Comcast Xfinity throttling

First of all, what are y'all doing that you're blowing through 250 GB in two weeks?

Netflix STAYS running at my house on multiple TVs and I topped out on Comcast's meter at 189 GB one month and that's about as high as it got.

Here is the bad news...service providers are moving to usage based billing. The demand for bandwidth is exceeding the ability of carriers to upgrade the public network infrastructure to continue providing unlimited bandwidth on into the Terabytes for each customer. 40 Gig and 100 Gig interfaces are SUPER expensive and the routers/switches they run on are even more so. The average customer isn't going to exceed 250 GB a month unless you are downloading and streaming 24/7.

It can be a pain, but it's gotta happen

echo465

I apparently cursed myself. I'm posting this from my phone because my dsl just went down. My data usage was very high for months when I switched from Mozy to Crashplan for online backups. Plus the usual video streaming and stuff.

dead_p00l

I agree with vinbuck. Metered usage and caps are the wave of the future, at least the immediate foreseeable future. With that in mind providers should be willing to offer either higher caps or no caps if a customer is willing to pay an additional cost. I dont know if any providers currently do this but it would make sense.

tpatt100

Yeah I see caps becoming the norm just to get us used to the tiered plans when the entertainment industry fully adopts online media as a true alternative to cable and OTA. That way they can sell you tiered plans with different prices like long distance charges were back in the day. I could see this since we are so used to tiered or metered plans for all of our current utility needs. Comcast wants to curb the high end users as long as they can since the majority of their users do not use that much.

Eventually when the mainstream users moves everything online cable wants to be in a position to become a utility company like water, sewer, gas and electric when you no longer need their cable service.

Believe it or not, there actually are pretty good reasons for the bandwidth caps.

I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty, however, that they won't be that low forever.

Nobylspoon

I would be fine with a cap if it was dependent on your speed package. I pay twice as much for my service but I am still limited to the same amount as someone with a slower package. The only difference, I am able to reach the cap faster. I am still billed twice as much for the same 250GB.

Cloud computing and data throttling can not both be "the future" as they conflict with each other greatly.

@vinbuck - Reaching 250GB is quite easy. 1hr of HD streaming from Netflix is 2.5GB (figures are from Xfinity FAQ). That is 3.3 hours a day. There is always someone home in my house so it is quite easy to max the cap with just Netflix alone. Xfinity FAQ solution - Switch to a lower quality streaming. Sounds to me they just do this to push for people to subscribe to their own HD service so they want to block access to competitive services.

I have found a way to bypass their throttling mechanisms. I need to do some testing to see if this still is reflected on my 250GB allocation or not.

Roguetadhg

Actually ISPs will be throttling connections, not just comcast xfinity.

ISPs to Start Throttling Pirates, More by July 12

mind you, this says for pirates. However, I doubt it won't apply as a generic umbrella that's a "cap" period.

which to say, if you use gaming a lot, or multiple users using the connection - your up a creek without a paddle.

Asif Dasl

I'm kinda surprised you guys have such low bandwidth caps... the ISP I'm with now has a lower 40Gb for irregular users but then next one up is 300Gb then for a few Euros more it's 350Gb - and the ISP I'm moving to has a 500Gb cap for all 25Mb, 50Mb & 100Mb packages... if anything I thought you guys would be unlimited on top packages

Everyone

Read the fine print even closer. They can actually ban you from their service for exceeding that cap. You're supposed to get a warning letter the 1st time you do it, and the 2nd time they ban you. That is of course unless they've changed this within the last 8 months or so, as that was the last time I looked at it.

Switching to Business Class service was the best thing I ever did. I did it BEFORE I ever came anywhere near the cap. Cancelled the TV side of my cable, switched the internet to Business Class, picked up Netflix. I have 2 TVs, and while I'm working, my wife is usually watching Netflix on 1, and the kids are often watching something else on Netflix off the other. Cut my monthly expense for TV + Internet in half, have a better internet connection, and don't have to worry about any caps.

