Beware Of Comcast!

[digip]

I live in australia....i have a 1.5megabit connection with 256k upload speed with 40gb peak 12pm to 12am and 30 gb off peak 12am to 12pm for $60 a month $au.

Our dollar is pretty close to the $us so think yourself lucky.

i make do just fine and dont come close to my limits, because i control my network with an iron fist.

Well, I pay close to that for my cable internet+tv combined.

Do you own or rend your modem from your ISP?

I used to get like 1-2meg download speeds on my old DOCSIS 1.0 modem, but when I bought my Linksys DOCSIS 2.0 modem, my speeds were about 30mbit down. Then comcast got wise and started throttling everyone and now I get about 16-20 down and 5 up just because of the upgraded modem. Might be worth looking into, but I can't guarantee it will help your network speeds though.

[psydT0ne]

yeah its my modem...and its adsl...no cable here...

[h3%5kr3w]

Meh. I got 6mbps down, about 768kb up (adsl) and I changed from an ancient Westell Wirespeed modem to a new d-link. Interesting about IP changes though. I have had the same ip address for at least 7 years now :P And even with a new modem, there is no change, but I like it that way for rdp over tunnelling.

At&t has gotten stingy with their bandwidth lately though.. Been noticing them throttling down to about 5.5mbps down and around 768kb, but at one point I used to get around 8 down and 3 up.. Sure wish they didn't find that booboo in their network :P

[foo]

ya. i kinda have to call bullshit on the 400-450GB every month quote too :P

[eovnu87435ds]

ya. i kinda have to call bullshit on the 400-450GB every month quote too :P

That's what I was told over the phone. They wouldn't send me any tangible reports, so all I have to go on is the representative's word. My demonoid records are 850GB up and 120GB down, and that's been for over a year of membership

[digip]

Here are some numbers, and greatly out of proportion to most users Comcast speeds, but for me, when I download an episode of Hak5, I get 250KB/s. Thats 1.640625 megabits per second or roughly .2 megabytes per second. This is real world download speed, not a speed test result (which are not going to be usable for this test).

Now. Lets multiply .2 megabytes by 1440 (number of minutes in a day). Thats 288 megabytes a day. And thats only if I was sustaining that speed at 100% of the day. Now multiply 288 by 30 days in a month on average. Thats 8,640 Megabytes per month just in download speeds. That comes to 67.5 Gigabytes per month.

Lets say you were a crazy file sharing nut. If you let that shit run 24/7 and had also calculated in your upload which would be dwarfed in comparison to your downloaded bits, you might get say maybe at 20 Gigabytes per month upload (That number is greatly inflated by the way, and taking in to account that you would be running at 4 megabits per second 24/7 upload, which would probably never happen on Comcast, even on a good day of traffic).

That is just calculating if you left the box running 24/7 seeding and downloading. That doesn't take into consideration other computers or devices, like an XBOX or Playstation, netflix player, etc. BUT, even if you were doing this 24/7 on file sharing alone, you only get close to 90 gigabytes of traffic in 30 days, so I find it hard to believe that any one single account, unless has multiple machines, consoles, stolen wireless , botnets, etc, are using over the monthly cap of 250GB per month.

My math may be flawed, and I'm sure it is (I'm using http://www.matisse.net/bitcalc/ for the calculations based on my real download speeds, not speed tests) but I'd be hard pressed to see real data records kept by Comcast on any account.

We don't even know how they are calculating the speeds either, so without someone on the inside who can prove to us that people come even close to their threshold, I call total bullshit on Comcast for disconnecting any home user without proof, and in doing so, someone should get a lawyer for a class action suit, because it sounds more like deep packet inspection and questionable content filtering more than a bandwidth usage policy.

Edited November 12, 2010 by digip

[justapeon]

I dumped comcrap and saving a more than 100 bucks a month. After seeing over 40 channels with over the air tv (living neat a large city), did not need cable tv with a new isp. Cut cost even more. My brother said I could leach off his wifi, but I prefer not to do that. Even with downloading the old ubuntu repo and tons of cd's, did I ever even get close to 200meg per month.

[5ive]

You can get a real unlimited line from comcast business - even at a residential address - however it costs quite a bit more. I used to do this, I was paying like 200 a month for a 50/10 business line and it had no b/w limits. It is well known that the residential side of comcast is not really unlimited. I have since dropped the business line and switched to two connections, a comcast line and a qwest DSL line. The qwest line has no b/w limit either so I use that for all my downloads - its much better for me this way as well because now I can leech the crap out of stuff without interfering with my online gaming.

