Slashdot Mirror
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."
Looks like I got fios just in time
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
Time to find a new home for my Pr0n server. :(
Provided they tell you that up front. Not telling you and still capping your service is most charitably considered sleazy and is hopefully something they could get sued/prosecuted for.
And what about the screwing around with P2P traffic? Are they still going to do that and pretend that they aren't?
...should be enough for anybody.
I want my FIOS.
I want congress to SMACK THE TELCOS HARD. They have been collecting Billions of dollars in fees to provide Broadband and have delivered nothing.
I want the money paid back with interest NOW!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
And hell, if you're a little devious...those connections will run fine split into a MythTV box with an analog card, to get all of extended basic, and if you split that off into a HDHomerun...you can scan and get all the unencrypted QAM Digital and HD channels out there.
At least..so I hear. Anyway, that should more than compensate for a slightly higher monthly fee for internet service....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Much as I hate it, I'd rather spend the money on a Comcast Business connection than worry about whether or not I'm getting close to some artificial cap.
I FTP things in and out of my apartment all the damned time, including backup image files and the like, let alone dealing with torrents or streaming video. I'm sure I transfer more than 10GB a day.
Disgusting as it is, I don't have any other high speed alternative.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
I believe the plan is, this is fine now so nobody gripes. Same as it ever was, I don't notice the cap so there's effectively no cap, right?
In 5 years, 250GB will be used up in a week. Now they're saving money, and charging you if you want any more. The thing is, that 250GB cap has been there forever. Same as it ever was, right?
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
I'm actually oddly happy about this. I was contacted in the past about going over the mysterious limit (I did about 400GB that month,) and since then I've been living in fear that I may go too high again and get my service cut for a year. Now that an actual known limit exists, I can easily monitor my usage accordingly via my WRT54GL flashed with Tomato.
A 250GB limit is more than fair, and as long as it is fully disclosed in advanced, I have no problem with it. Having secret, constantly changing limits with undefined penalties for violations is not acceptable for any contractually agreed upon service.
This is perfectly reasonable if they're up front about it. I have a request... I would like a method to see what my consumption so far is so I can plan appropriately.
Wait until you start downloading Blu-Ray from content delivery services.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Notice that it doesn't say anything about if the 'data limit' is uploaded data or downloaded. My guess is they'll make it combined.
Also, since there IS now a limit that can be tied with the monthly price, can we sue spammers/advertisers/etc for $.0000002 per kilobyte? I think its a very generous rate to give them, since cell phone companies like to charge $.10 per kilobyte.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
O wow, you have servers that use more data than is offered for a residential cable user.
You're retarded for even mentioning that fact. If you were running those servers on a comcast connection from your house, you'd be even more of an idiot.
Try getting perspective. This is residential service, not a fucking datacenter.
Well, 250 GB per month averages to 771.6 kbps (Calculated as 250 billion bytes * 8 bits/byte / 30 days). Quite a bit less than the speeds they advertise.
On the other hand, a limit laid out in is much better than one you don't know about.
On the gripping hand, I guess Comcast just doesn't want your business if you use more than 250 GB per month?
If any good comes out of this, it is the fact that software as a service is no longer an effective option. It's too bad for online movie rentals though, that was actually a very good idea (except for the DRM part of it.)
President/CEO Pacy World http://www.pacyworld.com
There's a big difference between 250GB and 250GB/month.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
And I'm sure Comcast will make an effort to hide that little bit of information in the fine print so you don't notice it.
Honestly, they can't call it unlimited anymore. Unlimited has a set definition. It's not open to interpretation. If you introduce caps, or limits, well, you're giving a different service.
It would be nice if Comcast actually did something surprising... like, you know, give a good service? That would be tits.
Ads should not count towards the cap. That would be very very unfair. Caps are a bad idea, because 90% of the stuff we get is stuff we don't want.
President/CEO Pacy World http://www.pacyworld.com
Well, looks like all my porn for the next 6 months is getting downloaded in September.
It wouldn't ruin other peoples bandwith if they actually upgraded their infrastructure which they were given money for. If you don't have enough room for unlimited, don't sell unlimited
I agree with you, in general.
However, this move looks like a positive thing. Comcast always limited you, but it was always an arbitrary amount, which you wouldn't know till they banned you for a year. More recently, they pinned it down in terms of "songs", "videos", "pictures", "emails", etc.
