Just got an email from Cox

[Aasum]

I get those emails every month and between 4 TV streaming 1080p netflix streams most of the day I easily hit 1TB a month.

[seafirex]

I have to give the other posters a thumbs up on there answer. It is the customer responsability to read the term and condition at all time in everything.

 

Yes also they are right to say " What a limit on a 150mbps connection ? " Because i also wonder why they limit the bandwith, we all know that the faster it goes the more you will use and at that speed no restriction should ever be put in place.

 

At least know you know what is wrong with the service you got. I suggess you call them up to ask why they never advise you also of that limit. 1 way or another every ISP even if the type of service is a long standing service they must still disclose at all time the limit of bandwith the service includes. Even the providers here in Canada advise us if there is a limit or none ( mine as none and was told also at registration they even discuss the different plans and what it includesin details ).

 

So i can not understand why your ISP would not advise you of it knowing that the connection speed was so high and you would have reach the limit so fast on that type of connection. Just by giving me the speed the service offer i can see this issue incoming from a mile away. 

[COKid]

I really don't have a problem with caps. Why should I pay to same price as some other bloke downloading 10 times as much? The OP lost my support with his entitlement attitude. I guess it's not what you say but how you say it.

 

I honestly don't know if the Cox limits are fair, however. I d/l nowhere near that much stuff.

[VBCtv]

I live in a West Cleveland suburb in Ohio. I have Cox and have their 150mbps service also here. I have gone over my cap 3 times in the 3 years since they started doing the caps and have spoken with Customer Service about it in the past. They claim they are soft caps, meaning they will only send out that email or terminate your service if you are in a high traffic area and could be affecting other users around you.

 

Here's an article from a year ago, someone reporting about there bandwidth soft caps.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Cox-Bumps-Usage-Caps-Slightly-123220

[neo158]

Here in the UK most, if not all, ISPs have a fair use policy in place and use bandwidth throttling if a user is downloading an excessive amount. As others have stated it's a consumers responsibility to read the T's & C's before signing/accepting a contract. I seriously doubt that the two paragraphs in the image the OP posted are the extent of the Terms and Conditions.

[VBCtv]

The T&C is different in every market at Cox. Cox's website is split up to each market. I think all the caps & if they are hard or soft caps varies by market & amount of people in that market that they service. Here in Ohio, there are only 7 suburbs served by Cox and that is in the whole state, just up here in Cleveland West.

[neo158]

The T&C is different in every market at Cox. Cox's website is split up to each market. I think all the caps & if they are hard or soft caps varies by market & amount of people in that market that they service. Here in Ohio, there are only 7 suburbs served by Cox and that is in the whole state, just up here in Cleveland West.

 

That's just silly, you'd think they would have a single set on T&C for all areas.

[xrobwx71]

Exactly, at that speed you could easily pull down 200GB a day, I can't even imagine that type of speed coming from a 15 meg service. on 150 how many megs down does that translate into? I get about 2 megs per second.

8 bits in one byte.

[Michael Scrip]

we all know that the faster it goes the more you will use and at that speed no restriction should ever be put in place.

I don't quite understand this.

 

I have 50mbps internet... the OP has 150mbps.

 

Does that mean he will download 3 times as much stuff as me?  Wouldn't it depend on the particular server you're connecting to?

 

And how does Netflix eat up more bandwidth with a faster download speed?  You can only download as fast as the Netflix CDN can deliver.

 

Plus... a 2 hour Netflix movie will still take 2 hours to watch no matter what your speed is.  So... that 3GB Netflix file will use the same bandwidth for both of us.

 

I hate caps as much as anyone... but I don't exactly understand how you will automatically use more if it's faster.

[HawkMan]

For the record, while you can put terms and conditions for the use of broadband in a separate TC document, I believe legally they have to inform about important usage restricting limits like caps needs to be listed there right with the spces for the lines like speed and such.