[5ive]

Digip, I never upload a thing, strictly leeching - and have easily topped those numbers. I would leech from various topsites just about every x264 movie release, x264 tv shows that were good, x360, wii, pc games, you name it - I never touched half of it - but when you build a 20TB WHS you naturally want to try and fill that sucker up. The topsites are all euro/asia these days and its been years since one was in NA but even so I can still get a solid 300-600KB from them and I would always dual thread and use like 4 sites at a time.

Edited November 18, 2010 by 5ive

[digip]

easily topped those numbers

You say you top those numbers, but from 1 single account or both those lines combined?

Let me ask you, do you have a way to report your monthly usage? Does the ISP show you in fact how much bandwidth was used for the month? How are you calculating how much was used in a 30 day time frame? I'm just curious how people are keeping track of this. 250GB is a lot of damn files.

Edited November 18, 2010 by digip

[5ive]

You say you top those numbers, but from 1 single account or both those lines combined?

Let me ask you, do you have a way to report your monthly usage? Does the ISP show you in fact how much bandwidth was used for the month? How are you calculating how much was used in a 30 day time frame? I'm just curious how people are keeping track of this. 250GB is a lot of damn files.

From a single account with comcast - I know I topped because Comcast called and told me I did for several months straight and thats when I upgraded to the Business line. If it was obvious pirating and not TLS/SSL FTP transfers they prob would have just cut me off. 250GB is a lot I agree but I have over 15TB of x264 movies alone - I was downloading every single BR/HDDVD (this was back when they were both in play) that was released that had a 5+ IMDB score. I amounted like 1200 rips, some was before the business line and some was after + other content as well but the Movies is what was really adding up. Now days I am much more selective...

*edit - my numbers are off, those were just going from my head.

The real x264 total is 990 movies and they take up 5.29 TB - My roommate constantly rips netflix/BB blurays and thats where the other 10TB and 200+ movies are. Either way I can assure you that 250GB in one month is very doable. Comcast would not have come up with the number if people were not going over it.

Edited November 18, 2010 by 5ive

[5ive]

what the heck, it dbl posted when I edited.

Edited November 18, 2010 by 5ive

[hexophrenic]

what the heck, it dbl posted when I edited.

Kind of asking for it, aren't you 5ive?

[eovnu87435ds]

From a single account with comcast - I know I topped because Comcast called and told me I did for several months straight and thats when I upgraded to the Business line. If it was obvious pirating and not TLS/SSL FTP transfers they prob would have just cut me off. 250GB is a lot I agree but I have over 15TB of x264 movies alone - I was downloading every single BR/HDDVD (this was back when they were both in play) that was released that had a 5+ IMDB score. I amounted like 1200 rips, some was before the business line and some was after + other content as well but the Movies is what was really adding up. Now days I am much more selective...

*edit - my numbers are off, those were just going from my head.

The real x264 total is 990 movies and they take up 5.29 TB - My roommate constantly rips netflix/BB blurays and thats where the other 10TB and 200+ movies are. Either way I can assure you that 250GB in one month is very doable. Comcast would not have come up with the number if people were not going over it.

Holy S**t thats an impressive library! Let's just hope the MPAA doesn't read your post :D

Edited November 18, 2010 by eovnu87435ds

[5ive]

Better go get my tinfoil hat huh

[digip]

More craptastic news about Comspastic. If you didn't know, Comcast is trying to kill of Netflix via extorting extra fees from Level 3.

http://www.ticktockcomputers.com/blog/call-for-help/net-neutrality/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-karr/comcast-busted-new-tolls-_b_789786.html

[555]

I could see someone doing 400-450GB a month. If you are uploading and downloading you do not have to be by your computer, I used to download and upload a ton of stuff right before I went to sleep to keep good upload ratios. Say you download a 1GB file in 30 min's, 2GB's an hour, 8 hours of sleep * 2GB's = 16GB's a night, 16GB's a night * 7 nights a week = 112 GB's a week * 4 weeks a month = 448GB's a month.

That is only for one file! lol If you are seeding more then 1GB file, like 10 files that are 1GB 4.5TB's a month bandwidth. Everyone with unlimited bandwidth plans should just upload and download linux distro's all day to fuck with comcast haha

[VaKo]

I have a business grade DSL line, which comes without limits. If you pay for residential service, you will get a residential usage limit. And if you are downloading 250GB a month on a regular basis, you might want to think about that.

