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Comcast's 105MBit Service Comes With Data Cap
itwbennett writes "Comcast just announced the ultrafast, ultra-broadband 'Extreme 105' 105 Mbit/sec Internet service for an introductory price of $105, when bundled with other services. That's the good news. The bad news: Comcast 'put a data cap on the service of 250 GB per month — about five hours worth of full-bandwidth use,' writes blogger Kevin Fogarty."
Business accounts have a limit. It just isn't acknowledged as any specific limit. You can easily use a terabyte or maybe even two without running into problems. After a certain point, they're likely to want to speak with you about signing up for a more dedicated service at a higher cost.
It's interesting, however, that in the same physical location, they can't afford more than 250gb/mo, because it is consuming all of their precious resources. Pay them an extra $40, however, and that same location and network can suddenly handle six or eight times that much bandwidth. Of course, the other important reason to get their business service is that you can get 5, 10, or even 50 mbps *up*, instead of 768kbps.
... coming from a company that made it into the final four of the worst companies in America? It took a company as bad as BP to knock Comcast out of the running.
Why are you judging? Maybe he has more than one kid? One child is watching the new pixar movie, while another is upstairs working on a online college course that has them running through some online lectures.
Then, you have the Mom, who is a work at home mom and has to constantly keep up-to-date with their training materials.
Now, this mom that works from home, always has to have some type of white noise in the background so jumps onto a hulu channel herself.
250GB is easy to burn through if you are single, and EVEN EASIER to burn though if you are married and have kids.
Speed is not just about downloading more. It is also about downloading stuff quicker, believe it or not. Even if I wouldn't go anywhere near the cap, I would love that speed if I needed to download a movie or two onto my iPad to take on a long journey, because I might not think about it until it's rather late. If I can do that in 10 minutes, then grand.
And ISP have a clue, believe it or not. They know that only about 0.5% or less of their customers regularly go over the cap, and very few actually find the caps to be a problem. If they could just not take that bothersome 0.5% as customers, they would probably be better off. Here in the UK, I just signed up for a broadband deal that has a 60GB cap, but allows me unlimited downloads that don't count towards my cap between midnight and 8am. That seems a reasonable compromise to me. Downloads as much as you want but don't affect other customers who have lower needs, but who still want to watch Youtube videos in HD.