This means you could conceivably sue Comcast if they raised a fuss and you were under your 250 gig limit.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
400gb? What are you downloading, the entire bible word by word in 1280x1024 bmp format?
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.
Hmm. Would this include upload as well? I'm thinking that if you happened to have a number of highly desirable files in your P2P folder, other people grabbing a copy of your content might kick you up. Might this actually be the objective of such "reasonable" caps, to make people think twice before hosting such content?
250GB/month =
0.77Mb/s (megabits) * 24/7
(a bit less than half a T1 running an full capacity)
3.31 days At 7.0Mb/s and you're out.
Not bad for cheap McInternet service, I guess...
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
How can I possibly make it through a month at 250 G? I, um, have a condition, yeah, that's it, that requires I download unlimited amounts of data from the internet. This is cause an undue hardship. As if comcast has the RIGHT to take this from me. If my connection weren't actually my neighbors, I'd SUE THEIR ASSES pronto!
So what shall I do Slashdot? How can I get my umlimited back? Get a bigger Wifi antenna? I heard about that but what about bandwidth?
The should have done this long ago, put it in the contract, and saved themselves a lot of bad press.
I share a house with 9 people and have comcast internet. Everyone in the house is on at least some bit each day with nearly everyone knowing how to stream video/music online as well as games and such.
250g might be good enough for a person, but it sure isn't good enough for a house/apartment with more then 1 or 2 people living in it.
TruePunk | Games
All those examples put together won't come anywhere near 250 GB.
So say you have Comcast's triple-play or some VOIP service that rides out of your house on your Comcast connection. You get cut off for one reason or another, such as exceeding this cap. Is your phone service dead, too? Better have a mobile phone if 911 needs to be called?
Are you referring to the Old Testament or the New Testament? Or both? In the Old Testament there are 593493 words so that equates to about 724 GB, and for the New Testament there are 181253 for about 221 GB so that equals about 945 GB so if he tried downloading the bible it would take him over two months. You may want to do some research. ;)
Australians and New Zealanders seem to be the only people on the planet who think that the entire world's internet connections should be as bad as theirs. Why is that?
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
On the Comcast Network Management page, they note that:
Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 - 3 GB.
That puts the cap in a little more perspective, not that the 2+ TB/mo users will think it's reasonable.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
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.
Here we go... here come the Australians who inevitably pop into internet usage cap threads with their "In Australia we pay $500 a day for 10 mb up and down transfer... you should be happy with the restrictions your ISP is placing on you."
Dammit Australia, just because you have crap internet, the rest of the world shouldn't have to accept it!
Don't get too comfortable. Unless you're willing to pay for dedicated bandwidth - very expensive - sooner or later all ISPs will have to either apply data caps or go bankrupt.
And, of course, there'll be a snowball effect; the more ISPs offer data caps, the more heavy users the remaining ISPs will get, and the less they'll be able to afford to subsidize them.
How much did Australian businesses get for building out broad band but didn't? US businesses were given billions of taxpayer dollars to build out broadband but only a few have built any at all. Verison is slowly building out FiOS, fiber to a neighborhood splitter, but not many other businesses are building out broadband. They cried they needed public money to build out broadband but did nothing with the money given to them other than pad their profits.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
what the hell are you complaining about -_-
here in belgium the "unlimited" internet is 20GB/month at 45 euro/month, for 60 euro/month i think you can get 60GB/month...
and they're also always advertising it as unlimited -_-.
250GB/month seems a very reasonable amount of traffic, you could easily do it for a single month, but if you can keep up that rate for an entire year, i can't but wonder what the heck you're downloading, you'd have to run out of stuff to download pretty quickly!
That statement actually relates well to a very insightful point made at the end of the article:
You are lucky to have some genuine competition in the form of FIOS. If I could, I would switch to that in a heartbeat, even if I had to pay a relatively large installation fee (probably up to 200 dollars). Unfortunately, just about everywhere I go I'm locked down to one provider. In the tiny town of Jackson, OH, I am restricted to Time Warner Cable (another company working on a cap), and before I was transferred here I lived in Minneapolis, subject to Comcast. I suppose I could potentially get DSL, but that is so much slower than cable it almost doesn't count as competition in the broadband market, and satellite is so latency heavy it doesn't count either. That leaves cable standing alone, unless you are lucky enough to have true broadband competition through FIOS.
