A programmer from Tennessee shares his experience with Comcast, who was charging him for using 120 GB of data while he was away on vacation.
After tedious actions, a mountain of patience and thorough investigations, it became apparent that the coder never streamed such an outrageous quantity of data. In fact, it was a typo in the records of Comcast that led the mobile data carrier to read someone else's counter.
You may want to read the full story on Paste Bin. The programmer, who calls himself Oleg in the post, describes the half-absurd, half-amusing shenanigan in great detail.
To summarize, his story develops around the fact that Comcast put a huge amount of data traffic on his tab, going as far as pinning 120 GB on him during his overseas vacation.
According to the author, he is a moderate bandwidth user.
"I am not a gamer, and I do not stream anything beyond the occasional Youtube video," Oleg mentions.
Oleg notes that he continued to receive warnings from Comcast regarding his data cap after returning from days spent away from home.
That is why he went on and set up an experiment in which he abandoned the use of broadband for almost a week. He used a tethered phone for mobile data traffic so he could get an estimate of how much he spends online each week. The results significantly differred from what Comcast reported. His cellular data records showed 8 GB, whereas Comcast claimed that Oleg gulped 66 GB of Wi-Fi data, although his router was unplugged during the whole experiment.
Oleg reached out to Comcast and, after painstaking phone conversations, found out what the problem was. According to his discussion with Ars Technica, the mobile data carrier had a typo in its records.
"[It] turns out their system had my modem MAC address entered incorrectly, there was an off-by-one typo," Oleg pointed out.
"They were counting data from some modem who knows where," he added.
The good news for the programmer was that he knows a thing or two about computers, and was able to untie the mess Comcast was responsible for.
For those of you who have no IT experience and see a surge in data drain over Comcast's reports, it might be wise to double check if they registered you correctly.
