Cox Data Caps meant to end or cash in on tv streaming

[osu1991]

Cox instigated 1TB caps with $10 for every 50GB in overages for all packages except gigablast, which is 2TB. I have yet to meet anyone that has gigablast around here. It is supposedly available some where in the metro.

I already use between 650-750GB a month just with casual online viewing of Netflix, Amazon, WatchESPN, etc.. Guess I wont be going to full time streaming anytime soon. $90 a month for 150MB service is high enough, let alone if I were to start going over. Cox basically can do what they want as the only other choice for me is Windstream which lists blazing fast 3MB DSL as the fastest available in my neighborhood.

Cox online reps are deflecting inquiries saying they have new internet packages coming out later this year including an unlimited option. My guess is they will double the price for unlimited

edit perhaps matching Comcast at $50 premium addon for unlimited data
Cox Prepping Unlimited Broadband Data Plan | Multichannel

 

[glen4cindy]

Cox instigated 1TB caps with $10 for every 50GB in overages for all packages except gigablast, which is 2TB. I have yet to meet anyone that has gigablast around here. It is supposedly available some where in the metro.

I already use between 650-750GB a month just with casual online viewing of Netflix, Amazon, WatchESPN, etc.. Guess I wont be going to full time streaming anytime soon. $90 a month for 150MB service is high enough, let alone if I were to start going over. Cox basically can do what they want as the only other choice for me is Windstream which lists blazing fast 3MB DSL as the fastest available in my neighborhood.

Cox online reps are deflecting inquiries saying they have new internet packages coming out later this year including an unlimited option. My guess is they will double the price for unlimited

edit perhaps matching Comcast at $50 premium addon for unlimited data
Cox Prepping Unlimited Broadband Data Plan | Multichannel

So far, Spectrum, formerly Charter Communications claims no data caps.

I'm interested in knowing how much I use. We watch a fair amount of Netflix as does my daughter along with quite a bit of YouTube.

She easily can max our monthly phone plan if I don't curtail her a bit.

Is there a measurable way for me to see my total monthly data use?

I certainly do not want to ask Spectrum!

Thanks in advance.

 

[harshness]

So far, Spectrum, formerly Charter Communications claims no data caps

If you want this to be seen, you need to start a new thread that has Spectrum in the title rather than hijacking a Cox thread.

 

[glen4cindy]

If you want this to be seen, you need to start a new thread that has Spectrum in the title rather than hijacking a Cox thread.

You call this a "hijack"??

Really??

He's talking about DATA CAPS and so am I.

 

[harshness]

Cox instigated 1TB caps with $10 for every 50GB in overages for all packages except gigablast, which is 2TB.

$10 seems an unreasonable price for 50GB of wired bandwidth if they're selling you 1TB for $100 as part of the basic plan. Comca$t is reportedly charging the same overage rate as Cox so you're not going to get much help there.

The wired broadband people are scrambling as they hadn't considered UHD streaming and that anyone wouldn't be entirely happy with their TV service.

 

[harshness]

You call this a "hijack"??

Yes. The Spectrum offerings and rates have little to no relation to the Cox packages.

This is especially important since Spectrum continues to claim to have no caps.

 

[Ronnie-]

If you want this to be seen, you need to start a new thread that has Spectrum in the title rather than hijacking a Cox thread.

This is hardly a "hijack". He mentioned that his company so far is not enforcing data caps.

Then he mentioned he would like to see how much data he was using , so starting a new thread with Spectrum in the title would not give him any more exposure than he would get by people reading this one, as his question was not necessarily provider specific.

 

[Ronnie-]

So far, Spectrum, formerly Charter Communications claims no data caps.

I'm interested in knowing how much I use. We watch a fair amount of Netflix as does my daughter along with quite a bit of YouTube.

She easily can max our monthly phone plan if I don't curtail her a bit.

Is there a measurable way for me to see my total monthly data use?

I certainly do not want to ask Spectrum!

Thanks in advance.

You could ask spectrum, although you do not want to do that. It is possible you could check through your online access, as some companies make this info available.

Also check your modem/router. What kind do you have? Many you can log into and get the info you want, although it may different from what your cable company says you use.

 

[primestar31]

If you are in a Charter/Spectrum LEGACY area, there is no way to tell how much data you are using, without asking them to manually check for you. IF you do that, they will assign a person to watch it and report back to you...

