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Comcast Predicts Usage Cap Within 5 Years
finalcutmonstar (1862890) writes "With net neutrality dying a slow painful death, it is no surprise that in an investor call yesterday Comcast executive VP(and Darth Vader impersonator) David Cohen predicts bandwidth caps within the next 5 years. The cap would start at 300 GB and cost the customer subscriber an extra 10 USD for 50 GB. But, Cohen stated that 'I would also predict that the vast majority of our customers would never be caught in the buying the additional buckets of usage, that we will always want to say the basic level of usage at a sufficiently high level that the vast majority of our customers are not implicated by the usage-based billing plan.'" Update: 05/15 13:58 GMT by T : Correction: Cohen is actually talking about data transferred, rather than stored (as headline originally had it), as reader MAXOMENOS points out.
Bandwidth, in networking, is a measure of the amount of data transfered per time unit. The Comcast exec is predicting a transfer cap, i.e. a maximum quantity of data.
You're right, though; Neither are "storage". Whoever titled the post is a moron.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
No, the Comcast exec is predicting a bandwidth cap.
Or do you seriously believe that his 300 GB cap is a LIFETIME cap? Much more likely it's a monthly cap.
And 300GB/month is a measure of a quantity of data (300GB) per time unit (month).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Have you seen what has happened because of the Google Fiber rollout? Here in Austin, you have AT&T scrambling to match the offer after the mere ANNOUNCEMENT by Google that they intended to offer service, and now there's a local ISP called Grande doing the same (although they already had a few fiber rings around the city to service their business customers, so their entry into the fight was a simple choice). That's right, with nothing other than a statement of intent, we have a virtual land race for uncapped near-gigabit internet for under $80 a month. If that's not competitive economics at work, I don't know what is.
You're right, so long as you don't actually use your connection, caps aren't a problem.
Of course, if you don't do any of that, then a basic ADSL connection would be just fine and 10 years ago is calling.
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We cut DirecTV off 4 months ago, we are a 100% streaming home now.
We have 5, the kids often watch something on the iPad, mom and dad are on the TV, etc. between Netflix, Amazon Prime videos, Vudu, we use a lot of bandwidth, and that will only go up once 4k streaming comes out.
Then the PS3 is downloading patches and updates in the background, as is the multiple Windows computers, and every month or so the iPads update as well.
Heck, our new Sony 3D TV has had three software updates itself in 6 months.
Then there is backups, I use two backup programs, Crashplan and Backblaze, to backup our family videos, pictures, and documents, it is about 6TB worth of data (2x of course)
Then there is steam, I have many, many games on Steam, and they have lots and lots of patches that auto update.
Then there is online play, SWTOR probably doesn't use tons and tons of bandwidth, but running for a few hours probably uses a decent amount, and they have patches to download every two weeks or so.
We easily use multiple terabytes of data in a month, and not a single byte of it is pirated. We are also not that unusual, many families are cutting the cord, our friends have dropped cable or sat TV and went to all streaming. They have XBoxes and PS3s, and computers that update, etc...
300gb is either a lot, or not nearly enough, depending on your situation.