I just moved and comcast jacked my bill up a bunch because I have the "blast" package. When I asked why, they said it was because I had the fastest access level. They offer two lower and slower levels. Is there any truth to this? Do they really catagorize my IP address and prioritize my data so that I always get pushed to the back of the line if I don't pay enough?:eek:

I just moved and comcast jacked my bill up a bunch because I have the "blast" package. When I asked why, they said it was because I had the fastest access level. They offer two lower and slower levels. Is there any truth to this? Do they really catagorize my IP address and prioritize my data so that I always get pushed to the back of the line if I don't pay enough?:eek:

It isn't done by IP address, it is how your modem is configured. They can setup the modem to only send and receive at a certain rate.

Thanks for info. The modem is already installed at the "blast" level. They said if I downgraded, no one would come out. Does that mean they can somehow reset my modem remotely?

All they do is usually send a .bin file to the modem. This is what limits/regulates your speed.

Ransom

JHouse,

In addition to the ability to reconfigure your modem to only operate at certain speeds, service providers have other mechanisms at their disposal to control bandwidth usage on a per user basis.

For example, a few years ago I was a hardware engineer with a company and built a product that would sit "inline" between users such as yourself and the services providers' internal network and the Internet. Each and every packet traversing between users and the Internet could be observed, tracked and counted.

With such a box deployed, if a user's traffic patterns did not comply with the service providers policies, bandwidth could be limited for that user. And, this traffic monitoring wasn't just on a per user basis, but rather policies could also be created and enforced based on the type of traffic, i.e. peer to peer versus BitT**** versus http versus email and so on.

So, even though many of us might have multi-megabit Internet connections, say 3Mbit down or whatever, it's quite likely that the service provider may limit something like BitT**** traffic to something far less than that.

There are several companies building such products, the product I built being just one of them.

In addition to the ability to limit bandwidth on a per user, per protocol basis, these boxes can also do lots of other interesting things, like looking at any byte in any packet that they want to, for whatever information that is of interest. Google "deep packet inspection" if you want more information in that regard.

Regards,

Dan

Scary

Do they really catagorize my IP address and prioritize my data so that I always get pushed to the back of the line if I don't pay enough?:eek:

There is some truth to this, just not today :D The Internet WILL move to priority based trafficking within 2 years. The wheels are already in motion. It will mostly affect consumers, and businesses will be given priority. Beyond that the providers like Yahoo, AT&T, etc will all have top priority to internet bandwidth and they will be able to throttle their bandwidth as they see fit. Eventually people will be waiting in queues to get to their information. It sucks, but it is coming.

Google "net neutrality" if you want to read more on it.

-Chad

Thanks. Now the only loose end is which form of suicide to select.