Who would have thought that leaving South Africa for the US would result in yet more bandwidth woes! Why yes, it's true...I've hit the "cap". I just got a call from Comcast this morning saying that I exceeded the limit last month and that I was being given a warning.
Let me get one thing straight first. The cable here is *far* better than the ADSL back in SA. Don't get me wrong there. However, they could be a little more upfront about their restrictions. Apparently I was in the top 0.1% of their bandwidth users last month. All I was told that if I return to this top 0.1% bracket again within the next year then my account will be suspended for a year. Wow, that's quite harsh don't you think? Especially when you consider that no-one can ever know what that limit is in terms of an actual bandwidth figure and that as much as a tried the guy refused to even give me a ball-park figure. All he said was that I had to "drastically reduce" my usage and that if he gave me a figure he would be fired.
I was rather surprised at how interrogating he was. Some of the questions I can understand, such as asking if I had a wireless network and whether or not it was secure. When he asked what I was doing that was causing such excessive usage -- man, I got a little annoyed. I told him straight that it was private. What are they going to benefit knowing what I use my line for?
The good thing is they have plenty DSL providers here. Hopefully they'll be more customer-friendly. Yes, they charge a bit more, but the other stories I've read about Comcast are a little saddening (even though they don't come close to the evilness of Telkom!) such as sending forged TCP RST packets and throttling encrypted traffic.
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Thoughts on Rust
4 years ago
This is hilarous!
ReplyDeleteFCC May Fine Comcast Up To $1.77 Trillion
ReplyDeleteI saw that soon after I made this post. There's no ways they'll get fined that amount. It's X amount per torrent customer, which if all their customers would bring it to that figure. Still, would be awesome if action was taken against them as they appear to be a bit like the Telkom of the US.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure there are plenty of unsecured wireless networks in a place like california, maybe you could set up some sort of load balancing solution to conceal your usage :P
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine who emigrated to the US found an unsecured network and so conveniently had a chance to try out their OptOnline cable connection for a few weeks before he decided to order it for himself.
That's what I thought, but it's not the case in my area. About 20 wireless networks and they're all secure.
ReplyDeleteI received one of those calls myself and had my internet shut off for 2 days. Same thing over here, no exact number of how much "internet" I was using. It's annoying, and I still have no real of figuring out how much I use.
ReplyDeleteI would like to know why is getting our bandwidth information like some top secret pentagon info. I mean how hard is it to tell me if I'm close to 250GB and/or give me the exact usage.
ReplyDelete