In my opinion, cable providers are starting to stifle innovation and competition the same way large cell phone providers do. They see one company screwing the customers with a cap, and figure, "Hey, I can do that too! Now I can keep more money for profits instead of network upgrades." And with no competition to force changes on them, that's the way things will stay. Both cell phone companies and cable companies are able to stay the way they are because of huge barriers to entry... you can't lay another set of cable lines in every town, and it's prohibitively expensive to try to set up another nationwide cellular network. In instances like these, the government does need to step in to regulate the monopolies/oligopolies. My water company doesn't put a cap on how much I use because the government regulates that monopoly (granted, I do pay more the more I use, but if the cable companies went to that model without government intervention, it would probably be priced like the cell phone companies price text messages: 10 cents a kilobyte or something ridiculous. That's why I'm currently opposed to anything other than a flat rate from them).
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Because when I signed a contract with them, it said NOTHING in regards to usage limits. To the contrary, we decided to go with Comcast specifically because it was advertised as "Unlimited".
Are they rewriting my contract without notice? The contract says that they will notify me in writing of any changes, and thus far, have not.
Are you saying watching HD movies and backing up pictures/home video to Carbonite or something aren't residential activities?
No it's not. It's like complaining that my connection to the power grid can't support eight computers in my home, because the "average user" doesn't have eight computers. Who's to say, though, that I don't have a high-power desktop for gaming (1), a laptop for surfing, etc (2), a laptop for the wife (3), one laptop each for the kids (4, 5), one MythTV box each for the upstairs TV and the downstairs TV (6, 7), and a media server (running Windows HOME Server, not something Enterprisey) (8)?
Sure, this is a hypothetical example, but it's not at all unreasonable. The fact that I'm not "average" doesn't mean I should need a commercial-grade connection.
Cox tells you what the limit is (40GB/mo on my plan), but doesn't give you a meter. I don't want to be "contacted about excessive use", I want a meter like the gas gauge on my car. Fortunately, I use a linux router with vnstat so I can keep tabs, but how many home users are able to provide their own meter?
My dad uses Wild Blue, and they provide a nice web page with a meter to check your usage. Their cap is a continuous time average over 30 days, so you don't have to wait until the end of the month for it to reset - the average bandwidth starts going down again after he finishes his Ubuntu download, and is ready for another in a few days with worrying about hitting the limit.
It's still beyond me why they can't manage to offer a sliding scale...
First 100 GB... You get at the full bandwidth.
For each additional 50 GB, it drops by 25% of whatever it was last.
First 100GB = 100%
100-150GB = 75%
150-200GB = 56%
200-250GB = 42%
250-300GB = 32%
300-350GB = 24%
350-400GB = 18%
400-450GB = 13%
450-500GB = 10%
Now you've got a system where no one ever finds their connection suddenly shut off on them for the remainder of the month.
Instead, it just keeps getting slower and slower to the point where much over 250 GB is going to have slowed so much they'd really have a hard time going much further anyway... and those 5GB movie downloads they used to get within an hour now need to run all night, if not all day and all night, and so are no longer appealing anyway.
Though, to be fair... Funny how it's only those companies that make money by charging for the delivery of TV and movies that seem to have issues with users using the kind of bandwidth needed to get TV and movies without them.
Wait until you start downloading Blu-Ray from content delivery services.
Blu-Ray is an optical disc format.
It says nothing about the codec used to encode the video.
Many early Blu-Ray discs were nothing more than high bitrate MPEG-2.
Now everyone uses VC-1 (Microsoft) or H.264 (MPEG-4) because they are vastly more efficient.
I think what you meant to say was "Wait until you start downloading high definition video from content delivery services."
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
With that many users, you are well beyond a consumer grade connection. While it will work, dont complain if you go over. Nine people is well above the norm to share one connection and not to expect to pay more, or meter your use accordingly.
Good-bye
Bandwidth is only a zero-sum game when it's at 100%. If a cable is sitting at 50%, then using more of it has an incremental cost of zero. To put it another way: each byte you use at peak time costs a whole lot, but each byte you use at off-peak time is free. This severely complicates pricing and cost analysis.
I agree that the 250GB cap is exceedingly generous, however. Just so long as they're up-front about it and no longer try to sell this as "unlimited", I have no problem with it whatsoever.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
It seems to me that Comcast is looking at the long tail guys and thinking we have 5% of our users consuming 90% of out bandwidth. (Or some such thing).