[Timan Veteran]

I just switched from cox, but basically you will get bugged to death if you go over your 400gb~ or whatever limited. They won't actually do ANYTHING to your service. Now they will call you an warn you if you start go go over by like a factor of 3, so say you download/upload (this is the ###### part, it counts upstream) 1tb of data, they'll call, tell you you have a limited and to watch it, goto their site to see stats etc blah blah blah. I went over every month last year, and the month I went over drastically (was backing computers up to the cloud) I got a call.

[Crimson Rain]

I have a 8mbit (###### speed compared to yours; I know) Internet but I can download 2TB or more per month if I want to lol.

[Raa]

None of you guys have been to Australia then... :laugh:

[primexx]

I agreed in a previous post that the 400GB limits are not reasonable and yes it "sucks".   But the real point here is he did not read the terms of service, etc. and is now blaming Cox for the situation.  Consumers have to understand what they are getting into when purchasing products and services.  There is no lack of information available.  He not a victim of bad business practices, he's a volunteer.  He chose not to learn about the service being offered.  And now he's mad, so be it.  Live and learn, I hope.

For the record, while you can put terms and conditions for the use of broadband in a separate TC document, I believe legally they have to inform about important usage restricting limits like caps needs to be listed there right with the spces for the lines like speed and such.

 

Yup. Raze is being wayyy too simplistic with his caveat emptor stance. It varies by jurisdiction obviously but I think in most (all??) common law jurisdictions contracts are not absolute. You can't just go burying all sorts of onerous clauses in a fineprint countract and expect to enforce it without ever bringing the customer's attention to it. Sure, the customer has a responsibility to actually read the terms that they're agreeing to, but the fact is that the vast majority of people don't and even if they did wouldn't understand it anyway. So usually only reasonable terms that the parties should have expected to form part of the contract are enforced where one side didn't read it and no attention was brought to the specific part. Problem is, who the heck is going to sue a telecom giant? Even if somebody did, the courts may well find that a ludicrously small data cap is a reasonable term. And most important of all: you have no choice - who else are you gonna go with? There are no other providers, so f you.

[Darrian]

I typically go 300+ GB over my "limit" (on Cox) within the first week of my billing cycle.  They just keep sending me emails throughout the month and never do anything about it.

[+LogicalApex MVC]

I agreed in a previous post that the 400GB limits are not reasonable and yes it "sucks".   But the real point here is he did not read the terms of service, etc. and is now blaming Cox for the situation.  Consumers have to understand what they are getting into when purchasing products and services.  There is no lack of information available.  He not a victim of bad business practices, he's a volunteer.  He chose not to learn about the service being offered.  And now he's mad, so be it.  Live and learn, I hope.

Although I agree that consumers should always read all contracts fully... Not doing so shouldn't give business license to legalize borderline fraudulent business practices. IMHO selling a 150Mb connection that can exhaust its cap in about 8 hours is extremely deceptive. It would be similar to running an all you can eat buffet that had a note on the back of the receipt in small print saying "All you can eat is defined as 1 plate per customer". Sure, you disclosed it, but you're being intentionally deceptive.

 

There should be tight regulation of the ability of ISPs to do stuff like this. IMHO it should be purely illegal...

 

The reality of the issue is simple. ISPs are under intense pressure to raise their speeds, but don't want to make the actual infrastructure investments to do so. The solution? Introduce caps. These will allow you to increase the customers speed, and charge them more, but then ensure that the only thing they can do is browse Facebook and stream Netflix here and there. In reality, it will ensure their load on the network doesn't change all that much meanwhile they are spending a lot more money for a speed they are severely crippled from actually using. Oversubscribing their lines shouldn't be a problem that impacts the customer negatively. They should be forced to suffer the punishment of having oversubscribed their infrastructure.

 

I would prefer penalties for ISPs failing to deliver 90% of the lines advertised speeds and I would also prefer a ban on caps.

 

I really don't have a problem with caps. Why should I pay to same price as some other bloke downloading 10 times as much? The OP lost my support with his entitlement attitude. I guess it's not what you say but how you say it.

