And it’s different how? If a single user uses 70 GB of bandwidth a month, and Comcast tells them they’re using too much, next month they might use 65 GB. That’s STILL too much, so Comcast tells them off again. 60…55…and so on until the user finally hits a usage that Comcast can live with. He’s found the limit; again, assuming Comcast doesn’t just drop his service before then. But if the limit is 30 GB (PURELY hypothetical), and the user would willingly have restrained himself to that limit (I admit, another hypo), then what’s there to be gained by simply saying ‘it’s too much’ and letting the user interpret that to mean 5 GB too much when it’s really 40 GB too much?
As for the suggestion that setting a limit will induce people to break it, well… that’s what the limit’s for. Comcast draws a line in the sand, saying “If you cross this, you’re out.” They’re then completely justified in dropping a user who insists on trying to get around that limit. While they may also be legally justified in tossing someone who they deem to be using “too much” without giving specifics, it can cause unrest and suspicion among their existing customers, possibly encouraging them to seek other broadband providers.
Hell yes! That’s awesome! Because when companies save money, they ALWAYS pass it on to the customer.
Remember Windows XP’s release? Wow, it had an awesome new feature (cough, cough) that made you activate it and associate the machine with a particular hardware setup.
Besides the various ways that things screw up and cost the customer time/money…it doesn’t matter because it was all going to save people money.
See, less piracy means more sales. More sales means more profit. More profit means lower prices for everyone! Wow! Thanks, Microsoft!
What? Huh? XP is more expensive than 95, 98, and 2000? But that’s impossible! I mean, hell, Microsoft is passing on the savings to us! That’s what companies do!
Any other observations from your fantasy land?
Really? How?
How are you true “residencial” users going to be hurt?
And, again, what about the lowest-usage users? There some sort of rebate in the mail for them?
You know how much my 300GB or so per month hurts TWC and all their users? So much that my speed recently went from 1.9Mb/s to 2.7Mb/s.
-Joe, poor Comcast. If you’re going to come up with a fucking pricing plan, stick with it
Screw off jackass (There, did I get that right? Mr. Fucking Anal?)
Pointing out a typo as means to somehow build credibility for your own argument is not only lame, it shows just how pathetic you are at creating any kind of solid argument on your own.
Then again, your argument that everything should be free for everyone and anyone, so long as their not a big 'ol mean company, is pretty lame in its own right too.
Uh, yeah, there is. Dickweed. It’s worked into the equation. I, a RESIDENTIAL user, pay around forty bucks a month for a broadband connection. A small business owner probably pays four or five times that amount. Why? Presumably because they use more bandwidth than a single residence does. Or so the pricing set-up suggests.
So, it’s essentially built in. I pay four or five times less for service that’s expected to fall within normal residential usage patterns. If it isn’t, then as Comcast has said, they will either try and curb their usage, or tell them to get a plan that’s more in line with their actually usage.
Make any sense to ya? Or is your only ammunition your ability to parse and pick apart sentences?
From my vantage point as a Verizon DSL customer, I got to observe my bill drop from $50 per month to $35 per month this year due to (presumably) competition from Cablevision. Think they’d have done that if their costs were $40?
From my vantage point as a pricer for computer services (not connectivity, but maintenance) I observe that we are very concerned with the prices our competition offers. If we have enough profit margin in our prices we can lower them to be more competitive. No profit margin, no lower prices.
Successfully running a business these days requires constant vigilance with respect to your costs. The companies that can get away with lax cost controls are few and far between. You let yourself get fat, someone will come along, kick your ass, and leave you in a heap on the floor.
Well, so what? As long as you set a limit that everyone can use without ruining your service, it doesn’t matter if everyone does use that much. If your kitchen can only make three entrees per person, you don’t set the limit at six unless you’re looking for trouble.
But you know you is really paying the price for this guy’s usage. His next door neighbor, also shelling out $50 a month for cable internet, who is getting killed by the bandwidth hog.
