Re: Net Neutrality and Your Internet Bill

On Fri, 3 Dec 2010, nicholas a. evans wrote:

>>> It's a more honest and more easily audited business transaction than 
>>> "unlimited" service that gets mysteriously cut off or throttled when 
>>> you hit the unpublished limits.
>>
>> Unpublished?  Wouldn't it be specified in your contract and elsewhere? 
>>  I check my cell phone provider's website all the time to see how much 
>> bandwidth I've used, and that's why I've never been caught off-guard by 
>> my data usage.
>
> Cell phone companies are much more up front about it, both because they 
> have more competition and because bandwidth is more scarce.
>
> Comcast is wired, and I was unable to find out what my limits are from 
> their website.  When I originally signed up, they even advertised their 
> service as "Unlimited Internet", although I knew people who had their 
> service shutdown for excessive use during that period.  It looks like 
> they've removed that from the advertising by now, which is good. But I 
> still don't know where I stand as far as how much I've used and what my 
> limits are, which is not so good.

FWIW, I have been told that my own cable provider allows people like me to 
check our bandwidth usage online, but every time I have tried to set up my 
online account, I get a message saying that there's been an error or 
something.  I phoned customer service about this and they didn't have 
anything useful to say beyond "oh we've been having problems with one of 
our servers and it should be working again in a few days".  (And that was 
more than a few days ago.  And no, the feature *still* isn't working.)

Mind you, it's not like they've ever *billed* me for extra bandwidth 
usage.  But when I got my Netflix.ca account a few months ago, I figured I 
should probably look into this.  Just in case.

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