Mediacom, a cable TV company with about 1.4 million Internet customers in 22 states, is telling heavy upload users to reduce data usage – even when those users are well below their monthly data limits. Dice.
Mediacom’s fastest Internet plan offers gigabit download speeds and 50 Mbps upload speeds with a 6 TB monthly data limit. But, as Stop the Cap wrote in a detailed report on Wednesday, the ISP is “reaching[ing] to an increasing number of your heavy uploaders and telling them to reduce usage or face a speed accelerator or possible account closure. “Mediacom has told Ars that it is contacting heavy uploaders” more often than before “due to the increased use triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The company said that heavy uploaders” may be below its permission to use full bandwidth, but still have a negative impact on the Mediacom network. “
Mediacom’s terms and conditions say the company charges $ 10 fees for each additional 50 GB block used by customers who exceed the data limit. But users can be warned about its use long before they risk excessive fees. A user in East Moline, Illinois, who described the situation in a DSLReports forum in early January, said that he paid for the 6 TB plan “to make sure we didn’t go over the limit” and never used more than 4 TB. The user wrote:
So, I got a call from Mediacom’s fraud and abuse department today. The representative told me that they were calling customers with “above average” bandwidth usage because they were having network problems. I ran and checked my account and only used just over 2.5 TB last month. He told me that my upload was 450 GB above average and, if I didn’t reduce my usage, they would limit or disconnect me. I argued that I used less than half of the total data allowed by my plan, but he said that my 1.2 TB upload was too much and that this was my warning.
Another gigabit user in Missouri named Cory told Stop the Cap that the monthly limit of 6 TB “is a lot more than I will use, but I still received a warning letter saying that I was shipping a lot. I found out that I used about 900 GB on last two months, setting up a cloud backup of my computer. At most, I can send files at about 50 Mbps, which they claim is interfering with other customers in my neighborhood. I don’t understand. “
Much use in the “exclusive opinion of Mediacom”
Letters sent by Mediacom to heavy uploaders said: “Your account usage is greater than 99.5% of all Service customers. Due to your overuse, you are negatively impacting the Mediacom network and other users of the Service . “
The letter goes on to say that it is a “violation” of Mediacom’s acceptable use policy “to use excessive bandwidth, either upstream or downstream, which, in Mediacom’s sole opinion, places an unusually large load on the network or exceeds normal usage. Mediacom has the right to impose limits on excessive bandwidth consumption by any means available to Mediacom. “
Mediacom provided the Federal Communications Commission with a little more detail in response to customer complaints. A letter from Mediacom to the FCC said that “the company’s network is built to allow more downstream use than upstream”. Mediacom’s letter to the FCC also described the data limit as “a large conduit with a smaller conduit inside it … Due to historical trends, the smaller conduit allows for upstream use, while the rest of the conduit is reserved for downstream use. ” The heavy use of uploads can emphasize this “minor conduit”, which means that customers “may be under full data usage permission, but still have a negative impact on the network”.
Mediacom blames pandemic
Even without general data limits, Mediacom’s Internet plans have built-in upload limits. While the gigabit download plan limits uploads to 50 Mbps, the 60 Mbps download plan limits uploads to just 5 Mbps and the 100 Mbps download plan limits uploads to 10 Mbps. The 60/5 Mbps plan has a monthly limit of 200 GB and the 100/10 Mbps plan has a limit of 1 TB.
We asked Mediacom why it did not update its network enough to fully support the upload speeds and data quotas its customers pay, but we did not receive a response. New versions of the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS), which have been widely promoted by the cable industry, can support symmetrical download and upload speeds of 10 Gbps. Even an earlier version of the DOCSIS 3.1 standard, now widely deployed, theoretically allows 10 Gbps downloads and 1 Gbps upload speeds. But the cable industry has been slow to increase upload speeds.
When contacted by Ars, Mediacom pointed to cable industry statistics showing 31.8 percent growth in downstream traffic and 51.1% growth in upstream traffic since the pandemic increased in March 2020. Mediacom spokesman Thomas Larsen also told us:
Given the increase in traffic during the pandemic, we have reached customers who fall under 0.5 percent of upstream users more often than before. This is not the easiest topic to explain why Internet use is growing rapidly in this home work / home study environment, so it is difficult to give an exact number that puts a customer in the 0.5 percent category because that number changes from month to month month.
Ideally, we can help the customer identify the cause of the upstream overuse problem and help them take steps to manage it. We may offer business-class services designed to support greater uploading capacity, but that is not really the point of this exercise.
Mediacom also contacts heavy download users “when their use negatively impacts” other customers, said Larsen. “Because our network was designed to handle significantly more downstream traffic, it happens less often.”
As for whether customers who do not reduce their use will face limitation or account termination, Larsen said, “use that negatively impacts the Mediacom network is prohibited and Mediacom may implement network programs necessary to deal with such use or suspend or terminate the service. “
Exchanging ISPs “is not an option”
Mediacom’s handling of uploaders is reminiscent of the measures taken by Cox Communications at the beginning of the pandemic. Cox imposed slowness across the neighborhood in some cases, reducing the upload speeds of the gigabit download plan from 35 Mbps to 10 Mbps. Mediacom doesn’t seem to have done anything so drastic, but telling users to reduce upload usage when they haven’t yet reached their data limits is frustrating for customers.
“If there were any other Internet option besides the terribly slow AT&T DSL, with a small data limit, I would change it in the blink of an eye,” wrote the Mediacom client in Illinois who posted on the DSLReports forum. “Unfortunately, with my work and working from home, running out of usable Internet is not an option.”