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Comcast's Web-based broadband meter, which was rumored to be released back in January, is still not available to consumers. According to a Comcast representative whom I spoke with earlier Tuesday, it's still not ready for prime time, and is undergoing further employee trials before being released to the public.
Once released, the meter will let customers of Comcast's high-speed Internet service monitor how much of their 250GB monthly bandwidth quota has been used. This will help keep them from going over that limit--something that results in a termination of their service upon the second offense.
Comcast imposed the monthly usage limits back in October as a way to keep network hogs from slowing down speeds for other customers. However, the only tool that was provided to help customers keep an eye on how much they were using was McAfee's Security Suite. While free, the software tool could only track bandwidth use on the machine it was installed on, and not from networked mobile phones, game consoles, or other household computers.
Comcast's monthly bandwidth cap for consumers is 250GB.
(Credit: CNET)Back in December, DSL Reports posted leaked screenshots of what the online meter looked like at the time, along with specifics on how often the reports were being updated to reflect recent usage. Their sources noted that it not only tracked the past three months of use, but also let users break down where use was coming from, right down to the device. This could be used to help track down devices that may be using more than their fair share, be it computers or other networked home electronics.
Comcast would not provide any further details on the unreleased utility, but given the fast-approaching one-year anniversary of the cap, it's fair to expect its release sometime this fall. In the meantime, there are several ways to keep an eye on household bandwidth using a variety of software tools, which we've listed in this handy guide.
Communications provider Comcast on Wednesday announced two new tiers of service for heavy residential downloaders, along with speed upgrades for subscribers of its existing services.
The two new plans, dubbed "Extreme" and "Ultra" clock in at 50 and 22 Mbps of downstream respectively and 10 and 5 Mbps of upstream. Comparatively, customers of Comcast's "performance" plans are getting a big jump from 8 to 16 Mbps on the downspeed, however, upload performance remains at 2 Mbps.
The speed bumps, which are being rolled out to 10 major markets between now and next year come at a cost. The somewhat confusingly named Extreme and Ultra tiers come in at $139.95 and $62.95 a month, amounting to an annual cost close to $1,700 a year for subscribers of the Extreme--nearly three times that of Comcast's standard monthly residential service.
Alongside these residential tiers, Comcast is also introducing a new business tier called "Premium," which comes in at 22/5 Mbps down/up for $99.95 a month, as well as beefing up its Deluxe tier to match the Ultra plan at 50/10 Mbps down/up for $189.95 a month. Meanwhile, the "Starter" business tier has received a similar speed bump to that of the residential plans, moving from 6 to 12 Mbps.
So quickly--to sum up the new and updated plans:
Residential services
(new) Extreme 50 (50/10 Mbps down/up) - $139.95/month
(new) Ultra (22/5 Mbps down/up) - $62.95/month
Performance Plus (16/2 Mbps down/up) $52.95/month
Performance (12/2 Mbps down/up) - $42.95/month
Business services
Deluxe 50 (50/10 Mbps down/up) - $189.95/month
(new) Premium (22/5 Mbps down/up) - $99.95/month
Starter (12/2 Mbps down/up) - Price unknown
Cost aside, what may be the most controversial aspect of this speed bump is that subscribers of the residential plans will get no higher cap over the 250GB monthly limit which was instated earlier this October. Comcast's own release prides the new Extreme plan on letting customers "download a high-def movie (6 GB) in about 16 minutes, a standard-def movie (2 GB) in about 5 minutes and a standard-def TV show (300 MB) in a matter of seconds." Do the math and you'll see that an extreme subscriber could easily blow past the 250 GB cap in a matter of hours.
Comcast's PR representative Charlie Douglas tells me the cap will remain in place for residential customers, although for right now business customers are free to go over that. Any potential residential customers who think they may go over, the slightly more expensive business tiers might offer a safe haven from having your heavy bandwidth habit limited.
Thursday's news about the upcoming 250 GB monthly cap for Comcast data subscribers left some questions unanswered. I shot a few of my own, as well as some from readers over to Comcast to get them answered. These are mostly items that did not appear in both the post about the amendment, or the otherwise comprehensive FAQ page.
Update at 5:05 p.m. PDT: In a bizarre twist, the previous answers to my questions were answered by someone named Bill G., who Comcast says is not an authorized spokesperson for the company, despite answering my e-mail sent through the company's press contacts page. Charlie Douglas, who is Director of Corporate Communications for Comcast's Online & Voice Services, wrote me back to let me know the "correct" answers to these questions. I've highlighted where the previous unofficial answers differed for the sake of continuity, although the only major differentiation from the unofficial contact is the mention of Comcast developing its own bandwidth monitoring and notification service for its customers, which is apparently not happening.
