Comcast Users Say Broadband Meter Neither Clear nor Reliable Last week we pointed out how Comcast had managed to somehow swap a user's MAC address in their records and bill them for other customers usage. When Comcast's meters expanded to Florida recently users complained that the company's meter tracked usage that never happened. The FCC has received 13,000 complaints about Comcast's usage caps this year, many of them also complaining that the company's meter doesn't match their router statistics.

Comcast, for what it's worth, has long stated it pays a company by the name of NetForecast to confirm their meter's accuracy. Those reports suggest that Comcast's meters are reliable within 1% accuracy over a month. But complaints about meter accuracy and the general uselessness of Comcast's bandwidth meter continue all the same. The Consumerist directs us to this week's complaint over at Credit.com, where a user complains that Comcast's meter is not only inaccurate, it's doesn't offer enough detail: quote: Richardson, who lives in Atlanta, regularly exceeds Comcast’s 300 GB usage cap. In July, she was charged $70 for overages. In August, $90. Meanwhile, warnings that her family is about to exceed its allotment seem to come earlier and earlier each month. “Today, December 7th, I just got a notice that we have already used our 300 GB of data for the entire month of December!!!! What?? It’s only 7 days into the billing cycle!!!” she wrote to me recently. “This seems ridiculous since we have only been home TWO of these days!!! We will probably be billed an extra $100 to $140 in overage costs just for this month. I spoke with three different people, including management, and got no help.” At the moment, Comcast's usage meter (when it loads) only details overall consumption for an entire household. That may be problematic for parents who are trying to narrow down where traffic consumption is occurring, but aren't technically proficient enough to use their home router's reporting features. That's great news for Comcast (who'll be raking in extra money from people clueless about consumption), but it's not so great for Comcast's customers, who'll be facing major rate hikes.The Consumerist's Chris Morran is spot on when he notes that complaints like this are only going to grow exponentially as Comcast usage caps expand: quote: Comcast maintains that only a small percentage of its customers are currently impacted by these data caps. Unless the company figures out a way to demonstrate that its measurements are accurate — and that customers get more precise information about when and how much data was used during a billing period — this could be a mammoth disaster waiting to happen when Comcast expands the caps to its full roster of more than 20 million customers. And as we've noted for years, US regulators couldn't care less whether broadband usage meters are accurate (hell, they don't even really seem bothered that Comcast's now At the moment, Comcast's usage meter (when it loads) only details overall consumption for an entire household. That may be problematic for parents who are trying to narrow down where traffic consumption is occurring, but aren't technically proficient enough to use their home router's reporting features. That's great news for Comcast (who'll be raking in extra money from people clueless about consumption), but it's not so great for Comcast's customers, who'll be facing major rate hikes.The Consumerist's Chris Morran is spot on when he notes that complaints like this are only going to grow exponentially as Comcast usage caps expand:And as we've noted for years, US regulators couldn't care less whether broadband usage meters are accurate (hell, they don't even really seem bothered that Comcast's now using them anti-competitively against Netflix ). And despite wanting to bill like utilities, ISPs have managed to keep government from treating them as such. The end result is a major cable company now using usage caps to not only hinder streaming video competition, but pummel subscribers with no alternative ISP choices with major new rate hikes.







News Jump WISPs Get CBRS Range As Great As Six Miles At 100 Mbps Speeds; Windstream Officially Exits Bankruptcy; + more news Charter Relaunches Free 60-day Internet And Wi-Fi Offer; NCTA: FCC Should Stick With 25/3 Speed Threshold; + more news Comcast Shuts Off Internet for Subs Who Were Sold Service Illegally; AT&T, Verizon Team To Stop T-Mobile 5G; + more news California Defends Its Net Neutrality Law; AT&T's Traffic Up 20% Despite Data Traffic Actually Being Down; + more news Are The Comcast-Charter X1 Talks Dead In The Water?; AT&T May Offer Phone Plans With Ads For Discounts; + more news Europe's Top Court: Net Neutrality Rules Bar Zero Rating; ViacomCBS To Rebrand CBS All Access As Paramount+; + more news Verizon To Buy Reseller TracFone For $7B; 5G Not The Competitive Threat To Cable Many Thought It Would Be; + more news MS.Wants Records From AT&T On $300M Project; Google Fiber Outages In Austin, Houston, Other Texan Cities; + more news States With The Biggest Decreases In Speed; AT&T Hopes You'll Forget Its Fight Against Accurate Maps; + more news AT&T's CEO Has A Familiar $olution To US Broadband Woes; EarthLink Files Suit Against Charter; + more news ---------------------- this week last week most discussed

Most recommended from 40 comments



karlmarx

join:2006-09-18

Moscow, ID 15 recommendations karlmarx Member Comcast..just doesn't care Why should they care at all? Remember, this has NOTHING to do with congestion, and contrary to what their press releases lie about, this has NOTHING to do with fairness. This is REVENUE PRODUCTION. Nothing more, nothing less. The fact that the incremental cost to provide 1GB vs 100GB is virtually nil, means this is a pure money grab scheme.

And like the gas stations of the old days, before they were regulated, a 'gallon' could be whatever the 'seller' decided a gallon was.

Comcast is charging you for EVERY SINGLE BYTE to your cable modem, whether you requested the data or not. If you get hit with a port scan, a ping flood, or anything, it's COSTING YOU MONEY. Those annoying multimedia ads can easily exceed 10mb per ad, and even though you don't want them, AND you have an ad blocker, the DATA is still sent to your IP address.

Why is this allowed to happen? It's VERY SIMPLE... MONOPOLY. Period. If you want anything over 20mb/sec, you REALLY and TRULY don't have any choice except to use your cable provider. Some of us, VERY FEW of us, are lucky and have TRULY unlimited 1gb/1gb for LESS than comcast charges for 50/10. But we are far and away the exception to the rule. For 95%+ of the US, your choices for high speed are CABLE or.. umm, nothing.

