Pfft. Maybe your computer can only store between 20 and 60 GB. But disk space is cheap. I’ve got over half a terabyte of storage on my home network.
For the record, it was hardly a “polilte” phone call. More of a threat than anything else… but it goes towards a pattern I’ve noticed from Comcrap.
There’s always public libraries. 
Seriously: Porn and P2P are both appropriate for a home connection, provided you’re not using them uber excessively. I mean, if you’re ripping DVD’s and sharing them on Kazaa, and not limiting how many people can hit 'em, I’d say that’s a bit abusive.
Yes, the advertising isn’t completely truthful, but, given how much the general internet-using public knows about this stuff (given that the general public and the internet-using public are pretty much one and the same now-a-days), it’s pretty close to the truth. “Unlimited” means “unlimited, until you start using it so excessively that you start messing things up” more of then “really and truly unlimited.” Think all-you-can-eat buffets.
Well, it’s not quite false advertising, because Comcast does publish a (vague) acceptable use policy, of which the key phrase is probably
“You must ensure that your activity (including, but not limited to, use made by you or others of any Personal Web Features) does not improperly restrict, inhibit, or degrade any other user’s use of the Service, nor represent (in the sole judgment of Comcast) an unusually large burden on the network. In addition, you must ensure that your activities do not improperly restrict, inhibit, disrupt, degrade or impede Comcast’s ability to deliver the Service and monitor the Service, backbone, network nodes, and/or other network Services.”
They also note that 1% of of users consume 18% of the bandwidth.
5% consume about 50% of the bandwidth.
The other 94% consume about 32% of the bandwidth.
This site contains reports of people being scolded for using 50Gig/month, so our OP is really at the far end of the bell curve.
In general, I don’t have a lot of good things to say about Comcast’s pricing policies, but they’ve been pretty professional about the internet service.
Auntie Pam didn’t seem to be such a “geek”, therefore I am guessing that while there is a large amount of storage space, there isn’t 300GB of room on her machine.
Sam
No claim to geekness here. I was reluctant to even ask my question, but I figured somebody would need to dumb this discussion down a bit. I’m looking at Metacom’s post as my first lesson.
I have a Dell Dimension 4700, and I don’t even know how much GB storage it has.
You assume that he downloads 300GB of porn a month. Can you point to the part in this thread in which he stated he was downloading porn?
Sorry Astro.
I still don’t think his “all of it” answer actually meant that he was downloading porn 24 x 7.
Wow, my DSL company doesn’t. I guess they figure since I pay for a dedicated amount of bandwidth per month, I should get to use all of it.
If I’m paying for 1 Mbps downstream, dedicated, then I should be able to use that at any or all times, even if I’m downloading nothing but memory dumps from other people all month long.
It’s not my problem if they don’t make arrangements on their end to live up with the contract they made with me. My DSL provider guaranteed me a certain dedicated bandwidth would be available at all times. If they can’t live up to that, it’s not me who should suffer.
catsix, can’t you post anything without an attitude problem?
Can’t you read my posts without assuming things that aren’t there?
I disagree. Yes, the acceptable use policy does seem to allow Comcast to limit excessive use, but it seems that the OP’s beef is that Comcast won’t say how much is too much. If they were to tell the OP what the maximum allowable bandwidth use is, then they wouldn’t be able to use the term ‘unlimited use’. It is limited, but the limit is undefined. It’s false advertising.
You obviously haven’t spent much time exploring the Prelinger collection, and the other stuff at archive.org. Thousands of videos, many in high-resolution mpeg-2 format, available for free and legal downloading.
There are many other websites that offer large amounts of material for downloading. Take government websites for example. They offer literally tens of thousands of items, most of which is part of the public record and freely available for download. Reports, forms, press releases, press conferences, and a host of other stuff, as well as audio and video files on some websites. You can download stuff like most of the Congressional Record for the past decade or more, audio files of Supreme Court arguments, images and movies from the National Parks Service’s websites, and myriad other material.
The Library of Congress’s American Memory digital collection contains literally tens of thousands of images, many of which are offered not only as JPEGs, but also as high-resolution TIFs, coming it at 20MB+ per picture. American Memory also has hours of video and audio. Similarly, NASA offers many gigabytes of images, presentations, video, and other material showcasing the agency’s work.
Thesae are just two of many hundreds of sites—private and public, American and foreign—that have large amounts of material for people to peruse. And the sites i’ve discussed so far are just the free ones. Through my university i have access to many hundreds of other websites that offer massive amounts of material to scholars and researchers. Sites like Lexis/Nexis and JSTOR are a very small part of a huge network of scholarly and academic databases.
And let’s not forget the large number of websites that people can join for a fee. The Nation magazine, for example, offers access to every edition it has published for the past 140 years to people willing to pay $300 a year. Music sites like iTunes allow people to download as many songs as they’re willing to pay for. And while people have been joking about it, the fact is that a subscription to a porn website is a perfectly legal use of the internet, and offers another way to download large amounts of information legally.
Hell, it really requires very little effort to download a large amount of material. I listen to internet radio on a regular basis while i’m working at home, from a variety of websites all over the world. Even at the relatively low streaming rate of 128kbps (16kB per second), if i left this radio on for a whole month it would constitute over 40GB of usage.
We can argue about what is and is not reasonable usage, and whether an ISP should take actions like those described in the OP, but let’s not make the unfounded assumption that anyone downloading that much material must be either running a commercial enterprise or breaking the law.
Do you have a standard residential line from a major ISP? If so, I’d be shocked if they didn’t take some kind of action if you were in the 300 GB a month range…
I don’t know how major my ISP would be considered, but I do have a ‘non business’ DSL account. Agreement says they guarantee I have 1 Mbps downstream dedicated, so really, if I want to fill that up 24/7, I don’t see what they can say about it.
I pay for dedicated bandwidth. If my ISP can’t provide what they say they do, they’re not living up to the contract, right?
It depends on what your contract says really (obviously). That said I would expect that if they’re on the ball and notice that you are using a whole bunch of resources (to the extent that you are costing them money rather than making them money) they’re under no obligation to keep providing you service once your contract period that you’ve paid for runs out (in other words it’s not just the DSL customers who can choose to terminate the contract). What the OP experienced was a warning that his ISP is considering this, if you were to do the same thing I would be suprised if your ISP didn’t do something similar.
Right. But dedicated bandwidth, especially that much of it, strikes me as being atypical. I guess you’re getting a good deal.
At the end of the term of the contract, they have the option of either renegotiating to get a higher price for the bandwidth, or not renewing the contract. If I don’t like the terms of a new contract, I can go to someone else who will be more agreeable to me. But as it stands right now, they’ve got to honor the contract, no matter how stupid it was for them to use the word ‘dedicated’.
They’re not exactly brilliant, my ISP. I have no idea why they used the phrasing they did, but since the contract states 1 Mbps downstream dedicated, I’m gonna be all over that.
I apologize. Your tone came across as snarky for no good reason. I interpreted it that way for no good reason. I’ll not do that again.
It’s OK. I can see that it was easy to read the snarkyness into the post even though I hadn’t intented it to be that way.
I apologize for my response to you, because I know I could’ve been nicer about that.