And God said NO DOWNLOADING, and the FCC disagreed... So they compromised (March 6, 2009)

Current mood:disgusted

So Comcast has decided that they are going to limit the amount of data you download per month. You can now only downlaod 250GB of data. If you go over this, they will suspend yor service and give you a nasty phone call. If you do it again, you are now denied service for a year.

Initially, they were specifically targeting P2P downloaders, but the FCC said that ain't right, so they came up with this data cap and made it program/ application- agnostic, meaning that it only sees your bandwidth usage, not what its used FOR. 

I just spent the last hour in a one on one live chat with Comcast Customer service. The guy was very nice and all that, but when I mentioned this data cap, even specifics on it, he seemed to have no idea what I was talking about. I then gave him a link to a news article about it. All this was because the page about it on the Comcast site was giving me an error message every time.

Anyway, after I sent him to a site with an article on it, he told me that the limit applies ONLY to the e-mail storage on Comcast. I asked a few questions at this point, because that didn't smell right to me. But he was very specific about it. I know. I saved the whole conversation. He told me flat out that the cap does not have anything to do with the stuff you download or anything else. Just the amount of storage used on a Comcast e-mail account.

I then finally got the FAQ and Terms of Service page to work for me, after leaving the chat with customer service. The wording in there is slippery, to say the least. But after reading it several times through and talking it over with a friend of mine who actually knows people that have been affectd by this, I decided that this is bullshit.

The cap pertains to everything (for those Katt Williams fans out there, know that every time I say the word everything, in my head I hear "ev-ar-e-thang??" "Ev-ar-e-thang." and I laugh.). You really DO only have 250 GB of bandwidth to play on per month. Most people aren't going to be affected by this, becasue thats a fucking LOT of shit. But once that is allowed, where is it going to end up?

They can tell you how much FREE stuff you can download from a service you are PAYING for. What the fuck sense does that make?? Here's a perfect example of why this pisses me off right now.

NIN posted a lot of concert footage not too long ago that they encouraged people to download. They said to make something with it. Complitaions and what not. Thing is, its about 600GB worth of concert footage. This now presents a problem. Turns out, it can be downloaded in 3 installments of about 200GB per chunk, but that soesnt leave much room for other crap for three months. 

I don't know. I guess the basic idea here is that this is a load of crap and it pisses me off that no one's actually said or done anything about it. And I don't think anyone is likely to, either.  Awesome. Really awesome. Land-of-the-free shit, right there.