I’m only partially defending Comcast; they stink. I recently returned to Denver to find they have taken over. When they installed my digital cable, there was no channel lineup card available. When I called to talk set up the installation, I asked if there was a website that I could follow along as the lady explained the digital options. “Well, yes, we have a website, but it doesn’t have the channel lineup.” I wound up ordering what I thought was “everything”. Almost $100 a month including tax. When I was home sick on Friday, I channel flipped through everything for the first time. Not counting PPV, sports, etc., there are over 20 channels I am “not authorized” to receive. News channels, mtv clone channels, movie channels. So Comcast sucks. Agreed?
Nevertheless, the only thing they are doing wrong here is not setting a hard and fast limit, clearly spelling it out. If 1% of their subscribers are using 28%, and the next 5% are using another 50%, they have a problem. And everyone else that has digital cable or digital internet that lives on the same service line as those people also has a problem. Comcast just needs to suck it up, bite the bullet, and state plainly what the limit is.
Well, since I’m not the anal type, I guess I won’t explain the difference between “there”, “their”, and “they’re”.
Anyways, where did I say that everything should be free for everyone? Anywhere you want to point that out, feel free.
Someone pays a certain amount of money for their access. That access is sold by speeds, not quantities. If they wanted to limit people to a certain amount of usage, there’s nothing wrong with that - as long as they make it clear. They don’t.
**
For a guy with a broadband connection, you sure have a thin skin.
Really? I kind of think that the people who use 50 meg a day are the ones paying for it. Their service isn’t suffering. And they’re paying quite a hefty chunk of change for such a small bit of downloading, don’t you think?
I thought the whole point was that they’d lose on some, make it up on others. Isn’t that the whole reason monthly plans are offered?
Let’s look at it this way…
If it were more profitable for Comcast (TWC, whichever) to charge $1.00 per gigabyte downloaded, don’t you think they’d do it? I think they’d change their service plan so quickly it’d give their lawyers whiplash.
Power companies don’t charge a flat fee for electricity. Their business model obviously shows them that is a very bad idea.
Either Comcast didn’t realize that and are now being inconvenienced by the Bad Downloaders, or they just plain screwed up. Either way, maybe it’s time to suck it up?
Umm, wrong. If you insist, I will dig up cites when I have time, but it is a fact that heavy usage degrades service. I can speak from personal experience that cable internet affects my TV when somebody (or many somebodies) on the same line as mine are hogging the line.
Well, I choose to pay the money for speed. I download very little, and I don’t spend a lot of time online, but my bank, my news, my singles service, and so on have all chosen to use very heavy web sites. I prefer to have them come up quickly, do what I want, and be done. My choice. I’m perfectly entitled to complain to my provider when a bandwidth hog slows me down.
The business model for broadband is still in flux. Obviously Comcast has realized that they are not doing it right. I would be delighted to see broadband charge by usage, as I believe that is where the cycle is right now. Remember Compuserve and AOL and Prodigy all charging by time online? Once it became cheaper to charge a flat rate, they did. Now we’re back at the other end of the swing, at least for now.
Yes it does. Comcast itself doesn’t have unlimited access. They buy it from someone else. And from what I understand, they buy in advance what they think they’ll need for a set period down the road, sometime in the future. Kinda like the weird world of the power biz; where a company buys what it thinks its customers needs, and if it exceeds that guesstimated usage, then they pay out the ear for the extra energy from someone else.
So by keeping these bandwidth hogs around, on a RESIDENTIAL account, they’re needs are going to cost everyone in the long run as the provider starts upping their rates to compensate for the higher than anticipated usage.
You’re basically arguing for subsidizing this guys usage… when he full well knows, or should fucking know, that his needs aren’t meant for the typical residential user… it’s small business territory he’s dealing with.
You just can’t help yourself, can you?
That, or you’re not very funny.
Whatever the case, it’s been fun chattin’ with you. Bye.
