[Merged] Comcast Implements 250GB Cable Internet Bandwidth Limit

[yippy]

I actually think 250Gb/month is a good thing. If someone is using that much data they should be paying for a dedicated line or comercial grade connection or something and not using all the bandwidth they share with the rest of normal people.

And 250Gb/month is so huge of an amount that unless you are downloading 60 -150 movies a month you won't hit it.

 

[JML42691]

In understand the IPs are worried about bandwidth issues, but punishing their customers is not the answer. 4% of all internet traffic is junk, but rather than figure reducing the amount of junk mail traffic they are limiting the amount of (in theory) legitimate traffic. So if the amount of junk increases and their bandwidth does not increase, is Comcast going to have to lower the cap? At what point does it stop? This is a case of f**k the users, they'll keep paying anyway. Would you let the highway department tell you the roads were too full of trucks so you can only drive so much?

http://asert.arbornetworks.com/2008/03/2-of-internet-traffic-raw-sewage/

Except in this case, Comcast has set an abnormally high limit, which probably 99% of their users won't even come close to. And their reasoning for doing this was to have a set amount for when they would stop your service for excessive use, rather than having an unstated amount like times in the past.

 

[oban14]

Now that comcast is capping everyone at 250 GB per month...

Does anyone have an application to recommend that can capture bandwidth? I have no idea how much I'm using on a given day, much less over a whole month. The bandwidth widgets I have reset upon reboot, whereas I'll actually need a monthly tally.

Any recs?

 

[epochblue]

I don't know of any apps to keep track of your bandwidth usage, but what you're doing that you're so worried about hitting 250GB in a single month?

Unless you're downloading a lot of high-quality movies, I sincerely doubt you're going to be anywhere near the cap.

 

[WillJS]

To reach the cap you would have to do something like the following:

Sending 20,000 high-resolution photos,
Sending 40 million emails;
Downloading 50,000 songs; or
Viewing 8,000 movie trailers.

There was another good write-up somewhere about the cap and what you have to do to reach it.. but I can't find it now that I need it.

 

[acxz]

To reach the cap you would have to do something like the following:

Sending 20,000 high-resolution photos,
Sending 40 million emails;
Downloading 50,000 songs; or
Viewing 8,000 movie trailers.

There was another good write-up somewhere about the cap and what you have to do to reach it.. but I can't find it now that I need it.

or 5. Be a massive porn addict.

 

[JML42691]

From an article about this a few weeks ago that was linked to on this forum, it said that you would have to download 4 standard definition movies a day for a month to reach that limit. Comcast was always capping people for their usage if it were deemed to be over-used, they just never had a publicly stated amount, which is what the point of this cap was. Most providers cap their customers at MUCH lower amounts, you should be fine, reaching 250GB in a month would be a major accomplishment if you are not hosting a website from your house. You should be fine.

 

[kalex]

unless you are constantly uploading and downloading its highly not probable that you will go over 250gb cap

lets say average SD movie is around 1GB, this is 250 movies u have to download to go over the limit

 

[oban14]

While I appreciate everyone's concern about my downloading habits, and those of you who are defending a 250 GB cap... but back to the question: Do any of you know of an application that will cumulatively capture my bandwidth usage over the course of a month?

 

[localoid]

There's Net Monitor...

 

[KingYaba]

iStat can help you see your usage. The problem is, the stats are lost when you reboot. I have the iStat menues. My computer has been running for just under three days and I have almost 3 GB of data that came in and half a GB going out.

 

[EricNau]

OK, I clearly missed the memo. Comcast is doing what?

 

[e.m.]

The problem with Activity Monitor and other apps mentioned here for this purpose is that local network usage (file sharing on local network, wireless time machine backups, etc) are included, and obviously those do not count against the Comcast cap.

I wonder how much data online gaming such as Xbox Live uses. Or voice/video chat?

Also, does the cap include upload as well, or is it just download?

 

[JML42691]

OK, I clearly missed the memo. Comcast is doing what?

Here is a link.

 

[Catch Them]

ugh....comcast does it AGAIN. always doing something conspicuous to piss people off.

i mean its not a question of how much one downloads or doesnt each month.
I just dont believe in internet restrictions; especially an overpriced company.
next mandatory blocked sites on comcasts ISP network...yay cant wait!


I do alot of networking file transferring to friends in my area and im pretty sure i hit about that much and possibly more each month, and also seeding and downloading specific apps.

ridiculous...

 

[Julien]

...i mean its not a question of how much one downloads or doesnt each month.
I just dont believe in internet restrictions; especially an overpriced company.
next mandatory blocked sites on comcasts ISP network...yay cant wait...

ridiculous...

You may not believe in them but what about your neighbors. If you are downloading 250Gb or more a month you are seriously hindering everyone else's bandwidth around you.

Now what if the shoe was on the other foot and your neighbor was running a full blown server from his home and hogging all the bandwidth and you had a hard time downloading? How would you fell about limits then?

 

[SnowLeopard2008]

ugh....comcast does it AGAIN. always doing something conspicuous to piss people off.

i mean its not a question of how much one downloads or doesnt each month.
I just dont believe in internet restrictions; especially an overpriced company.
next mandatory blocked sites on comcasts ISP network...yay cant wait!


I do alot of networking file transferring to friends in my area and im pretty sure i hit about that much and possibly more each month, and also seeding and downloading specific apps.

ridiculous...

yea, torrent is illegal. just how many apps do you download? Say FCE is about 1GB, you'd have to download it at least 250 times a month. now that is ridiculous.