It's not in Comcast's PROFIT MAXIMIZATION to have accurate meters. It won't RAISE REVENUE if comcast doesn't count traffic you didn't request from using your cap. THIS is the end result of a MONOPOLY power ABUSING it market.

Guess what, apart from cancelling, there REALLY isn't anything you can do. Sorry to say that, but unless you can get your city/town to run a competitive offering, YOU are going to end up getting screwed. And I EXPECT, by the end of 2016, the MAJORITY of the country WILL be under data caps. Sucks, but apart from the government stepping in and regulating, there isn't a solution.

maartena

Elmo

Premium Member

join:2002-05-10

Orange, CA 11 recommendations maartena Premium Member Who pays for unwanted/hacked traffic? If you piss off the wrong people on the internet - specifically those who can use large university networks to mess with you - you may end up with some "l33t" hacker kid that floods your line for a couple of days. Even one night of that could eat up half of your data allowance, and that is traffic you most certainly did not ask for.



The official answer I already know: "We will investigate these on a case by case basis and subtract data based on the outcome" or something like that.



Then there is spam mail. Although its not going to amount to a LOT of data, it is unwanted nonetheless. Although you CHOOSE to go these websites, an argument can be made for unwanted advertisements as well. Yes, there are ad-blockers, but not all websites work well with an ad blocker on purpose.



Another issue is lost packets. If the line quality is bad, you could lose say.... 25% of packets, and not really ever notice it as online video streaming will probably just buffer up fine, especially if your connection speed is more than twice as fast as the video you are watching. (Hint: youtube and netflix HD is around 4 Mbps, and will most likely work fine on a faulty line with 25% packet loss that is 10 Mbps or greater. Your video will however consume 25% more data because 25% of packets will need to be sent again. This could go on for months..... And unless the measuring is done on the CLIENT side (in other words: pay for the packets that ARRIVE, not for the ones that get lost on the line between Comcast local DC and your house.) the measurements are going to unreliable. You don't pay the electricity company for lost electrons along the way (and a lot get lost), you don't pay the gas company more if a gas leak happens in your street, and you don't pay the water company if the line BEFORE your meter bursts and floods your property. It should be the same way with data.



And then there are hacks. WPA2 can be hacked in under 8 hours nowadays utilizing a flaw in WPA2 that can't be patched by using GPU's in video card to perform certain math. They can also sniff out Mac addresses used on the network using this flaw, allowing a hacker to use THAT mac address to connect. (I don't know the exact details, but it is safe to say WPA2 isn't secure any longer). You can actually solve it by running a small RADIUS server on Linux or Windows, and let that server do the authentication. RADIUS is strongly encrypted and does not have that flaw. You could leave your WPA2 wide open but you won't get past the RADIUS authentication..... but not everyone has that option, nor the technical expertise to run a RADIUS server to protect your network. I have the technical expertise, but I honestly can't be bothered.....



But what if someone DOES hack your WPA2 network? If this was a credit card number that was stolen instead of a SSID and access key, two things would happen:



1) The minute you call the credit card company your card will be cancelled, and a new one will be sent to you.

2) All charges not made by you will be reversed by the credit card company.



But can/will comcast do the same?



1) Is easy, you put in a new SSID, hide it, change mac addresses, put in new access keys, etc....

2) Not so easy. How do you prove after all that the data transferred is not yours?



A credit card company can spot patterns. They know that transactions from Nigeria on the same day you pumped gas in Los Angeles are probably bogus and hacked.... but if you download a large chunk of data to a Nigerian server, can you really prove it wasn't you? You may be playing an online game, and your neighbor is uploading a whole bunch of encrypted data (let the imagination go wild) over your hacked WPA2 and not even notice it.



Datameters with all ISP's have proven pretty unreliable. U-Verse isn't even bothering anymore because they supply TV service over the same VDSL line, and can't reliably separate the two in counting the traffic.



Caps are not needed. It has been said over and over that it isn't about network capacity, it is all about filling pockets and preventing people from using online video services instead of their own TV service. If it really WAS a capacity issue, they could just slow down the speed when you reach a certain amount of data. E.g. have 25 Mbps and reach 500 GB?, Okay, we'll put you on 5 Mbps for the rest of the month. And even that is questionable, we have so many capless providers (TWC is one for now.... so if Charter) and you don't hear that there are any MORE capacity problems then there are with say Comcast. That is because there are none. They suffer from the same level of capacity problems as any other provider in that there are underserved areas, neglected cities, overloaded nodes, etc..... but if a company like TWC can roll out 300 flippin megs across much of their footprint without complaining about capacity, you tell me how it is about capacity now. It isn't. Caps must stop. uwuowo

join:2015-10-19 1 edit 7 recommendations uwuowo Member The problem isn't the meter's inaccuracy, the problem is the meter itself Rather than complain about the fact the meter's inaccurate, how are you guys not unnerved over the fact it even exists?

sraz

join:2013-10-28

Tucson, AZ 5 recommendations sraz Member Alternatives? Well since Comcast refuses to compete on price or service, seems to me they leave the path wide open for competition. Sadly a failure of the telcos and our politicians has left us with no competition. Fortunately for me I could get decent DSL, when I had Comcast I pretty much had to shut things off about half way through the month, and I have television service! So their evil scheme to protect television revenues makes zero since when people who have television can still easily go over their less than generous data allotment. I'll laugh when they offer 1gigabit speeds and still have this joke of a data cap. That or I''ll just sign up for 2 months at a time, blow the courtesy overage months with a few TB, then cancel. xD