Operations, and I quote:

"We are continuing to focus on network reliability and performance by testing, monitoring, and enhancing our systems 24/7 to support customer usage and minimize any outages. Since March 1st, we have seen downstream and upstream peak Internet traffic rise by 27.4% and 46.9%, respectively. As the Mediacom network is engineered to be 18 months ahead of anticipated consumer demand, we had already built in the system capacity to handle this sudden surge in volume.

Additionally, we've accelerated network maintenance and new construction efforts to support anticipated traffic growth as more and more people work and study from home.

These continual network improvements are critical as we are supporting more broadband customers at faster speeds than any time in our company's history. In fact, we closed the 3rd quarter of 2020 with 30% of our customers taking speeds of at least 200 Mbps and with over 100,000 customers taking 1 GIG internet."

There is then a section on how Mediacom conducted the first field trial of their 10G internet platform. So, if customer demand increased so much, and customers have been flocking to the higher tiers, and usage is up almost 47% on the upload side, why is it that Mediacom is coming after someone and threatening disconnection for using 3.65Mbps upload for the month of December when my package is 1G down, 50Mbps up?

Please let me know if there is someone beyond the call center folks that would like to discuss this, as I am genuinely curious how this makes any sense.

Here is the full text of the message if anyone else is interested: »view.e.mediacomcable.com ··· 0cec/raw

Anon9d921
@173.24.225.x

9 recommendations

Anon9d921 to tsduke

Anon

to tsduke
I just had the same experience.
I got two phone calls just before christmas (12/22 & 12/23 at around 3:30pm local time), I let them go to voice mail, and they sounded like a phishing or scam from a Fraud and Abuse team.
Ignored it, received the postal mail letter January 7. I spent a couple of hours checking my system to make sure what I had wasn't having issues. I checked the total usage history, and one month I got to 40% of my 4000gb usage cap.

Called Mediacom, and they told me I uploaded a terabyte from thanksgiving to Dec 20th. That would be correct as I was updating my photos and uploading them to my gallery service.

Final answer
Mediacom stated that I had to keep my uploads below 750 gb per month. M
Mediacom's network engineer had determined that
Mediacom's AUP says they can limit anything they feel is detrimental.

I am not happy about this. This was not published anywhere that I can find even today.

Pre-pandemic, I chose Mediacom because of upload speeds, not download speed.

I work remotely, and my wife is a doctor who does telemed.
No way will I switch my wife to Mediacom now, we will keep that on the other DSL service for the critical items.
radios
join:2020-10-02
Holbrook, NY

4 recommendations

radios to poonjahb

Member

to poonjahb
WOW!!. this sure seems like FRAUD to me!. you can't use what you already have paid for?. HMMM..
YuRi
Premium Member
join:2008-11-04

5 recommendations

YuRi to poonjahb

Premium Member

to poonjahb
said by poonjahb:

MediacomChad,

Not to call you out on anything, as I understand you are relaying corporate information, but I logged into my account this morning to check my consumption so far this month, and had a banner at the top titled "Special Alert: Keeping you connected through the holiday season and beyond!"

Imagine my surprise to open it and read the message and see the below excerpt from the Mediacom EVP of Operations, and I quote:

"We are continuing to focus on network reliability and performance by testing, monitoring, and enhancing our systems 24/7 to support customer usage and minimize any outages. Since March 1st, we have seen downstream and upstream peak Internet traffic rise by 27.4% and 46.9%, respectively. As the Mediacom network is engineered to be 18 months ahead of anticipated consumer demand, we had already built in the system capacity to handle this sudden surge in volume.

Additionally, we've accelerated network maintenance and new construction efforts to support anticipated traffic growth as more and more people work and study from home.

These continual network improvements are critical as we are supporting more broadband customers at faster speeds than any time in our company's history. In fact, we closed the 3rd quarter of 2020 with 30% of our customers taking speeds of at least 200 Mbps and with over 100,000 customers taking 1 GIG internet."

There is then a section on how Mediacom conducted the first field trial of their 10G internet platform. So, if customer demand increased so much, and customers have been flocking to the higher tiers, and usage is up almost 47% on the upload side, why is it that Mediacom is coming after someone and threatening disconnection for using 3.65Mbps upload for the month of December when my package is 1G down, 50Mbps up?

Please let me know if there is someone beyond the call center folks that would like to discuss this, as I am genuinely curious how this makes any sense.

Here is the full text of the message if anyone else is interested: »view.e.mediacomcable.com ··· 0cec/raw

That Mediacom link is full of discombobulations.
krypt0
join:2003-05-18

1 edit

8 recommendations

krypt0 to poonjahb

Member

to poonjahb
I got the same letter in mail today.

Granted I'm a heavy internet user (Lots of computers, consoles, streaming and also work from home), and have exceeded 6TB cap a few times, but I pay for my "overage fees" as billed.
I guarantee my neighbors internet service experience is not degraded due to any of my network usage. The majority of my neighbors have DSL or a very minimal internet plan.

This is BS, because the only other option is to "upgrade" to business internet.
3X the price, and slower upload speeds from residential. If business plan was 1000/100, then that would be different story..

Additionally, doesn't a business cable internet connection use the same equipment and infrastructure (lines, CMTS, etc..) as a residential connection?
How would residential usage that is "negativity affecting performance" be any different from business usage?
If my residential usage is truly having such a negative impact on their service, then my business usage would have the same impact.. It's the same amount of data being transferred, just billed differently.