This sort of thing always happens when you sell something as "all you can eat for a dollar". Works fine when Aunt Minnie and the Canasta Club got to lunch, but not so good when the Ohio State offensive line shows up.
Also Comcast is being hit with the prospect of having to compete with FIOS. To do so means that either have to invest lots in physical plant to achieve the same service levels as FIOS, (which is what Cablevision seems to be doing) or cut prices.
So they think think cutting prices makes a lot of sense - most people don't need FIOS service levels. Most people will be happier with the lower price. But to cut prices they need to get rid of the long tail customers.
I know! Let's put a use limit in place. This will piss off the long tail guys and they will move to FIOS. BRILLIANT we have just unloaded our unprofitable customers to our competition! What could be sweeter!
PROFIT!!!
250GB in a 30 day month is 8.3GB a day, 355MB/hour, ~6MB a minute, 101KB/sec.
Or, 809kbps. On a connection which is advertised as being at least 6mbit/sec.
It's also the beginning of the end- they'll use this to justify limits per week next. Then per day. They already have a hidden cap on uploads; they advertise a 768kbit upload limit, but if you upload at more than 384kbit/sec (the old limit) for more than about 4-5 minutes, your connection gets massively crippled, not just until you slow back down to 384kbit/sec, but until your upload drops *dramatically*. They call this "powerboost", but it's really "ripoff technique" to let them advertise one speed, but actually have another.
You know what still gets my goat? That comcast has for more than a decade had an incredibly hostile AUP that banned any form of mailing list or discussion group hosting, yet you people only started screaming about your "rights" and network neutrality when they brought the hammer down on your precious porn and TV episodes.
Please help metamoderate.
A couple years ago, I decided to start watching TV on my computer instead of the TV, for no real reason besides liking my chair in the PC room better. So I started really hammering my connection with some torrents (piracy haters, note that I was still paying my full cable TV bill, so in essence I was downloading what they'd already been sending me). My Internet and television provider was Cox Communications in the San Diego area.
I made sure to keep my torrents only running at night out of respect for neighbors on the same cable network. One morning, though, I woke up to see all my torrents dead. I went to see if google was up and was redirected to a page instructing me to call the Cox security division. I did and, after a good while on hold, was told that I'd exceeded my data cap.
Which, being as we were in the middle of a month, was news to me. Confused, I hung up and continued more or less like I was, trying to keep the overall load down a bit with transfer caps in Azureus. A week later it happened again, exactly as before. This time, though, I demanded more of an explanation from the CSR. What I was told amazed me.
Now, I'm not a network engineer, but I'd always assumed that the ISP could keep a pretty good watch on every connection at once. Maybe that's more infeasible than I'd thought on a cable network, but still, the rep claimed that wasn't the case. They COULD get a general idea of who was producing "too much traffic," though, and order a "watch" for that account be forwarded to the security division. Who would then, in turn, watch and record the exact amount of data coming out of that account for a period of time.
Where it gets even stranger - and more frustrating - is that this "period of time" is totally up to them. One of my infractions was a 24 hour watch, the other around 48, and supposedly they could be up to a week or less than a day depending on how many watches they had going. They would then divide the monthly cap (a very difficult-to-find number buried in legal boilerplate deep in an old PDF on their website and actually quoted differently in two other different places) by the time they recorded and shut it down if it went over. So, say, if you got 30Gb in a 30-day month and they did a 24-hour watch, they would shut down your account if it went over 1Gb! Which to my mind makes their advertised bandwidth a complete fabrication: if you downloaded at full speed all month, you'd be several orders of magnitude over the limit. And if they're allowed to shrink the "watch" size as small as they want (nothing they said indicated that a 24-hour watch was the smallest) then you can't be confident EVER using the full speed.
Too many of these warnings (either 3 or 5 being the magic number based on the CSR I was talking to) and they'd shut down your cable and blacklist you forever. In an area with no other Internet options outside of dialup, they basically were telling me I might have to MOVE if I did it one more time. And no, there was no way to see how much data I'd used up so far that month, but they were "working on it."
