I watch TV on my PC. I imagine this is going to be a real problem for me. 
I don’t know, if watching TV took 1 GB per hour (which would be very nice quality video), you could watch 8 hours a day. A month of surfing and light downloading and YouTubing takes about 5GB for me.
Of course, that should be 192.168..
I already said this on the amnesia weekend, but it pisses me off that these fucks are metering us but aren’t giving use access to their metering data. My guess is that that they are only spot-checking, and don’t want the customers to realize that.
It is just the beginning, they are putting a toe in the water. If you accept it they will drop it more.
The problem is many people won’t have alternatives, it’s cable or nothing. Verizon and Sprint Mobile Broadband is limited to 5GB per month, DSL isn’t available everywhere, Satellite sucks, dial-up sucks. So what can you do?
250 Gigs is like 8 Gigs a day for 30 days! Its not too bad i think 
. I get less than 8 Gigs “free” per month. I pay ~ $20 /month.
I go through a gig maybe every two weeks, but 250gb/mo is pretty ridiculous. Understandable for Comcast to ax them
I doubt that. It should be a simple matter of running a query against a database once a month.
No bandwidth caps here in Europe. We get 20mbps down, 1.5up for about $95/mo. I doubt I use 250gb/mo, but use video conferencing perhaps 2 hours per day and download 1gb + developer OS seeds every day or two. I would guess 100gb/mo might be expected.
Is this cap to try to stop torrents?
Oh, not at all. Comcast just unrolled a heap of streaming content for you. I wonder if they’ll include it in the cap. Want to bet they won’t? Of course, this may hurt those pesky competitors like Netflix or DTV’s new HD-stream. Convenient.
What the fuck business is it of Comcasts’ how much of my unlimited plan bandwidth I do, or do not use?
Those of you saying 250GB a month is unattainable by the average user are…well…wrong. Many of us stream videos from the internet, download large game files (I transferred over 5GB last night downloading a game, patches, and another 2GB for subsequent mods) have multiple users, or fileshare. Many of us are all pissed off at having our unlimited plans nested in a sweaty, sweltering nest of air quotes because Comcast decided to profit instead of use their government subsidies to upgrade their networks properly.
I plan on ignoring their cap completely and using the internet as I always have. Probably won’t hit the cap - and if I do I’ll go somewhere else. Bandwidth isn’t a resource - it costs them nothing to shoot packets back and forth.
Good luck with that. If you live in an area with multiple cheap high-speed Internet options, that is.
Well, of course I don’t. Almost nobody does in the United States. So instead we have the beginnings of what’s certainly going to become a slippery slope as the nooses get tighter and tighter.
Comcast has their oversold, oversatured network, and it’s much easier to gouge us into a new pricing scheme, that’s going to force dirty, filesharing pirate internet bandits - but also multiple-computer families, internet-media users, movie-makers and graphic designers and anybody else that’s dependent on high bandwidth.
Not to mention the customer service is a complete joke and their networks unreliable and much, much slower than they advertise. If bandwidth becomes a problem, then Comcast needs to upgrade their lines. And then - wow! More free internet!
Most (not nearly all) places that can get cable can get DSL, at least.
If Comcast cuts me, I’ll just head on over to Verizon - though that’d mean going from 16mbs down/2mbit up to 3mb/512k? 768, maybe. Every damn town around here has FiOS but us, it seems. :mad:
I actually think this is a major improvement over the way things used to be, which was that you had a cap, but didn’t actually know what it is.
The problem was that ISPs advertise “unlimited” plans, but they’re not really unlimited. Eventually, they’ll disconnect someone who’s extremely unprofitable for them.
Now, things still aren’t perfect. It would be nice to have them make available the metering data they have, and I’d guess that they will, in a while. But 250G is a lot of data. I could download 3 full-lenth movies a day on torrents, upload at a 1:1 ratio, and still not hit that limit. Before, people had a legitimate complaint when they were cut off from an “unlimited” plan for excessive usage. Now, maybe they’ll just have to limit their usage or pay extra for a business plan.
Think of this as a move toward honest advertising, not a move toward data limits. The data limits were always there, but now they’re being acknowledged. Limiting extreme bandwidth users (or making them buy more expensive services) will result in better, faster, and cheaper connections for the vast majority of users.
Every packet-switched network on the planet is “oversold”. That’s what makes so efficient
As soon as Comcast does this, all the P2P apps on the network will immediately notice all the extra bandwidth available and increase their bandwidth usage until the network becomes congested again. TCP is designed to do this so long as there’s data available to be sent – and P2P apps will always have data queued waiting to be transmitted.
Bittorrent apps like uTorrent are some of the only ones I’ve seen that can at least throttle their bandwidth usage if the user chooses.
It’s not?
It doesn’t? Computers, electricity, air conditioning, IT employees… that’s all free now? Why am I always the last to know?
:dubious:
I think what he’s trying to say is Comcast likely is paying the same price to their upstream providers whether 1 byte or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes are transferred. The higher-priced connections from T1 on up are unmetered.
However, if one or more cable users in an area use large amounts of bandwidth then there won’t be enough left over for everyone else in that area. How big that area is depends on the local network architecture. It’s like a garden hose, only so much water can flow through it.
Interesting intersection we’re seeing here; faster than ever Internet speeds, more bandwidth-hungry video being offered, while official bandwidth caps start to appear. So you can download that video really fast, just don’t download much of it. :dubious:
It really adds up, though, if a movie watcher prefers to download DVD images of movies at 4.37GB a pop* (why not when you can snag that in 35 minutes?) rather than the 700-1400MB XViD stuff. And there’s HD stuff out there that’s even bigger.
A streaming Netflix video isn’t all that bad - between 1 and 2GB usually, depending on the length.
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- assuming a 1:1 ratio, you could get 28 of these in a month.