 

I honestly don't know if the Cox limits are fair, however. I d/l nowhere near that much stuff.

I'm not sure what your point is. I have T-Mobile for cell phone service. All of my minutes are unlimited... Should I be requesting a discount from T-Mobile because I use less than 100 minutes a month and some bloke over there is using well over 2K? I mean, after all, why should I pay the same as some other bloke using 20X as much as me!?

 

If you are using very little of your connection then that's fine. You should be allowed to use as much, or as little, of the bandwidth you are paying for. There is no need to look at another user unfavorably for using their connection more than you...

[+Red King Subscriber²]

Don't worry ISPs simply use this time to roll out "unlimited data" plans which cost a lot more.

[br0adband]

Cox won't kill your connection at this point since it's your first notice - don't consider it a "warning" either, it's just a notification because the only way you get it is to a Cox registered email address and you'd be stunned at just how many people use Cox service but they never enable that aspect of their Internet service. They continue to use some other email and don't necessarily add it to their account info so they get them whenever Cox sends them out.

 

Having said that, the Ultimate package is 150Mbps as covered - that's 150 Megabits per second which divided by 8 ends up at roughly 18-19MB/s (that's Megabytes per second) sustained - some connections may show a tiny bit more depending on compression but when I had the Cox Ultimate service last year I was regularly pulling down 160 to 165 Mbps and even had some times where it was sustained at close to 180 Mbps (it ain't perfect and it does fluctuate but it's still usually 150 or higher so you do get more than you're paying for).

 

The bandwidth cap is 400GB for Ultimate which I myself had issues with last year when I got the plan the first time. I mean, they're giving 250GB of bandwidth for the 50 Mbps "Premiere" package, and since you're paying a lot more for the Ultimate which is literally 3x faster, one would logically think "Ok, 3 times the speed, I should get 3 times the bandwidth or 750GB a month..." - unfortunately Cox doesn't agree so that's a dead end and don't even bother complaining about it.

They may increase the cap next January which is typically when they do speed/bandwidth bumps. They didn't bump that one this year, however.

 

No offense but if you're getting games that are 100GB+ to download, you're better off buying 'em in the store or something and getting the physical media, geez. :D

 

Cox is the most lenient Internet provider in those respects - that notice you got was just a polite reminder that yes you DO have a bandwidth cap in place so, next month (or the rest of this month) slow down a bit.

 

200GB in 2 days... that's quite a bit, indeed, even if you're paying for 400GB a month.

[+Warwagon MVC]

I really don't have a problem with caps. Why should I pay to same price as some other bloke downloading 10 times as much? The OP lost my support with his entitlement attitude. I guess it's not what you say but how you say it.

 

I honestly don't know if the Cox limits are fair, however. I d/l nowhere near that much stuff.

 

I disagree the person with the 1mbp service and a 200 GB cap probably isn't planning on downloading a lot of stuff and when they want to go to facebook.com they probably google it.. Anyone with a 150mbp connection knows why he wants it and is probably going to be downloading a crap ton more than the 1mbp service person.

 

It's also not how much you can download but how fast you can download. As a someone that does computer repairs, and when I download (for example) the latest offline install of an Office service pack, the 15 mbp service which makes the download take 10 mins vs the 1mbp service which would take the download 2 hours.

 

As far as your argument of you paying the same price as some other bloke downloading 10 times as much ... why do you care how much they downloads? You could download just as much as them you just choose not to.

[Nashy]

Not seeing a problem.  You have a cap, you went over it.  Learn and move on.

[Brian M. Veteran]

Hmmm.

The majority of cases I've heard of ISPs with limits have been US, that and a few UK.

That's slowly dying off now though, after Virgin's run in with the Advertising Standards Authority over here. It was common practice to advertise broadband as being unlimited, but then have a "fair usage policy". Up until recently, Virgin would drop your speed by up to 60% when you downloaded a set amount (e.g. 5-10GB) during peak hours. They were slapped on the wrist by the ASA and told that they can no longer advertise as unlimited with the fair usage policy, so they removed the policy.

