FuzzButt Posted September 14, 2003 Share Posted September 14, 2003 Hello,Well I got this letter Yesterday from Comcast. It is standard company letterhead. It is a Notice of Acceptable Use Policy Voilation.Incendent Type: Network, Bandwidth, Data Storage, and Other Limitations.There are a few paragraphs after that that basically are just descriptions of what bandwidth is and references the terms of service.Odd thing is that no where in this letter nor the TOS or AUP on line are there any references to what is too much bandwidth and nothing is saying what/when or how much I used. There is an 800 number for the IP Network Abuse Team. I called them and there are about as much help as the TOS is. Nothing is in black and white. No one can say what it too much. At what point is the line being drawn. The only thiong they reference is that during August 2003 my Comcast High-Speed Internet exceeded Comcast's bandwidth usage limitations for my service.Ok now August was a bad month for me. It started out bad. On August 1st my house was hit by lightning. I was dark for 24 hours and was offline for 2 day's. Then the 14th the Blackout hit. All told it was a shorter month online then normal. Oh ya I can't forget the virus and all the work it was downloading service packs and updates for 5 PC's. Ya I also can throw in 2 full sets of Linux Distro's in ISO format so there is another 4GB. Anyway I sure would like to know the limit. The guy at the IP department was not much help. Here is something odd. Right now as I am typing this I have my DU Meter running in the background. I am showing no traffic up or down. I have everything else on my network physically unplugged from the Switch except the printer but the situation is the same with that unplugged. The situation is this. There is constant activity on my Linksys Cable modem. The link/Act light is almost constantly flashing and there are random sends and even more recieves. Also flashing is the ACT light on the router. There is no traffic beyond that. Neither of the 2 connected ports on the switch are flashing. I have not figured out why this is happening yet. I used to have a logger running and most of the traffic I had comming to me had Comcast IP's well that is what reverse lookups said at least. I hope I am not getting that tacked to my total since it is traffic from their sniffers and/or worms looking for open ports. I remember when I had a PC directly connected to the Cable Modem I was getting flooded with Messenger traffic. (On that PC I had not stopped it but it is disabled now)When I spoke with the IP Abuse guy I asked if upping my service level to "Pro" would help with the limit thingy but he said that all of the accounts have the same limits.When I get a chance I am calling them back to possibly open a report on this unknown traffic. Maybe someone in my area is trying to be a hacker and needs to be stopped.Also on a whim I started looking into getting DSL again. SBC, Earthlink and Covad so far. SBC looks the best right now. They are offering service packages that smoke this High-speed Cable. Try this 1.5-6Mb/s down 384 up with Dynamic IP for $99 a month with 1 year contract. I know I had 8Mb signal when I had DSL a few years ago and 384 is faster and probably more reliable than the 256 upload speed that Comcast is offering.Ideas/Thoughts?Chris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grasshopper Posted September 14, 2003 Share Posted September 14, 2003 I may be overly simplistic, but it sounds like a problem above your router, like you said, getting lots of messenger traffic or some other malicious type of bombardment. I think you should make one change at a time and see what happens. Although I'm not sure (this early in the morning) how you'd stop the traffic outside of calling support and maybe getting a higher tier support person and asking them. About the bandwidth limit, I'd just get all in a huff with them on the phone and demand to see an administrator in the networking area or whatever. They should know . If not then, keep on surfing!! Throw some numbers at them (numbers gathered with a network monitor utility) and see what happens. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeber Posted September 14, 2003 Share Posted September 14, 2003 demand to see an administratorAmen! I'd be curious to know how they can claim that you exceeded your bandwidth limits without having specific numbers. That's one of the most rediculous things I've ever heard.Officer: "You were speeding."Driver: "What's the speed limit here?"Officer: "There isn't one, but you were speeding."That would give them a license to charge you for exsceeding your bandwidth limits anytime they wanted the extra income. That's not an acceptable business practice. I wonder what the BBB would say about that? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SonicDragon Posted September 14, 2003 Share Posted September 14, 2003 QUOTEdemand to see an administratorAmen! I'd be curious to know how they can claim that you exceeded your bandwidth limits without having specific numbers. That's one of the most rediculous things I've ever heard.Officer: "You were speeding."Driver: "What's the speed limit here?"Officer: "There isn't one, but you were speeding."That would give them a license to charge you for exsceeding your bandwidth limits anytime they wanted the extra income. That's not an acceptable business practice.Definatly. Getting an admin is hard, but it needs to be done. Keep calling, keep trying all the different departments. Eventually, you'll get someone who is willing to help you.Best of luck. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ibe98765 Posted September 14, 2003 Share Posted September 14, 2003 In cases like this, I always go to the top of the food chain. Comcast is a public company. Using Yahoo, or MSNBC or whatever, you can look up their stock symbol and from there, get the main telephone number and a list of Officers. Call the President's office and start complaining there. I believe Comcast is HQ'd in Philadelphia, PA. It will help if you have a list of names of people you have talked to, times that you did so and what they said to you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ibe98765 Posted September 23, 2003 Share Posted September 23, 2003 New news just in! Read all about it here:http://www.msnbc.com/news/970151.aspPutting a lid on broadband use By John Borland Sept. 22 — Earlier this month, a Philadelphia Comcast broadband subscriber got a letter from his service provider, telling him he’d been using the Internet too much. Keith, who asked to keep his full name private, said he’d subscribed to the service for four years and never had a complaint before. Now he was being labeled a network “abuser.†Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freddy Posted September 23, 2003 Share Posted September 23, 2003 This is a new issue with Comcast is popping up all over the wires in the past few days. It seems Comcast has no set 'limit' but is targeting their top (ab)users to free up bandwidth to other customers. One such person was up&downloaded over 10g a day. This user claimed not to be exchanging pirated/copywrited material, but was hosting a real-time video chat with family overseas.From your description, I can't see how you could fall into this category. Maybe they get their ip logs screwed up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FuzzButt Posted October 4, 2003 Author Share Posted October 4, 2003 Well Friday October 3rd at 9:30 AM or so Comcast suspended my account without warning. I called them and the tech support people said a hold was put on my account and gave me a number for the Network Abuse department to leave a message at. I did that. 5 hours later a guy named Jef called me back. We played phone tag for a bit then I talked to him for a few minutes. He turned my account back on. I asked why was I turned off. the AUP states no number as being too much just the "anything that degrades network performance". I asked for a number and even he did not know. He told me he was expecting a letter himself. He also told me I was like the 300th person today he had spoken to about this. I explained to him that if Comcast is aggregating the months downloads together then my September download abount will still be quite high I estimated September's usage at 310GB downloaded and 25GB uploaded. I said this was not from hosting a server or anything like that but is a combination of normal surfing, Usenet access and streaming media. I said I have cut this back to about a gig a day but that has only been for the last week or so. I also mentioned that even while I was suspended my cable modem has quite a bit of receive activity. He said that most likely it was just the signaling from the head unit upstream from me.I think some time in the near future I am going to switch back to SBC for telephone service and get them to throw in DSL access on the line while they are at it. Chris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.