First they impose a bandwidth limit, which even though they say the vast majority of users never come close to reaching, I come close every other month. Am I the only customer that watches HD streaming content from Netflix on a regular basis, and might download a torrent or two a month? Fuck, last month I used half my monthly allowance in the first few days, what with uploading my music collection to Google Music on top of everything else.
And the goddamn connection is unreliable. The last few evenings, it was down half the time. And you have the gall to try to sell my Voice Over IP phone service over your shitty link? It’d be more reliable calling people via African drum language over smoke signals in a rainstorm.
I hope Verizon FiOS comes to my area and EATS YOUR FUCKING MOTHER AND CHILDREN.
I was unaware they had imposed a bandwidth cap, and I am a customer of theirs. How do I find out what my limit is and how much of it I’ve used at any given time within a month?
It is 250GB/mo and they offer some kind of usage meter, though I’m not sure if it will monitor previous usage or just from the time you start using it:
250/GB per month is very reasonable. Most ISPs are lower (by far) than this. I’ve never come anywhere close and I do quite a bit of streaming/downloading.
Now hold the phone…what’s this you say about Netflix streaming adding to the monthly GB total? Is that true? So, on average, how many GB’s do you use by watching a 90 minute movie, or a 30 minute TV show?
Cause those damn kids can watch a lot of Phineas and Ferb!
It’s pretty easy to hit that cap given the increasing digital lives we live.
Maybe not if all you do is facebook, but I got super close last holiday season. I had been watching a lot of Netflix, there was a Steam sale, and I had been backing up a lot of stuff to my cloud drive.
With the continuing growth of cloud services for backup, for music, for video, for games, these caps are going to have to go up.
Even then, it takes work to go that high. If I binged on the new Doctor Who series on Netflix, even assuming it’s all in HD (and I don’t think it is), 5 seasons at 13 episodes a season at 45 minutes an episode is ~49 hours of video. That’s not easy to do.
I started to gloat here about how Cox was so much better than Comcast and that Cox still hasn’t even thought about going to bandwidth caps. I figured I’d better do some research before sticking my foot in my mouth. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Cox has had bandwidth caps for years now, and apparently I just never noticed. :smack: Thing is, I’m a constant net user. I’m always on Netflix, Hulu, or Youtube, or I’m playing/downloading games. The only thing I don’t do with any regularity is torrent stuff.
Five minutes ago, I thought a 250 GB cap was an unfair ceiling. Now I’m very much less than sure about that (and Cox, at least, offers a tier with a 400 GB cap if you really need it).
So, not quite as much sympathy for the bandwidth cap as I was about to give. But if Comcast’s uptime is as shitty as I keep hearing about, then definitely, fuck Comcast.
I’ve almost always been pretty happy with Comcast, but the last couple few months my connection has been constantly stuttering on and off and it’s bugging the shit out of me. I called and they said they thought it was the modem going bad so I swapped it out with a new one but it still happens. I also unplugged the router for awhile to make sure it wasn’t the router going bad, and it doesn’t appear to be. I don’t what their problem is now, but I’m generally up more than down, so I’m not threatening to move to Canada or anything over it.
I’ve been on an Enterprise binge on Netflix. Coupled with the Steam summer sale, multi-player gaming, You tube videos, music downloads, etc I’m probably going to be skirting that limit again this month.
It seems to depend a great deal on where you live. I’ve seldom had problems with Comcast myself. I hear people elsewhere though complain about Comcast with great vehemence. There doesn’t seem to be much consistency in the quality of its services.