Nobylspoon

Asif Dasl wrote: »

I'm kinda surprised you guys have such low bandwidth caps... the ISP I'm with now has a lower 40Gb for irregular users but then next one up is 300Gb then for a few Euros more it's 350Gb - and the ISP I'm moving to has a 500Gb cap for all 25Mb, 50Mb & 100Mb packages... if anything I thought you guys would be unlimited on top packages

I wouldn't mind a 500GB cap. I hit 250GB in 2 weeks so that would get me through the month. You can only get unlimited with a business account. As you can see in the chat I posted, they didn't have pricing info for me on that. Some ISP's like FiOS have unlimited regardless of speed package. Not sure how long it will last though, they recently put a cap on wireless data plans.

WafflesAndRootbeer

Remember, you can adjust your Netflix bitrates via your account settings on their website to save your butt. Most people don't know that.

Everyone

WafflesAndRootbeer wrote: »

Remember, you can adjust your Netflix bitrates via your account settings on their website to save your butt. Most people don't know that.

Yup, but the video quality goes down when you do that. I love being able to leave mine at max quality.

Nobylspoon wrote: »

I wouldn't mind a 500GB cap. I hit 250GB in 2 weeks so that would get me through the month. You can only get unlimited with a business account. As you can see in the chat I posted, they didn't have pricing info for me on that. Some ISP's like FiOS have unlimited regardless of speed package. Not sure how long it will last though, they recently put a cap on wireless data plans.

To put it simply, it's a capacity issue. Data usage has grown exponentially over the last 5 years, and upgrading backbone circuits, turning up new cross connects and peering sessions, etc, is not a quick process, nor a cheap one. It's only in the last couple of years that 100g links have started to roll out, for awhile we were all stuck on 10g and 40g links. When you have 20 million subscribers, and each subscription usually has more than one person making use of it, it's pretty easy to fill 10 and 40 gig links. Traffic engineering is no joke. European countries have the advantages of much smaller populations, and less distance to cover between their IX's on a country by country basis.

As far as pricing for Comcast business plans go... it's not difficult to find.

Business Internet Plans, Business Internet Prices - Comcast Business Class

I'll bet dollars to donuts you were talking to a virtual agent instead of a live person, so I'm not surprised the responses were... less than satisfactory.

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

I'll bet dollars to donuts you were talking to a virtual agent instead of a live person, so I'm not surprised the responses were... less than satisfactory.

I'll take that bet. I'm sure the agent was live, but was probably in a typical outsourced country, like India or the Phillipines. If the agent was in the good ol' USA, I'm guessing it was still a live agent.

Net Neutrality, folks....Net Neutrality.

Read up about it as you would for any cert/tech fad like the cloud. Then find a coalition that ISPs are NOT a part of and join that....the consumers' voices (and dollars) have to outweigh those of the ISPs....only then can we further delay the throttling of data.

shodown

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

To put it simply, it's a capacity issue. Data usage has grown exponentially over the last 5 years, and upgrading backbone circuits, turning up new cross connects and peering sessions, etc, is not a quick process, nor a cheap one. It's only in the last couple of years that 100g links have started to roll out, for awhile we were all stuck on 10g and 40g links. When you have 20 million subscribers, and each subscription usually has more than one person making use of it, it's pretty easy to fill 10 and 40 gig links. Traffic engineering is no joke. European countries have the advantages of much smaller populations, and less distance to cover between their IX's on a country by country basis.

As far as pricing for Comcast business plans go... it's not difficult to find.

Business Internet Plans, Business Internet Prices - Comcast Business Class

I'll bet dollars to donuts you were talking to a virtual agent instead of a live person, so I'm not surprised the responses were... less than satisfactory.

Thanks for giving us the skinny. Sometimes when I hear "sales" or "management" folk talk about capacity they don't sound sincere.

Roguetadhg

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

To put it simply, it's a capacity issue. Data usage has grown exponentially over the last 5 years, and upgrading backbone circuits, turning up new cross connects and peering sessions, etc, is not a quick process, nor a cheap one. It's only in the last couple of years that 100g links have started to roll out, for awhile we were all stuck on 10g and 40g links. When you have 20 million subscribers, and each subscription usually has more than one person making use of it, it's pretty easy to fill 10 and 40 gig links. Traffic engineering is no joke. European countries have the advantages of much smaller populations, and less distance to cover between their IX's on a country by country basis.

As far as pricing for Comcast business plans go... it's not difficult to find.

Business Internet Plans, Business Internet Prices - Comcast Business Class

I'll bet dollars to donuts you were talking to a virtual agent instead of a live person, so I'm not surprised the responses were... less than satisfactory.

