For the record there is no written guidance of just how much bandwidth you have to use montly to be considered an abuser. Many people complain about this however at the same time it might be better to not publish numbers to avoid having a set number. For most the assumed number that seems to get you noticed is somewhere around 600 GBs monthly. That's a lot of bandwidth for the casual user.
Like many have mentioned cable is a shared resource and the ISPs have to purchase their bandwidth from the backbone providers.
Cox cuts them off at 40GBs, based on the one guy in Internet radio forums using his Cox account to transmit high-bandwidth feeds to his LoudCity broadcasting account, and got terminated for exceeding
40GBs in one month, which is why I am limiting my outbound feeds to Live 365 to 16K, until DSL gets put in, in a few days time. 16K translates to about 5GB per month on a 24/7 station, assuming a 30 day month, and most cable companies I dont think would whine about that.
There is no hard limit. It is a function of the node's average usage....
Take the average usage on a node - then the very top whatever percent of users are looked at. Then flagged if it is WELL over a certain percent of the 'norm'.
So, if your node is heavily used, the abuser still has to be considerably above the average user.
I realize that that wasn't YOUR point, but [lack of visibility] certainly is THE point in all of this.
It sure is, and we have no visibility to it.
Yes, that part is common knowledge, but without knowing the first piece of information, we're effectively blind. The second piece of information is basically worthless without the first piece.
This has all been discussed before, though. There's nothing new here.
But THAT is their whole idea, if you don't know how fast you COULD go, you won't push those limits. Just do your own thing on the net, if you get into trouble, they will happily inform you and then you can figure out a way to deal with it.
I wonder if that is how channels from all over the world end up on PPLive, PPMate, SopCast, TVAnts, and many other Chinese P2P Servers for the world to see.
I am not sure I agree or disagree with you....if I don't tell you how much bandwidth you COULD use, how much WILL you use? If somehow the word gets out that SOME people have been restricted because they are using too much bandwidth, but I do not let out any physical numbers, how much will you use? Probably less than you COULD use and therefore Comcasts's hardware is not stressed to its limits causing other problems. If you and I are on the same node and we both figure out we can use up to 5 gig a day, then we just might use that much. BUT if we are afraid of being whacked by Comcast we might be a bit more judicious in our use of our bandwidth and in turn keep their hardware from maxing out. Kind of like the speed limit analogy....the State says you can do
55mph on the Interstate, people do whatever they want, but NO ONE goes slower than 55mph. If the speed limit were raised to 65mph, after a bit NO ONE would be doing 55mph anymore, they would all be doing at least 65mph.
And right there is where the argument falls apart, IMHO. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that 200 GB/mo is a safe number anywhere on Comcast's network[1]. Knowing that, I still use about 30-40 GB a month for my entire household of 7 PC's, just as I've done since I started monitoring. Will SOME people use more if they think they can? Sure, but MOST won't. (I have some work experience in the area of bandwidth usage, not with Comcast, but with a national wireless data provider. We sell unlimited accounts, yet more than 97% of our customers use only a tiny fraction of what they COULD use, much to our delight.)
[1] I picked the number 200 out of the air, based on the many reports I've read where people have said they used 300 to over 1000 GB in the month prior to being notified by Comcast that they've used too much. The actual 'safe' number can and will vary from month to month and from area to area, which is really the heart of the problem.
The people who were affected, in many cases, gave out the physical numbers that caused them to be notified. But the fact remains that, across a given population, most people will not substantially increase their usage just because they can.
Since analogies are so popular, when I paid a flat rate for my home phone service, and that rate included both unlimited local and long distance calling, did I make any more calls than I did when I paid for each LD call separately? No. And since local calls have been unmetered for many years, do I and most others sit on the phone all day and night? Again, no.
Or how about this one...my co-workers and I all have cell phones with unlimited calling minutes, unlimited text messages, unlimited video mail, unlimited data, and a whole host of other unlimited features, but most of use less then 300 minutes of voice and less than 1 GB of data per month.
Last one...when my team goes to a buffet lunch, do we eat until we can't move, just because we CAN? No, we impose our own personal limits and stop eating long before the food runs out.
I think the people who say it's human nature to use as much of a resource, just because they CAN, are mostly wrong.
The kind of abuse monitoring we're talking about here doesn't prevent Comcast's hardware from maxing out. A period of a whole month is far less granular than it would need to be for that purpose.
*groan* Speed limit analogies suck, but here are two more to consider. In Montana, when the Interstate speed limit was "reasonable and prudent", the vast majority of drivers continued to drive 65-70 MPH, just as they did before. Second example, in municipal areas where the speed limits are typically 35-45 MPH, it's common to see people going significantly slower than the speed limit as they look for a particular business or address, or simply try to dodge pedestrians. In both cases, people didn't drive faster just because they could. Did I mention that speed limit analogies suck? :-)
This is way more than any reasonable residential user would use. If you are using that kind of bandwidth, if I worked at Comcast, I would think you are sharing this connection with other people. Basically reselling Comcasts bandwidth.
And just what is this company. There are many scam shams out there that promise what you just did.
Those rates are not for individual usage, those rates indicate some very serious misuse of bandwidth from a residential service.
That is an incorrect assumption. Remember the LA riots, where everyone started looting.
Some will. I took a similar plan, just because it was cheaper to have long distance and local service carried by a clec.
Again just because you do not see it happening, it is.
And again, I have seen people do just the opposite.
You need to wake up and smell the roses. Look at strip mining, open pit mining.
Yeah, right. People doing the speed limit when there are enough to have one per lane, side by side, slowing it to a crawl. The speed-limit signs are just taunts aimed at people who have somewhere to go.
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