When a programmer from Tennessee returned home off holiday , he found Comcast chivy him for using 120 GB of data while he was aside from domicile . But it turns out that a childlike typo in Comcast ’s records was what saw him nab the incrimination for someone else ’s data riding habit .
In avery thoroughgoing account post to Paste Bin , the coder — who ’s go by the name Oleg — report the saga in some detail . Essentially , his fib describes how he was bewildered by the charge per unit at which Comcast claimed he was champ through data : 120 GB during his vacation , 50 GB in a single day , that sort of thing .
Oleg says that he ’s “ not a eminent - bandwidth exploiter … I am not a gamer , and I do not rain cats and dogs anything beyond the occasional Youtube telecasting . ” In fact , he even took a 6.5 mean solar day vacation from using broadband to see how Comcast ’s figure changed when he did n’t use his connection . During that clip he relied on a tethered phone . At the end of the experiment he ’d only used 8 GB of cellular data ; the Comcast rejoinder claimed he ’d used 66 GB , even though his router was unplugged .
After a serial of what sound like incredibly maddening telephone conversation with Comcast , he finally find out out the problem . Speaking to Ars Technica , Oleg explain that “ [ i]t turn out their organization had my modem MAC address introduce incorrectly , there was an off - by - one literal error that was hard to see so they were count data point from some modem who knows where . ” In other words , a dumb typo saw him being charge for data point that had nothing to do with him whatsoever .
During his probe , Oleg was patently secernate by a Comcast employee that its data meters are “ 94.6 % accurate”—so this may not be an isolated case . Luckily for Oleg he was a programmer , but others might not have the same technical skills to fall back on . If the same thing take place to you , though , it ’s clearly worth fighting Comcast for a right explanation .
[ Paste Bin , Ars Technica ]
Image by AP
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