Dear Comcast High-Speed Internet Customer,
We appreciate your business and strive to provide you with the best online experience possible. One of the ways we do this is through our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). The AUP outlines acceptable use of our service as well as steps we take to protect our customers from things that can negatively impact their experience online. This policy has been in place for many years and we update it periodically to keep it current with our customers' use of our service.
On October 1, 2008, we will post an updated AUP that will go into effect at that time.
In the updated AUP, we clarify that monthly data (or bandwidth) usage of more than 250 Gigabytes (GB) is the specific threshold that defines excessive use of our service. We have an excessive use policy because a fraction of one percent of our customers use such a disproportionate amount of bandwidth every month that they may degrade the online experience of other customers.
250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of bandwidth and it's very likely that your monthly data usage doesn't even come close to that amount. In fact, the threshold is approximately 100 times greater than the typical or median residential customer usage, which is 2 to 3 GB/month. To put it in perspective, to reach 250 GB of data usage in one month a customer would have to do any one of the following:
* Send more than 50 million plain text emails (at 5 KB/email);
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song); or
* Download 125 standard definition movies (at 2 GB/movie).
And online gamers should know that even the heaviest multi- or single-player gaming activity would not typically come close to this threshold over the course of a month.
In addition to modifying the excessive use policy, the updated AUP contains other clarifications of terms concerning reporting violations, newsgroups, and network management. To read some helpful FAQs, please visit http://help.comcast.net/content/faq/Frequently-Asked-Questions-about-Excessive-Use.
Thank you again for choosing Comcast as your high-speed Internet provider.
A love letter from Comcast!........................
Posted by Jamie A MacDonald at Friday, September 19, 2008
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4 comments:
What I love is the little FAQ where they tell you how to find out how much data you've sent through Comcast:
Q: How does Comcast help its customers track their usage so they can avoid exceeding the limit?
There are many online tools customers can download and use to measure their consumption. Customers can find such tools by simply doing a Web search - for example, a search for "bandwidth meter" will provide some options. Customers using multiple PCs should just be aware that they will need to measure and combine their total monthly usage in order to identify the data usage for their entire account.
Err... uhm... they don't, in other words. They measure your usage, but you're just going to have to effin' guess, they won't help you, they won't provide you with any tools for doing it, they're just gonna wave their hands and say "you're on your own" and sit back and measure your bandwidth but WILL NOT PUBLISH THAT INFO ON YOUR COMCAST.NET HOME PAGE WHEN YOU LOG IN TO TELL YOU HOW MUCH BANDWIDTH YOU ARE USING!
Evil. Evil I say. Lucifer works for Comcast. If these evil mofo's didn't have a monopoly on "high speed" Internet in my neighborhood, I'd tell them where to stick it, long and hard...
- Badtux the Evil Penguin
(who knows evil when he sees it).
Yeah I know, but I suppose that EVERYONE (that is is total F'in sarcasm btw) will go and get a router like the wrt54g and change the firmware to one that has usage utilities. Oh wait I only know a few people w/ that know how! I know my mom or wife sure as shit couldn't do that on their own......So what about those people Comcast?
Damn I wish I could get Fios here!
Playing devils advocate ... the people who aren't savvy enough to monitor their own bandwidth would likely never use half that amount even if they stream Hulu like a couch potato. It's the Torrent loving geeks that will push the limit.
the comcast awsome-ness also includes them CHARGING you to come out to FIX THEIR BROKEN materials as well. Good thing I fixed their shitty modem on my own!
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