[ale] WARNING - RANT Re: Comcast Caps Data at 250G/Month

[Jim Popovitch]

2008/9/6 Michael B. Trausch <mike at trausch.us>:
> While I haven't gotten a response to my question directed at Comcast
> yet, I would be interested in finding out.  For the moment, I am making
> the assumption that all traffic that makes it in or out, including the
> overhead of TCP/IP, and including things that are filtered by your
> router/NAT (e.g., inbound packets that get dropped due to iptables
> rules) count against your limit.

Seriously now, I can't imagine Comcast doing packet analysis,
simultaneously, on all 13 million of it's customers.   Imagine the
latency *that* would induce, or the computing power required to
achieve such a thing.  Think it's easy?  Look no further than ALE to
see what solutions have emerged for methods of automatically
calculating and tracking individual home PC usage. ;-)

> Does anyone know if all that stuff makes it through to the statistics
> that are output by the "ifconfig" utility?  If a packet comes through
> eth0, and it is dropped because it's filtered, does it still make it
> into the stats?

Yes.

> And I can't imagine they'd count in bulk like that... I can pull
> down-to-the-byte stats that (I am fairly sure) are accurate, they should
> be able to do the same.  If they are using any unit other than bits or
> bytes for measurement, then they're going to be logging inaccurate
> counts, and that would be wrong.

They may not even be planning on counting the bytes.  I suspect that
they will do nothing in October except perhaps monitor a few select
customers/areas and only when a "target" exceeds 250G will they go
after them and say "we don't want you any more".  As it is now,
Comcast knows when a network segment is saturated (there are several
media reports of how they have addressed saturated spots in the past)
 The new 250GB rule gives them teeth to use when they find the
person(s) responsible for the saturation.

-Jim P.