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Comcast Floats a 250GB Monthly Bandwidth Limit
techmuse writes "Comcast is considering the imposition of bandwidth caps and reductions in network bandwidth to customers who, while paying for the use of a certain amount of bandwidth, dare to actually use it! Gizmodo has more on the subject." Reader Acererak points out that it would take some pretty heavy usage (by current standards) to hit the cap described. Bear in mind, too, that these reports are based on the word of an unnamed "insider," rather than an officially announced policy.
blah blah blah, milk this, milk that.
250GB ~= 800Kbit every second of every day for 31 days.
Some people need to step away from the computer and drop this knee jerking insanity.
250GB is far too reasonable to be their actual cap.
They've already admitted to bumping people off the service entirely for downloading ~90GB/mo.
There's no way they'll let those guys back in and not even charge them overages.
This is Comcast we're talking about. I'm going to be skeptical of anything they say that even appears reasonable -- and I'm not going to waste any time entertaining such a notion so long as it's merely rumor.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
You don't pay for a 6Mb pipe. You probably wouldn't want to pay for a 6Mb pipe, either.
A real 6Mb connection is a fraction DS3 with a SLA. Ballpark, you're talking about $3k a month for that kind of service, and that's assuming you live in a major metro area where the loop won't be exorbitant.
That is how much always-on, exclusively-yours bandwidth actually costs. So when you only pay $40 a month, it ought to be a sign that what you're going to get is a whole lot less.
In the case of Comcast, they are actually pretty up-front these days about speeds. (Bandwidth caps, not so much, but as TFA alludes to, they seem to be working on it.) That "6 megabits" is a burst speed. I don't like Comcast and as a result keep a pretty close eye on them, and they've never advertised it as anything but. If you---or anyone else---thought that you were actually buying a 6Mb constant (~2TB/mo. transfer) connection for $40/mo, you're laughably mistaken. Bandwidth just ain't that cheap.
Has Comcast engaged in some shady advertising in the past? Sure. Back when they called their service "unlimited" internet, they could rightly be taken to task for cutting people off. But they don't advertise that anymore and haven't in years. It's popular around here to sling mud at Comcast, and while there are lots of valid reasons for criticizing them, it's about time customers started wising up and started reading the fine (or not-so-fine) print about what they're signing up for. I have very little sympathy for anyone who takes asterisk-laden advertising copy on faith without question.
While it certainly sucks that residential broadband providers like Comcast oversubscribe their backbone capacity, most people wouldn't like the alternative: it would quickly price HSI out of reach of virtually all consumers.
Comcast is without a doubt pretty evil, and it's a crying shame that we don't have any real competition in most broadband markets, but people whining that they don't get fractional-DS3 service from their cable modem is tiring. In other news, my Volkswagen doesn't go as fast as a Ferrari.
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