Agreed. Im sure greed does play a role in it. With the internet growing into a "Cloud", streaming video, etc. Things will get clogged. I believe most people would rather be thottled and not capped. Atleast, I would be happy to take a slower speed, if that meant I can keep on doing what I needed to for the month's service. Or thottling at steps. After 50% of bandwidth used, 50% speed - or something like that.

it_consultant

My actual throughput increased when I moved off of Comcast's 50/10 service and onto Qwest's 20/5 service. I have done a few sustained throughput tests with my computer and my buddy who has a higher level of "speed" through Comcast. FTP and other bulk downloads went faster on Qwest. This is not some out of the ordinary behavior either, I see this behavior consistently on Comcast's network. I watched a video online of someone doing a packet analysis where he actually pointed out the drop packets that Comcast was inserting into the data stream. I wish I could find that video.

erpadmin wrote: »

I'll take that bet. I'm sure the agent was live, but was probably in a typical outsourced country, like India or the Phillipines. If the agent was in the good ol' USA, I'm guessing it was still a live agent.

I'm gonna bet that you're gonna lose that bet

erpadmin wrote: »

Net Neutrality, folks....Net Neutrality.

Read up about it as you would for any cert/tech fad like the cloud. Then find a coalition that ISPs are NOT a part of and join that....the consumers' voices (and dollars) have to outweigh those of the ISPs....only then can we further delay the throttling of data.

For the sake of simplicity, i'm not going to get into the costs of upgrading and maintaining public distribution, core and backbone networks but focus on just the access side...

It takes hundreds of thousands of dollars initially to serve a neighborhood of about 300 homes with roughly a Gigabit backhaul of voice and data in a DSL model (I'm sure the Cable SP guys can provide numbers for their part but i'm guessing it's similar). It then takes thousands of dollars to keep it going on a monthly basis. Take those numbers, do the math and tell me how we pay for an infrastructure that will get everyone on the internet (just in the US) with unthrottled data usage?

This is assuming a copper plant for access (the majority of the US) and a fiber backhaul. Use fiber on the access side and it gets even more expensive...

ISPs want you to have as fast a speed as possible because it gets you on and off their network as quickly as possible. The problem comes in when you want to use that data stream on a 24/7 basis. Suddenly only a handful of people can get on the local access network in that neighborhood. The OP mentioned a 20Mbps rate for his connection. That means without throttling, 50 homes out of 300 in the neighborhood get their full bandwidth and everyone else gets Dial-up. As backhaul and backbone speeds are able to be upgraded then things will get better, but someones got to pay for it somewhere and the 40 bucks I pay Comcast for the speeds I get isn't a bad deal at all.

The Internet is like any other utility - it costs money to get it to you and the more you want, the more it costs. You wouldn't jack your neighbor's water or power...why do you want to take his ability to watch Netflix?

tpatt100

I think developers are going to need to focus on intelligent/ effective middle ground alternatives to help accomadate providers until they either invest or are forced to invest in building up the back end. I know Android was talking about implementing data usage tracking for apps into ICS which I dont have yet but sure app developers are like "you got data and i'm going to use it".

shodown wrote: »

Thanks for giving us the skinny. Sometimes when I hear "sales" or "management" folk talk about capacity they don't sound sincere.

Well, I'm a Comcast customer as well. I'm not trying to be an apologist, and believe me that when I say the operations side is aware that the caps are a pretty unpopular move. With that being said, the caps effect a *very* small percentage of the customer base. And even without most of the populace approaching the cap per month, I spend a good chunk of my time each week doing traffic engineering due to capacity issues.

While the sales and marketing folk were quick to seize on what the caps could mean for them, and have moved to capitalize on it (and really, I can't blame them, it's their job to sell after all), the reason for the caps is rooted in practicality. I'm not saying the network would come crawling to it's knees and crash and burn without them, but it does serve a purpose. And I can say with a reasonable degree of authority that Comcast is adding capacity as quickly as it's practically and financially responsible to do so. Some capacity issues are the results of congested backbone links, some are the result of markets which have grown their subscriber base beyond their equipments capacity to comfortably handle. The issues are identified and do have upgrades in the works, but it's not going to be quick. It's a *big* network, and you can't make too many changes at once, or else you run the risk of a total outage, and trust me, the only thing that pisses customers off more than being throttled, is not being able to connect at all.

erpadmin wrote: »

Net Neutrality, folks....Net Neutrality.