Q: Will people who go over for the second time be able to challenge the account suspension, or is the two strikes and you're out policy the standard?Charlie Douglas: If a customer receives a call that he/she has exceeded 250 GB in a month, then we ask them to please moderate their usage. The vast majority of customers do so voluntarily. During that first call, however, we also explain that, per our Acceptable Use Policy, if they are among our heaviest users for a second time in the following six months, that we reserve the right to suspend their account for 12 months. Again, this is an extremely small number of customers--far less than 1 percent--and is a policy that does not affect more than 99 percent of our customers.
Will there be a usage meter available on Comcast subscriber's online account information?
Douglas: There are numerous free or fee-based meters that are widely available on the Internet to anyone who wants one.
(Editor's note: This differs from our unofficial contact who said "Comcast is developing a meter to track your bandwidth." We've got a write-up of ways to do this using various software tools.)
Will you be offering larger bandwidth packages for home businesses or "excessive users?"
Douglas: Our excessive use policy is only for residential service customers. As of today, this policy does not apply to our commercial services customers.
How does this factor in with users of your Digital Voice service? On average how much bandwidth does that service take up?
Douglas: Comcast Digital Voice is a completely separate service and is not a factor.
We've also had some questions about the bandwidth averages cited on this page. 2-3 GB median monthly bandwidth seems incredibly low, as does the figure for how large an e-mail is (0.05KB/e-mail). Most messages in my inbox hover between 10-50k. Was it a typo for 0.05MB?
Douglas: 2 to 3 GB/month is the median monthly amount used by our residential high-speed Internet customers. The examples we provided at www.comcast.net/networkmanagement are illustrative of how much activity would be required to reach 250GB in a month. More than 99 percent of our customers do not come close to using more than that amount.
Got any other questions you feel are unanswered? Leave them in the comments and we can send out a second round.
Starting October 1 customers of Comcast's residential data services will have an invisible barrier on their monthly data usage. Under the new guidelines of Comcast's Acceptable Use Policy announced Thursday, that cap will be set at 250 gigabytes per month, per account.
Users who go over the limit will get a courtesy call from Comcast's customer service for the first instance. However, under the new policy a second-time offense means the service is immediately suspended for an entire calendar year.
Surprisingly the company is not providing any tools to help users monitor their current usage. An FAQ on Comcast's support site simply suggests that customers do a "Web search" for bandwidth metering software that will track this amount for them. Going forward there may be plans to set up alerts over certain thresholds, or bundle some official tool as part of the company's starter software.
Comcast notes that the median usage for most residential customers falls somewhere between 2GB and 3GB, a number that is regularly broken within a matter of hours and sometimes minutes by customers taking advantage of streaming HD video and online backup services. The company breaks down basic usage numbers similar to what's seen on the marketing materials on a consumer hard drive:
* Send 50 million e-mails (at 0.05KB/e-mail)
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4MB/song)
* Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2GB/movie)
* Upload 25,000 high-resolution digital photos (at 10MB/photo)
A far greater problem may be the slighting of cloud storage services that offer file transfer and backup. Services like Carbonite and Mozy let you back up and transfer the entirety of your computer's storage several times per month, which on many standard consumer machines can be in the hundreds of gigabytes.
Apple, too, is just at the beginning stages of MobileMe, a service that offers sync and file backup to multiple devices. Additionally, the rumored all-you-can-eat iTunes could drastically change how much downloading users are doing on a monthly basis.
So what do you think about this new limit? Let us know in the comments and the poll below.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released an open-source, cross-platform program designed to track your packets and determine if your ISP is throttling your connection to torrents, VoIP, and other legal, high-bandwidth consuming communications. Called "Switzerland" and licensed under the GPL, it's very much in an alpha state and is only a command-line tool at the moment. Also, you're going to have to compile it yourself--that's not the most challenging task, but this isn't a simple self-extracting app.
According to the EFF, Switzerland works by spotting IP packets that have been forged or modified between clients, informing you of the change, and providing you copies of the modified packets. "The software uses a semi-P2P, server-and-many-clients architecture. Whenever the clients send packets to each other, the server will attempt to determine if any of them were dropped, forged, or modified," says the Switzerland Web site.
As far as usage goes, the EFF says that Switzerland is compatible with NAT firewalls, although some NAT firewalls may have to be disabled to test the ISP in front of it, because of the modifications that some firewalls make to packets.
I do wonder at the logic of the name, though. Referencing the "neutral" country is cute, but what's going to happen when somebody tries to find the program through a search engine? Googling "Switzerland" returns 234 million results, give or take.
Anyway, Switzerland is not the first packet-testing program around. What is special about it, though, is that unlike, for example, the plug-in for the Vuze/Azureus torrent client, Switzerland isn't tied to any host program. The open-source license, combined with the backing of a visible group like the EFF and the building awareness in both politicians and the general public of what Net Neutrality is about, could have serious ramifications for combating false promises of Net Neutrality from ISPs like Comcast.
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