Oh the humanity! I DL plenty, but who on God’s green earth needs or uses more than 250 gigs a month?
250? Shit, if I used 1/10th that, I’d be shocked. I thought I used the internet a lot but apparently people use more than 250 otherwise they wouldn’t need to cap it.
Moving Nazi thread from IMHO to The BBQ Pit.
I was surprised when I installed a bandwidth meter on my computer earlier this month and realized that I downloaded 120GB in three weeks. :eek:
Those instantly watchable Netflix movies and Hulu TV shows apparently suck up a lot of bandwidth (okay, I did download a ton of other stuff, but still).
I think it’s worth noting that with the connection I get from Comcast (16mb/s), I can only get 34 hours of full speed downloading in before I get cut off for the month.
I’ve probably hit 250 a month before, but certainly not regularly.
The people this is going to hurt are those with multiple people on the same account. Parents and 2 teenagers? I imagine they could hit the limit fairly easily.
We have four computers in the house that are used regularly. We stream Netflix, Hulu and a whole bunch of other sites in addition to a fair amount of down and uploading. We just got done streaming most of the DNC in HD. 250GB/month? Cake. Sure glad I’m switching to DSL. Fuck Comcast, those Nazi bastards! $55/month for 4mbps? Fuck 'em in the neck with a rusty chainsaw dragged through an over beshat cat box full of toxoplasmosis nymphs.
Can anyone recommend a good free bandwidth meter for XP? I watch a lot of Hulu and Netflix too.
Go to tools> speed tests > Flash 8 plugin test > external speedtests
Scroll down to your closest area, click on the link, it will give you multiple servers at varying distances from you and will check your down and upload speeds.
ETA: It occurs to me you’re looking for usage meter, not speed. Disregard–although it is a good spot to check your connection speed.
I use Bandwidth Monitor Pro, but FreeMeter seems pretty good and has just about all of the same features.
I am extremely lucky to have found a plan that gives me 60GB a month. That’s plenty for what I do.
I am very jealous that America has never had download caps before now. We have had them from day one.
I’ve paid per minute of connection and per kb transferred and had plans with caps before in US. The industry went to “unlimited” plans later on.
For dialup, yeah, but high-speed connections have never had widespread caps. I got my first cable connection in 1998, before most people had it, and even then we weren’t capped.
We generally watch approximately 1 half hour episode of Hulu a day. Add in a couple of movies rented from itunes and xbox, and I bet we will hit that cap before we know it. Mr. Jeeves is working on a solution to meter the bandwidth for all the computers in the house.
You know what really pisses me off though? Comcast has stated that they will not provide anyway for users to find out what their bandwidth use is. So you have no way of knowing what they say you are using. They also don’t say if this is download or downland & upload. On top of all that, in the past and as far as I know still now, they don’t have the data themselves until approximately 3 months afterward. So you get a 1 month warning, but it comes after you could have modified your behavior and you have your account terminated. This is really a very crappy lack of transparency.
First line of the article sez, “Comcast Corp., the nation’s second-largest Internet service provider, Thursday said it would set an official limit on the amount of data subscribers can download and upload each month.”
What an amazing coincidence that the cable company’s internet service instituted a policy that makes other video sources less available… :dubious:
Between Skype and online gaming, I bet I use a lot of bandwidth … I should probably find out before Comcast kicks my ass.
Net Meter I really like this one.
I wouldn’t get too comfortable. In the good old days of consumerism, when one company offered a new benefit, service, or discount to its customers, competing companies would quickly scramble to offer the same.
In the Bizarro World inhabited by ISPs (and banks), one company will discontinue a service or benefit, or raise prices/charge additional fees, and competitors will say “hey, I didn’t know we could get away with that!” and will scramble to bend their own customers over a couch and treat them similarly.
If somebody knows of a bandwidth meter that can distinguish between local traffic on my network (92.168..) and internet traffic, please post a link. The two already posted do not appear to have this functionality.
I’m limited to 5GB per month on my connection and it FUCKING SUCKS RAT BALLS! :mad:
But it’s the best connection I can get in my area (Verizon Mobile Broadband.) The first month I watched their meter carefully and got up to 4.8 GB. It’s something like .20 per MEGABYTE after you hit 5GB.