Read up about it as you would for any cert/tech fad like the cloud. Then find a coalition that ISPs are NOT a part of and join that....the consumers' voices (and dollars) have to outweigh those of the ISPs....only then can we further delay the throttling of data.

I know folks like to rally around big evil companies doing bad stuff to other big not so evil companies in the name of the almighty dollar. I can assure you that in the Comcast situation, the caps don't exist for that reason.

You want proof? I've had to explain to more than one friend/family member exactly why they're seeing stuttering/buffering/quality drops on Streampix after the sales guys told them it would work better than the issues they were having with Netflix.

There's only so much that traffic engineering and QoS can do, the pipe only fits so much, and if you try to force more down it, well, the pipe breaks!

vinbuck wrote: »

ISPs want you to have as fast a speed as possible because it gets you on and off their network as quickly as possible. The problem comes in when you want to use that data stream on a 24/7 basis. Suddenly only a handful of people can get on the local access network in that neighborhood. The OP mentioned a 20Mbps rate for his connection. That means without throttling, 50 homes out of 300 in the neighborhood get their full bandwidth and everyone else gets Dial-up. As backhaul and backbone speeds are able to be upgraded then things will get better, but someones got to pay for it somewhere and the 40 bucks I pay Comcast for the speeds I get isn't a bad deal at all.

The Internet is like any other utility - it costs money to get it to you and the more you want, the more it costs. You wouldn't jack your neighbor's water or power...why do you want to take his ability to watch Netflix?

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

I know folks like to rally around big evil companies doing bad stuff to other big not so evil companies in the name of the almighty dollar. I can assure you that in the Comcast situation, the caps don't exist for that reason.

You want proof? I've had to explain to more than one friend/family member exactly why they're seeing stuttering/buffering/quality drops on Streampix after the sales guys told them it would work better than the issues they were having with Netflix.

There's only so much that traffic engineering and QoS can do, the pipe only fits so much, and if you try to force more down it, well, the pipe breaks!

Contrary to popular belief, I'm NOT using my ISP's Internet 24/7. It's ON 24/7, but it's not being utilized 24/7...because hey....I have to be out of the house for at least several hours a day JUST so that I can pay for that access (among other things.) You hit the nail on the head though...folks are paying for those infrastructure upgrades that ISPs have to do so that the pipe can get widened. Problem is ISPs want to charge money at the front-end AND back-end (charge customers fees for access to the Internet; nothing wrong with that of course. But then the same ISPs want to charge Amazon and Netflix fees for putting their content out on the web for people to [pay for] access.) Welcome to the Net Neutrality argument, my friend.

Net Competition |

http://www.openinternetcoalition.com

You got both sides of the argument right there. I had to write a paper on this two months ago...I made some pretty sweet arguments, and some dude with a Ph.D from a well known university system gave me an A on this paper. While I was not allowed to focus on the technical part of the argument, I can pretty much dance with both of you guys on that as well. Yes, the pipe has to get widened, but if Comcast can't upgrade their infrastructure because they're too busy running NBC into the ground, then really, who's fault is that? More people are using the Internet...which means infrastructure has to be upgraded. Makes sense to me. But ISPs just want to get greedy.

erpadmin wrote: »

Contrary to popular belief, I'm NOT using my ISP's Internet 24/7. It's ON 24/7, but it's not being utilized 24/7...because hey....I have to be out of the house for at least several hours a day JUST so that I can pay for that access (among other things.) You hit the nail on the head though...folks are paying for those infrastructure upgrades that ISPs have to do so that the pipe can get widened. Problem is ISPs want to charge money at the front-end AND back-end (charge customers fees for access to the Internet; nothing wrong with that of course. But then the same ISPs want to charge Amazon and Netflix fees for putting their content out on the web for people to [pay for] access.) Welcome to the Net Neutrality argument, my friend.

