October of 2008 was a bellwether month for Comcast's High-Speed Internet (CRHSI) service. In October Comcast announced that the service bandwidths of their CRHSI 6 and 8 megabit per second (Mbps) services would soon be doubled. All slower services are being phased out. Comcast also rolled out their new 22 and 50 Mbps CRHSI services in certain areas -
http://www.comcast.com/About/PressRelease/PressReleaseDetail.ashx?PRID=814
Comcast also terminated their USENET service in October, due to the legal implications of the kiddy-porn traffic there. When it was in existence Comcast's USENET service had a 2 gigabytes (GB)/month data use limit.
But the news that has caused the most furor is the public statement of Comcast's CRHSI data usage (bandwidth) policy ? that a CRHSI user's data use is limited to 250 GB per month ?
http://www.comcast.net/terms/network/amendment.
This limitation is embodied in Comcast?s current ?Acceptable Use Policy? (AUP) -
http://www.comcast.net/terms/use/.
This data limit includes total data usage - upload plus download traffic including the TCP/IP header over-head. Each byte that goes through the Comcast cable counts towards the limit. This same limit applies despite the speed of your Comcast HSI service.
But when I read Comcast?s AUP I found a startling supplementary statement just before the part about the 250 GM limit: ?Comcast reserves the right to suspend or terminate Service accounts where bandwidth consumption is not characteristic of a typical residential user of the Service as determined by the company in its sole discretion.? This bold statement has not been publicized and gives a whole new interpretation to the Comcast bandwidth use issue.
Furthermore, the AUP states under its ?Prohibited Uses and Activities ? Network and Usage Restrictions? clause:
?restrict, inhibit, interfere with, or otherwise disrupt or cause a performance degradation, regardless of intent, purpose or knowledge, to the Service or any Comcast (or Comcast supplier) host, server, backbone network, node or service, or otherwise cause a performance degradation to any Comcast (or Comcast supplier) facilities used to deliver the Service.?
This leads me to conclude that Comcast can take action against ANY user who?s bandwidth consumption is un-characteristic or who causes network congestion or who uses more than 250 GB of data per month.
Comcast states that his is not a new policy, just a clarification of an existing network management policy. They also state that users who are deemed to be excessive users will be warned once and placed on six months probation. A second overage will result in the disconnection of their CRHSI service for one year. However the AUP states that:
?Comcast reserves the right immediately to suspend or terminate your Service account and terminate the Subscriber Agreement if you violate the terms of this Policy or the Subscriber Agreement.?
Later in this article I will offer some advice to about how to work within Comcast's guidelines for those users that are the most likely to be affected by the policy. But first, let's determine just who those users might be.
Whether or not Comcast's news is if of any interest to you depends upon the nature of your internet use. For casual users who only use e-mail, surf web-pages and do online searches, this news has no impact - 250 GB of data usage far exceeds your needs. More serious users who download megabyte-sized software packages, exchange digital photos and music, view video clips on YouTube, etc, are probably not impacted by the news either.
One note about video clips, such as those viewed on YouTube and CNN ? these services make use of download software such as the Adobe Flash Player. If you monitor your internet traffic in real-time, you will notice that when you play a video stream off of the internet, your data usage doesn?t just spike ? it bursts. The size of this burst corresponds to the size of the video buffer that you have configured your player to use. If you set the buffer size to one megabyte, then once you press the ?Start? button on the player, the buffer will begin to fill up, even once you have pressed the ?Pause? button. If you are just browsing YouTube, then the ratio of video viewed to that wasted can be quite high.
Realistically, no one who has not been previously warned by Comcast about their excessive use probably has anything to fear. That is, so long as they do not change their data usage habits. But therein lay the rub - people's HSI usage habits are changing.
More and more users are beginning to consume very large video files and streams over their HSI connection. The word is getting out that if you missed your episode of Heroes on Monday evening, you can still stream it to your home PC from NBC later on. Downloading it will use up over one half gigabyte, more if it is played full-screen. People are purchasing and downloading 350 or 700 MB TV episodes and 2 GB movies from Netflix and iTunes. Each movie on the X-Box is 4 gigabytes in size. All of these activities are perfectly legal, but they bring the customers and their families closer and closer to that CRHSI 250 GB limit.
YouTube is starting to offer band-width intensive high-definition video for downloads of things like TV re-broadcasts.
The users that really need to pay attention to the limitation are the really heavy CRHSI users: DP professionals, slingbox users, video aficionados, peer-to-peer (P2P) torrent users and data server operators. Their ranks may also include the clueless users who download their office work to home each evening and or who back up their hard disks to some online repository. Heavy users regularly exchange gigabytes worth of data over the internet and they might exceed the CRHSI 250 GB/month limit.
This is a good time to explore Comcast's reasons for their data usage requirement. Notice that I have emphasized that this rule only applies to Comcast's residential HSI. There is a certain amount of logic in assuming that if you are consuming over 250 GB per month that you are doing it for commercial purposes. Comcast's commercial clients operate off a completely different, higher pricing structure.
