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Comcast To Cap Data Transfers At 250 GB In October
JagsLive writes with this story from PC Magazine: "Comcast has confirmed that all residential customers will be subject to a 250 gigabyte per month data limit starting October 1. 'This is the same system we have in place today,' Comcast wrote in an amendment to its acceptable use policy. 'The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted.' The cable provider insisted that 250 GB is "an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. ... As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage,' Comcast said Thursday. 'If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,' according to the AUP."
If I flood your IP address, 250 GB can disappear pretty fast, and there's really nothing you can do about it. Whether your router drops the packets or not, they'll still be counted against your quota.
Similar if you fire up a p2p program, and download a video or game level or whatever. Once you end it, thousands of other people are still going to be sending packets to your IP address, checking whether you're back online and can share the file.
And it gets worse -- it doesn't even have to be you. Someone else might have done heavy file sharing, and then in the periodic reassignment of IP addresses that Comcast does (to prevent people from running servers), you get that IP. And all the request traffic, which can continue at high volume for days or weeks.
These are all weaknesses with the IP protocol, but it hardly seems fair not to have a system that takes this into consideration.
Is this a problem? Well, according to my router, I have had 18 GB in traffic (in + out) for the month of July for one of my WAN lines. According to the provider, it's been 27 GB. That's a rather big discrepancy. At the same ratio, if your router tells you you have used 180 GB out of the 250, you won't have 70 GB to go, you will already have exceeded the quota and are subject to whatever disciplinary actions Comcast might have in place.
you are complaining about 250Gb?!? jeez, In Aus I have to pay $120/month (~$100US) for 25gb onpeak, 40gb offpeak ( that's 65gb/month for those of you who suck at math). I WISH I was in a position to bitch about 250gb/month.
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
At first glance, I thought I'd use this as a reason to continue my comcast bashing, but come on guys.. really? For a basic level of residential service, 250 gigs per month isn't that bad... 2 full length movies per day basically... I bet their top 1% of users dont use half of that on average.. And, this is a GOOD thing from the point of view that the "Excessive use policy" now has a defined cap, and you know what to avoid to stay off the "bad boy list".. Much better than arbitrarily getting a letter or phonecall just because they see you as a torrent user, therefore you MUST be bad... -Steve
-Steve Tired of voting for the "lesser of two evils?" Come talk about it on www.bothsidesarewrong.com