Ehh..not a newcomer to this. I work for a Service Provider. ISPs/SPs do not charge for access to content, they charge for access to the network and how much you want to use it. You want to **** a few thousand terabits on my network? Sure...no problem, fork over the cash. Might want to do some research on peering agreements and Content Delivery Networks.

erpadmin wrote: »

Net Competition |

http://www.openinternetcoalition.com

You got both sides of the argument right there. I had to write a paper on this two months ago...I made some pretty sweet arguments, and some dude with a Ph.D from a well known university system gave me an A on this paper. While I was not allowed to focus on the technical part of the argument, I can pretty much dance with both of you guys on that as well. Yes, the pipe has to get widened, but if Comcast can't upgrade their infrastructure because they're too busy running NBC into the ground, then really, who's fault is that? More people are using the Internet...which means infrastructure has to be upgraded. Makes sense to me. But ISPs just want to get greedy.

Ok....so you wrote a sweet paper that was graded by Vint Cerf, got an A, and you want to go toe to toe on Internet Achitecture with two service provider engineers. We threw down our technical arguments....we have yet to hear yours?

That about cover it?

erpadmin wrote: »

Contrary to popular belief, I'm NOT using my ISP's Internet 24/7. It's ON 24/7, but it's not being utilized 24/7...because hey....I have to be out of the house for at least several hours a day JUST so that I can pay for that access (among other things.) You hit the nail on the head though...folks are paying for those infrastructure upgrades that ISPs have to do so that the pipe can get widened. Problem is ISPs want to charge money at the front-end AND back-end (charge customers fees for access to the Internet; nothing wrong with that of course. But then the same ISPs want to charge Amazon and Netflix fees for putting their content out on the web for people to [pay for] access.) Welcome to the Net Neutrality argument, my friend.

That's all the business side, and honestly, I don't care about it. The free market will shake it out. I'm only concerned with the operational side, and the part that gets me about the Net Neutrality argument is when service providers are accused of providing preferential treatment to traffic for things they own, and either refusing service, or providing degraded service. And that's simply not true. Comcast does not treat traffic bound for netflix any differently than that bound for Streampix. Not on purpose anyway... again, it's an issue of network capacity. For Comcast customers, Streampix traffic goes over the cbone (comcast backbone), whereas Netflix transits the ibone (internet backbone). They're entirely separate networks with different need s and demands.

And the entire 'charging Netflix more' for access is a bunch of sensationalist bullshit. It's a peering dispute. Peering agreements are privately negotiated between networks, with what is acceptable traffic levels and what isn't. This is the way the internet works. If one side or the other exceeds the agreed upon traffic rates, then the party getting screwed is going to do one of two things: #1 Demand more money #2 De-peer the offender. Comcast is hardly the only provider to have peering arguments. Look back over the last few years at Cogent vs. pretty much everyone. Cogent actually managed to partition the internet with some of their peering arguments. If Comcast decided to depeer Netflix, Comcast customers wouldn't lose access to Netflix, it would simply transit over another provider instead of going over the direct Netflix peering. This would likely lead to a degradation of service, as you'd be transiting another network entirely, and the degree of degradation would depend on the egress point and how the provider receiving that traffic routes it. Once it leaves the ibone for another provider, Comcast has absolutely *no* control over how it's routed to the endpoint.

If Netflix wants to send 3million+ subscribers their traffic over the peering session, and they're going to exceed the contract in order to do so, they're going to be expected to pay more. Any network engineer that has to deal with inter-AS peering will tell you the same thing.

While I have no doubt the sales and marketing folks would *love* to actually implement a policy of preferred service to Comcast owned IP in order to get folks to subscribe to it, it's not going to happen. It's been tried. You may remember when Comcast was using the Sandvine to detect bittorrent sessions and screwed with it by sending TCP RST's in order to kill the connections speed. That resulted in a slap on the wrist from the FCC, but more important was the public backlash. The only reason Comcast can get away with the DNS hijacking is because customers are provided the ability to opt-out.

Yes, the pipe has to get widened, but if Comcast can't upgrade their infrastructure because they're too busy running NBC into the ground, then really, who's fault is that? More people are using the Internet...which means infrastructure has to be upgraded. Makes sense to me. But ISPs just want to get greedy.