As has been stated, I would NOT ever ask based on that scenario, because you are possibly targeting yourself. I suspect that once you go over a terabyte a month, they may contact you to "let you know". At least they used to, but they did have caps back then.

Perhaps your router has a method of also giving you that data, OR it can be turned on to do so. My router can actually email that to me at times, without my having to log into it manually to check.

 

[EarDemon]

You want a thread hijack, I’ll give you thread hijack

Spectrum does not have caps nor do they throttle. Inquiring about such is not going to put you on any type of watch list. That’s just silly talk.

Former Time Warner customers can see their data usage in My Account, I think there is about a two-hour delay between what’s posted online and what you use. You can see an overview of the current month and four previous months, day by day, and an hourly view.

Seven or eight years ago, Time Warner attempted to initiate usage caps in a few trial markets (mine was one of them). There was a huge backlash and they scraped the plans altogether before it ever became a reality. However, they did begin offering a plan that was capped, but cheaper than their Standard Internet and as a result, usage meters were added to the online account management. People put on their tin foil hats and thought including a usage meter meant caps were imminent, yeah not so much.

I average about 150 GB per month. I do next to zero streaming of video. I stream a lot of audio, but I have so many options with cable and satellite TV, streaming video is not of interest to me. March was a light month since we had a five day power outage, April was heavy since I had to reformat, redownload and reset up from scratch my computers with the release of Windows 10 1703. May and June hit the 150 mark, and July is going to be a record breaker. Over 400 GB in 7 days and will be well over 1TB by months end. I have one of our servers at work set to back up to my NAS at home overnight.

See that little blip at 7, 8 & 9 last night? That was Netflix. Yes, I said above I do almost no video streaming but I signed up for yet another free trial for Stranger Things and Fuller House Season 2. I watched one episode of Stranger things, two of Fuller House and the first half of a movie before I gave up on it. That’s not even 2 gigs between those three hours.

I do a lot of work related stuff from home. I have a site to site VPN tunnel setup between our security appliance at work and my router at home for easy file transfer, network access, VNC and RDP. Also VMWare with about 10 VMs configured with various versions of Windows and Windows Server, a few Linux distros and even a Hackentoish MacOS 10.12 VM just because I can, that are constantly updating, and being played around with, while streaming Sirius XM or Shoutcast. That's the vast majority of what I use the internet for.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

I am on COX and have gone over my cap the past two months.

The thing that sucks is up until they started enforcing the cap our cap was 2TB and when they started enforcing the cap they dropped it down to 1 TB.

 

[osu1991]

Charter can't use/enforce data caps for 3 years or something as part of their merger with TWC.

Cox has an online data monitor you can see in your account settings. It's worked great for several years, but of course with this change, as of yesterday it's not working.

Cox has the defacto monopoly in Broken Arrow and most of the Tulsa and OKC metros. Windstream is the only other option here and it pretty much sucks.

In Tulsa you have ATT with Uverse or DSL as the other option. Bixby is a little better with hometown BTC having wired fiber to most of the town and providing gigabit service.

Like with healthcare in Oklahoma outside the larger metro's we usually only have 1 choice for internet and if it's not small town cable then it is ancient slow dsl. So much for net neutrality. Of course Cox isn't counting any data used through their own contour app.

Maybe I'll do something radical and just get rid of it all. Read some books and tell clients to send me paperwork in the mail.

 

[Claude Greiner]

This is just the beginning. Wait till all the providers have their own streaming services that have all the bugs worked out.

The next phase will to limit the type of data in buckets, and link the lower introductory prices to less data.

They will start by lowering streaming to 300 GB/mo and offer higher data caps for more money.

The game will then be buy your streaming video from your internet provider of pay more for internet service.

Ofcourse streaming video purchased from the internet provider will have no data caps.

It's coming. The internet providers are no longer going to put up with providing more bandwidth so you can bypass their video service.

 

[primestar31]

Then ATSC 3.0 comes around, and every station has a ton of sub-channels!

So, for people that can receive OTA, they will have plenty to watch without streaming.

 

[osu1991]

This is just the beginning. Wait till all the providers have their own streaming services that have all the bugs worked out.