I wish I could tell you that I angrily canceled my account and moved on. But no, I wasn't ready to move, and I wasn't ready to go to dialup. So I just stopped downloading anything over 1Gb, ever, and confining my high-tier, expensive 'net account to web surfing and games. And oh, yeah, I watched TV on the TV on my shitty couch like a good little boy. These fuckers continue to get my monthly checks to this very day. Aren't monopolies grand?
Except that 100KB/s is nearly a full megabit. Ask your ISP what a full, dedicated, guaranteed 1 megabit line with full, unlimitted, uncapped usage would cost.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I've seen it happen. I was temporarily living somewhere where Comcast was provided, and there was continuous activity, 24/7, trying to reach something at some port (14??). I tried powering everything off to get a new IP address, but the traffic continued. I doubt was P2P traffic, since they would give up eventually. My only guess is that there was a computer controlling a botnet on that IP address at some point, so there were thousands of zombie PCs trying to communicate with it. The internet was quite slow at times, but I don't know if it was all that traffic or congestion on the network or just Comcast having issues.
In my apartment in Shanghai I have a 5mbit symmetrical connection that is all-you-can-eat (i.e. unlimited traffic up and down per month). This costs me RMB 150 per month or about US$22.
Granted, there is no customer service whatsoever and when it falls over, I have to wait for the ISP (CNC) to realise and remedy.
In Beijing I pay the same but it is only a 2mbit symmetrical service, and also uncapped.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
At 4 Mb/s, 250Gb is 138 hours of HDTV per month. That's for the HDTV version of Vudu. NetFlix Roku also needs 4 MB/s. Apple TV needs 5 Mb/s in its best mode. Note that if you actually used one of those boxes that much, you'd be paying over $500 per month in video rental charges. (It's much like the iPod; filling up a large iPod with music from Apple's store would cost tens of thousands of dollars.)
One implication of all these set-top box movie devices is that there's going to be much more pressure on DSL and cable ISPs to deliver at least 4Mb/s sustained.
I think it's funny how different everyone's numbers are. I don't really want to scroll back up and list them all, but I've seen figures ranging between 70Kbps and 1.2Mbps... I must say I'm baffled.
The source for your TV channels isn't a peering connection with the internet.
That's the difference.
I think Comcast is just being greedy though - nothing more complicated than that. Baby steps toward metered usage.
-Matt
Comcast with QAM would be great, if it were really supported. But with my service, Comcast randomly drops channels like Bravo and Discovery channel from the set of open QAM signals for months at a time. If you try to call customer support, they say that you shouldn't be able to watch anything digital without a box from them...
Cable QAM is a great idea, but in practice drives you to Pirate Bay. Which in the end is easier to use and produces higher quality than a digital tuner anyway, for most things.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
People don't like to pay, period ;) But really, I can understand that. The psychological difference between paying for speed and paying for data transfer is that data transfer is a consumable commodity, but speed is not. Noone likes paying for something that can run out instead of something that does not.
I looked all over Comcast's website and no where -- not one place -- is their Internet service advertised as "unlimited".
In fact, there are numerous links on several pages that take you to their terms and conditions where Comcast has a full section (Section III) entitled "Network Management and Limitations on Bandwidth Consumption". I'll grant you it doesn't say specifically "250GB" anywhere in there, but that's a lot different than the falsehood of claiming "they advertise that it is unlimited!" when they don't.
The
When was the last time you saw Comcast advertising "unlimited" Internet access? Seriously. Maybe as little as 5 years ago, but I'd guess that they stopped doing it longer ago than that. For example, I couldn't find the word on their webpage from 2003: http://web.archive.org/web/20030207135808/comcast.com/Products/Internet_Details.html?LinkID=21 In fact, on my brief reading of the archived pages, I didn't see the word "unlimited" anywhere, going as far back as 1999.
Of course, they may have been using the word in TV and print ads. I don't have an archive for that.
Regardless, I haven't seen a broadband provider use that word in the US in a very long time, with the sole exception of cellular providers, who use 5GB and "unlimited" interchangeably when referring to their data plans.