I can tell you for a fact that Comcast is upgrading the infrastructure. This is not a quick or easy process. You don't just call up Cisco and say 'hey, I need a new CMTS, can you drop it off sometime this week?' and then you install it, configure it, and start sending out traffic. Hell no. In order to actually get customers onto the new CMTS, it requires an outage as we either move or split nodes. You don't just call up Level 3 and AT&T and say 'hey guys, I need a new 40gig link delivered to this site, can you install it next week?' New WAN circuits have lead times of months, not days, and that's assuming the fiber passes validation before we're willing to actually put any traffic on it. The infrastructure is being upgraded, because Comcast recognizes that pretty much all traffic is going to be IP based in the future. They're already doing it in some markets, where *everything*, voice, live video, VOD, and internet is delivered over the IP network, the RF infrastructure doesn't carry channels on frequencies anymore, they carry IP. This is why there's such a huge push to get rid of analog channels. Once that spectrum is reclaimed, we can push more cable modem channels, which means we can utilize upstream and downstream channel bonding to the cable modem, and provide much better speeds.

But as I said, this isn't a quick or easy process. We have to limit our impact to customers, which means we basically get 3 hours a night in which to perform impactful maintenances. My job has three main focuses - break/fix for anything that crops up, ipv6 migration, and infrastructure improvement, whether it be through traffic engineering, or support for additional capacity. Of the three, the last one takes up the vast majority of my time.

NewManSoon

erpadmin wrote: »

I'll take that bet. I'm sure the agent was live, but was probably in a typical outsourced country, like India or the Phillipines. If the agent was in the good ol' USA, I'm guessing it was still a live agent.

You can always tell when they are Indian agents .. they always say "May I know .." , and they use an "American" first name.

vinbuck wrote: »

Ehh..not a newcomer to this. I work for a Service Provider. ISPs/SPs do not charge for access to content, they charge for access to the network and how much you want to use it. You want to **** a few thousand terabits on my network? Sure...no problem, fork over the cash. Might want to do some research on peering agreements and Content Delivery Networks.

Not what I said though (or rather, meant). Netflix and Amazon wants to make their content accessible. Amazon, in addition to streaming video, also have other services, like their cloud products. For that matter, so does Apple, but that's neither or nor there. I'm of the opinion that these folks are just sharing data. You're a network guy...what the ---- does it matter if a packet is video, voice, html, email, etc. What the people on the good side of net neutrality is saying is that data is data. Yeah, video is a lot of data, but welcome to the 21st century. You guys are getting your money from the front end anyway....you're only trying to increase profitability by getting it from the backend from those content providers and the argument is it is stifiling innovation.

vinbuck wrote: »

Ok....so you wrote a sweet paper that was graded by Vint Cerf, got an A, and you want to go toe to toe on Internet Achitecture with two service provider engineers. We threw down our technical arguments....we have yet to hear yours?

That about cover it?

Ehhh, I just like going toe to toe with some good ol' boys, period. LOL. Network Engineering is outside of my scope, careerwise, but I do know that those network hardware companies are investing big to sell to you guys the hardware necessary to meet the heavy demand that customers have.

Think about how many network devices are in the home today, versus, oh 15 years ago. Ten years ago, people probably had at most three PCs and at least one. There was none of these Internet TVs, video game consoles that could go out to the net, tablets, smartphones (with wifi), etc. Hell, me being in IT, I can count 7 devices that I got hooked up to the In'net. Now times that by a couple of hundred million. That's just in this country, and even in rural areas, they have broadband (which btw, you're welcome...no doubt I helped pay for that courtesy of the USF...)

Your technical arguments are nothing more than corporate justification for why innovation will be stifiled. We both know that bandwidth can be upgraded to accomodate for heavy uses.

BTW, my professor is no Vint Cerf.....that net neutrality paper was for an organizational behavior class. We had to focus on coalitions who are for and against net neutrality. While the school I'm attending is a tech school, this is a non-tech class. My information systems principles class, on the other hand does touch on these topics, but my professor seems to love the supply chain/value chain/porter's five forces model. Nothing really about the sexiness of IT....

[Though still a good course nonetheless.]

EDIT:

vinbuck wrote: »

These are the kind of carrier grade routers that Forsaken is talking about running near capacity. This stuff isn't that old, but the net neutrality folks want us to chunk that investment out the window and pay 4 times more for 100 Gigabit ethernet and the next generation and the next so that nobody has to live with any kind of bandwidth limitation...ever. Seriously?

Yes, seriously.