Moreover, the ASA were annoyed by how complicated virgin made the policy. Heck, I have a MSc in a computer science related topic and I struggled to understand the restrictions sometimes - so how are your average joe computer users supposed to keep track of it.

[VBCtv]

As I said before, I know people at Cox & have talked to people at Cox. it's a soft cap. They won't enforce it unless you are affecting others around you bandwidth. 200gb in 2 days may be affecting others around you. This also varies from each market depending on how large the market is and how many customers they serve. I live in the Cleveland West market which is very small for Cox, they serve 7 suburbs and have 2 stores open, one at Westgate here in Fairview & one in Parma. And when I say stores, I mean they sell everything from routers to HDMI cables, you go there to pick up your equipment or even pay your bill or make changes to your service. It's actually alot easier than calling them.

Cox is very customer friendly, so depending on your market I would take that warning with a grain of salt. Now I've gone over the cap a few times & have never gotten an email, so you may have been affecting others and that is why the email was issued. They are called soft caps, there not hard caps, they won't charge for overages and you can go over. They were put in place so you 1.) knew you bandwidth usage. 2.) Protect Cox and give everyone equal amounts of bandwidth without limiting or harming other customers from heavy users.

[+Raze Subscriber²]

Although I agree that consumers should always read all contracts fully... Not doing so shouldn't give business license to legalize borderline fraudulent business practices. IMHO selling a 150Mb connection that can exhaust its cap in about 8 hours is extremely deceptive. It would be similar to running an all you can eat buffet that had a note on the back of the receipt in small print saying "All you can eat is defined as 1 plate per customer". Sure, you disclosed it, but you're being intentionally deceptive.

 

There should be tight regulation of the ability of ISPs to do stuff like this. IMHO it should be purely illegal...

 

The reality of the issue is simple. ISPs are under intense pressure to raise their speeds, but don't want to make the actual infrastructure investments to do so. The solution? Introduce caps. These will allow you to increase the customers speed, and charge them more, but then ensure that the only thing they can do is browse Facebook and stream Netflix here and there. In reality, it will ensure their load on the network doesn't change all that much meanwhile they are spending a lot more money for a speed they are severely crippled from actually using. Oversubscribing their lines shouldn't be a problem that impacts the customer negatively. They should be forced to suffer the punishment of having oversubscribed their infrastructure.

 

I would prefer penalties for ISPs failing to deliver 90% of the lines advertised speeds and I would also prefer a ban on caps.

 

I'm not sure what your point is. I have T-Mobile for cell phone service. All of my minutes are unlimited... Should I be requesting a discount from T-Mobile because I use less than 100 minutes a month and some bloke over there is using well over 2K? I mean, after all, why should I pay the same as some other bloke using 20X as much as me!?

 

If you are using very little of your connection then that's fine. You should be allowed to use as much, or as little, of the bandwidth you are paying for. There is no need to look at another user unfavorably for using their connection more than you...

 

Cox made no claim that it's services were unlimited or "all you can eat".  Your comparison is invalid.  Yes, companies are involved in questionable business practices which means it is very important for consumers to read the contract, no excuses.  And if you do not like the way companies package and sell their products/services then speak up. And I do realize that in many areas people have only 1 choice available for net access and I believe that is wrong and competition would be of great benefit to the consumer. And as I made clear I do not support ridiculous caps.

[HawkMan]

Cox made no claim that it's services were unlimited or "all you can eat".

 

they don't need to, any important info like a LIMIT should be there on the front page of the list of important information about the plan when he signs up, right along with speed. Without that, he's likely to win any consumer case he brings up against them if he was to do so. 

[Scraggles]

they don't need to, any important info like a LIMIT should be there on the front page of the list of important information about the plan when he signs up, right along with speed. Without that, he's likely to win any consumer case he brings up against them if he was to do so.

Exactly. I don't plan in taking action unless they do something to my bill or terminate service... I was simply ranting as a public service to let other people know who don't read the fine print. I didn't expect cox to send their lawyer after me.