They don't keep lowering the cap. 250gb this month, 200 next month, 150 the next.. Eventually they'll pull the bullshit the cell phone providers do and they'll charge per gigabyte or you pay an extra $5 a month and you get 100 gigs free, or pay $10 extra and get 250 gigs, or you can pay an extra $25 and get unlimited.. See, back in the day before text messaging was popular, I used to do text messaging for free, then the cell phone providers realized how much money they could make by charging for it.. Now at&t charges around 15 or 20 cents for every incoming and outgoing text message unless you pay extra for some bs text messaging plan. I'm all for them specifying a cap, assuming they stay honest and aren't planning on using it as a ploy to get eventually get more money on additions to a base plan
I've noticed that my Netflix "watch instantly" simply does not work properly from 4 pm to about 10pm every day. Netflix says it appears to be comcast that is throttling things.
a good netflix connection needs about 2.5 to 3Mb/sec. So if I watch 4 hours of netflix a night then I need 43 Gigibits of data, or roughly 5.4 Gigibytes. times 30 days is only 162 Gigabytes.
So a 250GB cap does not seem way out of line for even substantial usage.
What I want is for COmcast to actually deliver untrhottled bandwidth during prime time. The cap I'm fine with.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Let's check the numbers. 250 Gig/month means about 8 Gig/day. Divide that by a generous 86,400 seconds in a day, or round up to 100,000 seconds, and that's a constant download speed of roughly 80 Kbytes/second, every second of every day. That is quite a lot for a residential service, and it requires quite a lot of upstream infrastructure to support. It's unlikely to work well with normal web proxies, because the most likely use is Bittorrent.
So it's completely economically reasonable to want to set a generous cap, and go after the worst residential home users and say to them "this is excessive". I'm certain their contract permits this kind of cap in the small print. Like someone at a smorgasboard who wants to bring home a shopping bag of leftovers, going over that for a residential contract is pretty ridiculous, unless you're running a big download site from your home. And if you're doing that, you should pay commercial rates.
I mainly use the connection to work via VPN and have usual surfing habits.
I don't download movies or participate in online games.
There are several ISO downloads scattered throughout the totals.
These totals are from the machine I work with daily. The other 3 machines combined have Never used more than 2 GiB in a month.
As you can see, this is just under 300GiB for a year.
Comcast Video on Demand and VOIP will not be part of the cap (they use a slightly different protocol). Keep an eye out to see if Comcast allows other types of data to not count towards the cap.
For example if Comcast were to partner with Rhapsody they could say that their data would not could towards the cap. That would put other music download services at a disadvantage.
Or, for example if Comcast were to partner with Microsoft so that XBOX DLC did not count towards the cap but Sony DLC would count. That could influence you to buy and XBOX over a PS3.
I think it is through exceptions to their cap, via partnerships, that Comcast and other ISPs see as their way towards Access Tiering.
Is this limit download only, or is streaming count as well? How much data is really transferred back and forth for those hooked on MMOs? Is the 250GB limit down AND up? Could a person who plays (say 5 hours a day weekdays, 10 hours weekends) hit this limit by just playing the game they like?
250GB sounds like a lot until you really look at it. For desktop (even laptops now) the disk drive is bigger then 250GB to start off with. Most home desktops come with a 400GB-500GB hard drive. If they would have said 1TB that would have been better. Most regular people can hit 250GB (if streaming U-tube videos counts it is really easy to hit) but 1TB a month is out of reach for most regular people.
Those that have the P2P going can hit 1TB quickly. Those are the people that this rule is being made for. 250GB can be hit quickly if the person watches a lot of videos online (unless streaming doesn't count in the 250GB number).
There are ways to validate their claims. For example, my Linksys router is running the Tomato firmware, which provides a full-featured bandwidth monitor. I can get usage reports by hour, day, week, and month, as well as in real-time. It separates my usage into upstream and downstream, and gives me a combined total (which is the number that Comcast is concerned about). Now, a setup like this may be a little beyond your average websurfer, but then not many of them are likely to hit the 250 GB cap, anyway.
So now, if they call me again (and they have already done so once) I can verify their reports of my usage. I may not be able to convince the person on the phone, and they may still decide to cut my service, but at least I'll know I was right and have a record to use against them.
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
The bottom line is that they didn't tell me I'd be capped or interfered with when I ordered their package nearly 5 years ago.
This is laughable. At that time they really promised you unlimited service at a fixed price for the lifetime of your account? Right.
Times change, competition changes, business models change and customer demands change. Grow up and deal with it. I imagine you weren't complaining 5 years ago when you bailed on your dialup line to switch to Comcast while AOL was crying about the "fraud" that you perpetrated - "you promised you'd stay with us on our crappy dialup service forever."