The next phase will to limit the type of data in buckets, and link the lower introductory prices to less data.

They will start by lowering streaming to 300 GB/mo and offer higher data caps for more money.

The game will then be buy your streaming video from your internet provider of pay more for internet service.

Ofcourse streaming video purchased from the internet provider will have no data caps.

It's coming. The internet providers are no longer going to put up with providing more bandwidth so you can bypass their video service.

That is the day on the calendar when I tell them what they can do with themselves and chuck it all out the window.

 

[Jhon69]

Charter can't use/enforce data caps for 3 years or something as part of their merger with TWC.

Cox has an online data monitor you can see in your account settings. It's worked great for several years, but of course with this change, as of yesterday it's not working.

Cox has the defacto monopoly in Broken Arrow and most of the Tulsa and OKC metros. Windstream is the only other option here and it pretty much sucks.

In Tulsa you have ATT with Uverse or DSL as the other option. Bixby is a little better with hometown BTC having wired fiber to most of the town and providing gigabit service.

Like with healthcare in Oklahoma outside the larger metro's we usually only have 1 choice for internet and if it's not small town cable then it is ancient slow dsl. So much for net neutrality. Of course Cox isn't counting any data used through their own contour app.

Maybe I'll do something radical and just get rid of it all. Read some books and tell clients to send me paperwork in the mail.

It's actually 7 years, and since I have been with Charter Spectrum cable for almost a year that would make it 6 years left.
This topic has been a concern of mine from the beginning and why I'm keeping my cable boxes for HDTV.

 

[harshness]

So, for people that can receive OTA, they will have plenty to watch without streaming.

You seem to be making an assumption that (sub-)channel count means new or otherwise compelling content. Pay TV plexes and a significant number of broadcast TV networks that show "classic" TV have shown that this is absolutely not a reasonable assumption; more channels means primarily more commercials per hour for the caster.

Until DTV broadcast stations start being re-purposed or dismantled after a successful conversion to a new broadcast television standard, I'd wager there's not going to be a lot of subchannels go live that we don't already have.

Because it is getting more and more difficult to monetize OTA, I can't see it growing that much as a medium as compared with streaming.

 

[EarDemon]

I 100% agree. I don’t get the allure of FREE over the air TV and it’s dozens of 480i subchannels. Sports are about the only thing on OTA that I find compelling. Cookie cutter shows that involve the NCIS solving crimes in Chicago in 43 minutes or less don’t interest me. Judge Shows don’t interest me, estrogen infused round table shows with bitter angry women don’t interest me, tabloid gossip celebrity worship shows don’t interest me.

The subchannels are something that I never really understood. Who wants to watch stuff in SD? Who wants to watch old movies in SD that are edited for content? People complain about cable companies over compressing, when in order for an OTA station to have a full slate of subschannels, bandwidth is being cannibalized from the main feed. Spectrum carries 11 subchannels in my area, I think that’s just about all of them. But they’re constantly changing. We lost either Get or Grit recently and got TBD, around the same time we lost a country music channel and it was replaced with I don’t know what. I don’t pay attention much since the subchannels are in the upper 1200 channel range, out of sight out of mind, but it seems like two or three of them change affiliations every year.

 

[osu1991]

To each their own. I would rather watch something I've never seen even if it's black and white and in SD than continue paying for the endless reruns of crap on the majority of the pay channels. Dvr makes the commercials meaningless just like with pay tv's commercial laden channels.

That's why I find shows via other means, from other countries that are never shown in the US. I would gladly pay for them, but we aren't given that choice.

As long as I can get a few sports channels and basic cable channels for $35 or less with no equipment fees from cable, I'll continue paying. If the bundle price goes much more than that it will become expendable too.

 

[Tampa8]

This is just the beginning. Wait till all the providers have their own streaming services that have all the bugs worked out.

The next phase will to limit the type of data in buckets, and link the lower introductory prices to less data.

They will start by lowering streaming to 300 GB/mo and offer higher data caps for more money.

The game will then be buy your streaming video from your internet provider of pay more for internet service.

Ofcourse streaming video purchased from the internet provider will have no data caps.

It's coming. The internet providers are no longer going to put up with providing more bandwidth so you can bypass their video service.

I have been preaching that is what will happen for years.... If traditional TV isn't making enough money they will get it back from streaming.