Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Here's a copy of the e-mail Comcast customers were sent earlier this morning in my local area.Comcast is committed to providing you with the best online experience possible.Essentially this is just another way for them to stop people from downloading and or uploading large files; legal or not. I wonder how this will impact MMORPG for gamers. Maybe it won't matter at all? Who knows. What about the people who legally download movies, game and music? Heck, you can download things straight from Amazon, EA Games, and a whole slew of other companies. It's the direct download after buy option. What if it times out while you're fulfilling a legit purchase? Who knows maybe it will just mean Customer Support for a million online companies will double over the next several months. We'll just have to see.
One of the ways we do that is by managing the leading fiber optic network in the nation to ensure it is fast, safe and reliable. As part of our ongoing efforts to continuously improve the quality of our service, we are switching to a new network congestion management technique by the end of the year. It is focused on managing network congestion only when and where it may occur. It will also replace the current technique and will help ensure that all of our customers receive their fair share of network resources.
What does this mean for you? Probably nothing. We ran five market trials of this technique over the summer and found that less than one percent of customers were affected. So, the vast majority of customers will not notice any change to their Internet experience as a result of this new technique. During the times of busiest network use (which could occur at any hour, depending on your neighborhood), those very few extraordinarily heavy users - who are doing things like conducting multiple and continuous large file transfers - may experience slightly longer response times for some online activities until the period of network congestion ends.
As we transition to this new technique, we have amended our Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") and posted it on the Comcast.net Web site. For links to the amended AUP, as well as answers to Frequently Asked Questions and more information about this new technique or our network management efforts in general, please visit our Network Management Policy page at: www.comcast.net/networkmanagement.
Labels: Comcast
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Straight from the mouths of those who provide our service and act like God while also behaving as though they are head of a monarchy and demand over $100 in gold every month or they'll shut you down.
Argh!
I suppose it will shut down some spammers though which is the only good thing coming from the new policy.
Argh!
On October 1, 2008, we will post an updated AUP that will go into effect at that time.I don't know I think it's all foolish. I mean it essentially is putting a vice on everything INCLUDING legal activity. Because there are now more and more internet based downloads which you pay as you download and they are legal.
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.
I suppose it will shut down some spammers though which is the only good thing coming from the new policy.
Labels: Acceptable use policy, Bandwidth, Comcast
Friday, July 11, 2008
No, I'm not iPhone crazy, so hop over to Engadget for their play by play of today's launch.I'm more interested in the happenings over at Techdirt. Today they have an article about the whole privacy debacle in regards to internet realms.
Does Comcast believe the FCC has authority over its traffic shaping efforts? Well, it may just depend on who's asking. When the FCC asserted that it did have a say in regulating Comcast's traffic shaping efforts, Comcast emphatically stated that the FCC's authority does not extend that far. And, technically, Comcast is probably correct that it would be an overreach of the FCC's mandate -- though the FCC clearly disagrees.
Still, when defending itself against a lawsuit in California over the very same traffic shaping, Comcast has convinced a judge to suspend the lawsuit by noting that the FCC has clear authority over these matters:
This issue "i.e., the reasonableness of a broadband provider's network management practices" has, however, been firmly placed within the jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission ("FCC"), an administrative agency whose authority to regulate internet broadband access companies' services is well-established.
And then of course there is a neat piece of software I recently stumbled upon which I thought I'd quickly brief. It's called "TrueCrypt" and it's software for the top secret agent identity in all of us. When you encrypt files on your hard disk, not only do you want to scramble the files, but sometimes you want to prevent others from discovering that the files even exist, a sleight-of-hand known as steganography.
Best thing about this...it's freeware. =o)
Labels: Comcast, FCC, internet, software, TrueCrypt
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
The Comcast bundles currently being offered are the only economical way to get more bang for your buck.One important thing to know about their high speed Internet is they allow great networking abilities. They let you connect up to five computers to your Internet connection. These computers can also communicate with each other, allowing you to share files and printers. You can go wireless making it even easier to add computers to your home network. Though Brian and I won't have five, we'll definitely end up networking our desktops and we will probably opt to go wireless so we can be complete nerds with our laptops. Hmm...finally WOW on a network!
Get Double Play and Pay Only $69.00 With Every Purchase of Two Services Bundled.
Or get Triple Play and Pay Only $99.00 With Every Purchase of Three Services Bundled. With the triple play Comcast bundle you will have the ability to check voice mail messages via email and download video, Cable Broadband High-speed Internet, Digital phone, and Cable Television service, when purchased together, can save the busy, cost-conscious consumer considerably over purchasing individual services from different service providers.
Disclosure: This post has been sponsored.
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