 

[Catch Them]

You may not believe in them but what about your neighbors. If you are downloading 250Gb or more a month you are seriously hindering everyone else's bandwidth around you.

Now what if the shoe was on the other foot and your neighbor was running a full blown server from his home and hogging all the bandwidth and you had a hard time downloading? How would you fell about limits then?

I think they should be able to do that if that want to as well.
I dont see your need to have my justify it or police these ideals.

And i dont see where you get off telling me that torrents are illegal when you dont even know the extent of what I'm using it for.

geesh. calm down.

 

[ravenvii]

yea, torrent is illegal. just how many apps do you download? Say FCE is about 1GB, you'd have to download it at least 250 times a month. now that is ridiculous.

Torrents are NOT illegal. You can USE it for illegal things, just like you can use a knife for illegal things. Doesn't mean it's illegal itself. Get that through your head. I'm sick of people proclaiming that torrents is illegal and anyone who uses it are pirates.

I use torrents to download Linux distros all the time, about 600-700 MB at a time.

But I'm not worried about that 250 GB cap for downloading. I'm more concerned about video conferencing, though...

For video, they tend to be much less than 700 kbps, but let's say we have a high quality video chat at 700 kbps. Let's do the math:

It'll be 42 MB per minute. Let's say you had a long chat with your girlfriend for 3 hours. That'll consume 7.5 GB.

And to summarize all of this up, you'll have to video chat for only 33 hours each month. And that's assuming you don't use any bandwidth for anything else.

Shows how stupidly pathetic American broadband infrastructure is. In Japan, they look at 50 Mbps the way we look at 756kbps here, for chrissakes.

 

[dukebound85]

crap i use hulu alot

im more worried about time warner having a cap of as little as 5gigs from that article linked in this thread

 

[paduck]

my personal opinion is that ISP's should be a little smarter about their usage limits instead of simply having monthly caps. 250gb is a pretty hefty limit, but I could see how someone might hit it. Also, as content providers move towards HD content I suppose I am unconvinced that Comcast isn't trying to stifle it's competition as, at least, a side benefit of metering.

One thing that makes a difference is time of use. 250gb primarily betwen 4pm and 10pm is going to have a huge impact on your neighbors - and perhaps on down the line. From 1am to 7am, dramatically less so. If Comcast were to look at the people who blow the cap and the times of day in which they do so, that might be a mitigating circumstance. Something else is why do they choose 250gb as the limit? If the problem is 1.3% of users, what is the break point on 1.3%? If it is 250gb, then fine. If that break point is 500gb, then you have to ask why they are pushing down to the top 5% or whatever.

Upspeed capacity, being less than downstream capacity may also be an issue. If you are pushing out tons of data vice bringing it in, then that is another problem. I guess I am more concerned with downstream data caps than upstream ones. There are lots of ways to host data that doesn't include a server at your house. Not so much acquiring content from the web.

Bottomline though, if you are consistently blowing a 250gb cap, you probably should be moving to a corporate account anyway. Comcast is supposed to appeal to the "typical" consumer. As long as they keep adding capacity and increasing their cap to accomodate 98% of their users, then I think they are doing the right thing. Those who are in the top couple points of users in terms of capacity should be looking to move up a tier.

I do wonder why you can't serve data from somewhere other than your own house. Torrents, although not specifically illegal, certainly is fertile ground for those who wish to become potential targets of RIAA.

 

[hexonxonx]

I frequently purchase many seasons of TV shows and multiple movies on iTunes at one time. I am worried that I may one day reach the cap. I even purchased six seasons of the X-Files on one day and downloaded them and each episode is about 250MB. You can see that it would be easy to reach that cap.

 

[paduck]

Ravenii - check your math. If 3 hours = 7.5gb, then you get 100 hours for 30 days at 250gb. That's a 3 hour teleconference each day.

I think you can argue that isn't typical consumer use.

 

[crazzyeddie]

For video, they tend to be much less than 700 kbps, but let's say we have a high quality video chat at 700 kbps. Let's do the math:

It'll be 42 MB per minute. Let's say you had a long chat with your girlfriend for 3 hours. That'll consume 7.5 GB.

And to summarize all of this up, you'll have to video chat for only 33 hours each month. And that's assuming you don't use any bandwidth for anything else.

I think your math is wrong. A 700kbps video chat would be 310MB per hour,
or 7.27GB per day or would take 34 days to go through the 250GB... so you could chat 24/7 for an entire month and still not hit the cap.

 

[Catch Them]

while it is alot for some.

it just depends on your needs and necessities. which is not something most cable (or most companies) get.
and yes the U.S.'s broadband spectrum and set up is just completely a joke.
we have so much ability to have more than that and have a very expansive and elaborate high speed set up going, we have some the slowest broadband connections out of most of the countries that currently have highspeed broadband.


doing film and audio projects with various classmates and professionals we use torrents alot to disburse our work to each other to work on across various networks. and they can get quite heavy especially uncompressed video and heavy amounts of audio.
and thusfar we havent had many bandwidth problems but its been shaky, but we depend on it since were not all on the same network or have huge budgets to get better non-consumer connections; but in the end it works, so hopefully it wont be a huge deal or limitation....we do tend to get crazy with the stuff we distribute to each other through our work.


nothing illegal there....