[Netshroud]

My ISP just upped all their plans, I'm now on the 1TB plan - although I honestly can't imagine using even 200GB, never mind 1000GB.

[digip]

I could see someone doing 400-450GB a month. If you are uploading and downloading you do not have to be by your computer, I used to download and upload a ton of stuff right before I went to sleep to keep good upload ratios. Say you download a 1GB file in 30 min's, 2GB's an hour, 8 hours of sleep * 2GB's = 16GB's a night, 16GB's a night * 7 nights a week = 112 GB's a week * 4 weeks a month = 448GB's a month.

That is only for one file! lol If you are seeding more then 1GB file, like 10 files that are 1GB 4.5TB's a month bandwidth. Everyone with unlimited bandwidth plans should just upload and download linux distro's all day to fuck with comcast haha

If you have 16GB of sustatined traffic 24/7, you must have a huge pipe and the most in demand file everyone in the world wants. What are you serving? Porn? (j/k)

I can't imagine even being able to upload 16GB of 1 torrent file in a single 24hour period, even if I wanted to try it. FTP or SCP, maybe, but not a torrent upload. At least not on my connection. I doubt I would top more than a 1GB uploaded in a day for a single file. Given downloads are faster than uploads on torrents due to the shared parts of the whole, I highly doubt even you would be serving 16GB of uploads in a day, even running 24/7.

Ive torrented Linux distros and for a 700mb distro it takes about a half a day to seed the entire 700mb for 1 full upload ratio, just for the fact others sharing the file, plus uploads generally never top 100kb/s and generally idle around 20-30kb vs torrent downloads that go up to 700-1000kbs for my connection. Not that I can't download or upload faster via single feed, like an FTP file upload, which might be able to do 16GB in a day, but thats just what I see when using uTorrent.

If you people have speeds fast enough to seed 16GB in a day from your home connections, count your blessings because you must have super fast internet compared to the rest of us.

[Urban.Nerd]

If you have 16GB of sustatined traffic 24/7, you must have a huge pipe and the most in demand file everyone in the world wants. What are you serving? Porn? (j/k)

I can't imagine even being able to upload 16GB of 1 torrent file in a single 24hour period, even if I wanted to try it. FTP or SCP, maybe, but not a torrent upload. At least not on my connection. I doubt I would top more than a 1GB uploaded in a day for a single file. Given downloads are faster than uploads on torrents due to the shared parts of the whole, I highly doubt even you would be serving 16GB of uploads in a day, even running 24/7.

Ive torrented Linux distros and for a 700mb distro it takes about a half a day to seed the entire 700mb for 1 full upload ratio, just for the fact others sharing the file, plus uploads generally never top 100kb/s and generally idle around 20-30kb vs torrent downloads that go up to 700-1000kbs for my connection. Not that I can't download or upload faster via single feed, like an FTP file upload, which might be able to do 16GB in a day, but thats just what I see when using uTorrent.

If you people have speeds fast enough to seed 16GB in a day from your home connections, count your blessings because you must have super fast internet compared to the rest of us.

Kinda old i know, but this made me wonder and check. I logged in my comcast account and they have "usage meter" says im at 147gb out of 250 for this month already! last month was 139gb, before that was 247gb :-)!

[eovnu87435ds]

OK, so now I am 100% sure comcrap is full of s**t. it was about a month ago that we were suspended, and this month, we got the comcrap bill, AND WE WERE STILL BEING BILLED FOR INTERNET! After calling them up, they then said that we had used 1000 GB of bandwidth each month(yes, 1 TB), which is quite an increase from the last time. In addition, they said that they turned our internet back on as soon as we got off the phone with them the first time. Mind you, we had to wait a week for Verizon to hook us up with DSL(of which they had to send out a technician since when the comcast guy came and installed triple play, not only did he disconnect all of verizon's phone lines from the house to the outside, but he also snipped them so short that it was impossible to crimp anything. I had to come out with the weller! Mind you, you don't have to disconnect the phone line from the outside for comcast to work, so the guy just did it to make it a pain to ever switch back.) so we tried for a week to use the unusable comcrap internet, and lo and behold, it didn't work.

Bottom line, comcast can go suck one, I can't wait until we can get FIOS and be done with them for good.