Why does Comcast institute a data usage limit on their CRHSI service when other ISP's like Verizon do not? I am told that it is because neighborhoods served by CRHSI share local branches of the network, while services like Verizon's FiOS give each user a dedicated data line. Several very heavy local CRHSI users can cause congestion on their neighborhood's distribution network, but with Verizon FiOS they would not.
Verizon does impose a 2 GB per month limit on their wireless internet service.
CRHSI users purchase TV shows and movies from services like iTunes. Well, Comcast sells TV shows and pay-per-view movies too. It is not too hard to figure out why Comcast would want to discourage video data traffic on their CRHSI.
So, here is my advice for heavy CRHSI users whose CRHSI data usage is likely to exceed Comcast's limitation:
DP Professionals and server operators are probably violating Comcast's ?Agreement for Residential Services? (AFRS) - http://www.comcast.net/terms/subscriber and AUP agreements. Such users should look into switching to a limitless plan like Verizon FiOS or a commercial service. Note that Web servers of any type are forbidden, even for personal web pages.
Users who perform large backups of their home systems to online repositories might be better served by purchasing their own backup systems at home. In the long run, this is probably cheaper than paying for online storage, and is more reliable than the free services. Store backup media at work or in a bank safe-deposit box.
If you regularly synch your home PC to your computer at work, you could be using up a lot of your monthly data transfer allotment. You could get a dedicated CRHSI line and expense it to your employer. Otherwise, you could deduct the cost of a second line from your income tax as an employee business expense.
For slingbox users and video buffs - download a network traffic metering application like BitMeter2 - http://www.softpedia.com/developer/Codebox-Software-5585.html . It will allow you to record all of your internet traffic for the month. It will also allow you to set an alarm that will warn you when you are approaching your ISP's data usage limit.
Comcast is promising an account metering service in the future, but right now you can use the one provided in their free McAfee Security suite. Just go to McAfee Secutity Center/OpenSecurity Center/Tools/Traffic Monitor.
The Comcast AUP contains a special provision for streaming output data for personal use.
A slingbox can stream video at 400-900 megabytes per hour from your CRHSI connection. That could amount to nearly two gigabytes every couple of hours.
So how can you tell if you are using too much bandwidth? Do the math: divide the 250 GB CRHSI limit by 30 days, 24 hours per day, 60 minutes/hour, 60 seconds/minute. The result indicates that you could use your CRHSI service at a combined upload and download rate of 96 kBps (thousand bytes per second), twenty-four hour per day. But measuring this requires a method of accurately metering your data usage.
Peer-to-peer clients (like BitTorrent users) need to meter their data rates. These heavy users should install a network data metering application like BitMeter 2 as previously described.
The upload/download statistics displayed by client applications like BitTorrent are incomplete measurements of real CRHSI data usage because they do not include the overhead bandwidth required by the various transfer protocols involved in the administration of P2P traffic. If you compare the UL and DL statistics calculated by P2P client software to those generated by a true metering application, you will see that the numbers displayed by the metering software are about 20% higher. This is because the data usage displayed by a network metering application includes the extra bytes of data required to route and administrate the actual P2P data being transferred.
Some ISPs have reported that this administrative data alone constitutes 30% of their total network traffic. A recent test that involved downloading a torrent of 8 gigabytes of data, with the upload speed throttled down to 50 KBps, required an overall data usage of 32 gigabytes.
P2P client users should throttle down their upload speeds when using CRHSI. You don't want to be a constant torrent leach, but your participation in the peer-to-peer process does not obligate you to let your peers ruin your data use budget. By throttling down your upload speed to two thirds of your average download speed you can slash your over-all data usage dramatically. If you download at 48 KBps and upload at 32 KBps, you should be able to use your P2P client non-stop nearly all month without exceeding 250 GB of data usage. Restrict your P2P usage and you can safely use proportionately higher data rates.
Don't become a torrent server. When you have completed your download, stop the torrent once you have given peers a fair amount of time to access your new seed. If you are downloading a lot of large files, then you have supplied your peers with plenty of upload during your download period.
When you download a torrent, only select the associated files that you are really interested in downloading. You may wish to schedule your complicated downloads so that you can stretch them over several months time.
Run your torrent client during off-peak hours. The P2P traffic will still count against your 250 GB limit, but CRHSI administrators are less likely to target over-users who do not cause system congestion. Run your torrent during periods of low-traffic, like between 11 PM and 8 AM.
Comcast recently announced that they will not target P2P traffic for monitoring or regulation on the CRHSI. Copyright issues aside, users of P2P client software on CRHSI are in violation of their Comcast AFRS agreement only if they act strictly as servers. Since Comcast has recently been spanked for secretly throttling P2P traffic, I think that we can believe them.
I hope that this article has been helpful in clarifying the nature of this ISP's policies and has provided some helpful hints as to how we can operate within them.