Comcast to cap monthly bandwidth starting Oct. 1

By #Michael
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Grand Master

Richard Hammond

Posted
Posted
faster speeds != downloading more ;)

my downloading habbits haven't really changed from being on 4Mb to being on 20Mb, it just means i get things quicker which is what a lot of people want

Yes i realise that but my point was why give people the ability to download really fast and potentially max your monthly cap out in a few days, if they cant afford to pay for bandwidth then dont offer stupidly fast speeds.

Id gladly still pay the same amount for 10mb instead of 20mb and have no throttles or caps, i dont really care its just if i wanted to i should be able to with the amount im giving my ISP.

Grand Master

Mathachew Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted
Another thing you all seem to neglect is if Comcast is limiting those top 4% that cost them the vast majority of bandwidth, why am I, a person who may use 1-4 GB a month getting charged the whole price?

That's a great point. I think Comcast is testing a 'pay for what you use' system in Beaumont, TX.

Grand Master

Gotenks98

Posted
Posted

I think the whole cap thing is stupid especially since internet movies is where things are going to. I look at the netflix thing for XBL, how they expect people to use the service with all these caps now? It would be like paying for the movie twice if you hit the caps. I think they will loose so much business that they will change this.

Proficient

darkmanx21

Posted
Posted

This is more than enough for me. No doubt. I just hope they don't throttle. I have them now and am completely happy. No problems..except, the only thing they are really shady on is the bill. They bill one month in advance and it's never EVER the same. Always fluctuates. Don't understand why it's not fixed, like my cell phone bill. Oh well.

Grand Master

Roger H. Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted

if as someone said that's like 8GB a day, i think for "normal" uses it's fine, 1 person normally doesn't burn that up. But when you live in a house where there are 4 adults each with their own laptop you might get close. Just browsing youtube alone can rack up 2GB in a 2-3 hours from 1 person. Then add the MP3 downloads and the game playing (LAN or 360) and just browsing sites like Neowin where the front page is 256KB and up! It might not be 250GB but it certainly will be more than 4GB a day with those uses.

If you have the right router you can install DD-WRT as they have a bandwidth monitor. One day - non-stop downloading torrents and normal browsing (have a server for torrents) i racked up 35GB in a single 24hr period. The next day, turned OFF the server and just did the normal browsing (Sunday when everyone was home) and we still used over 3GB for the day.

Rising Star

BilliShere

Posted
Posted

the equivalent to comcast in canada is rogers.. damn greedy losers put a 60 gig cap for me.. they start charging 5 bucks more for every extra gig downloaded or uploaded...and also increased the price! :angry:

im switching to acanac 5mbps for 19.95/month. plus free huge web storage and no bandwith cap...

Rookie

zac76156

Posted
Posted
They're a cable company, like Cox.

Yeah, it kinda cracks me up that Comcast is getting all this attention for their 250 GB cap. Meanwhile, nobody mentions that Cox (and many others) have caps substantially lower than 250 GB. I have Cox "Premier" and I get capped at 60 GB down and 15 GB up.

Grand Master

Yuxi

Posted
Posted

"We've listened to feedback from our customers who asked that we provide a specific threshold for data usage and this would help them understand the amount of usage that would qualify as excessive," the company said in a statement on its Web site."

So they had a cap all along, it just wasn't officially announced?

Rookie

Yasha

Posted
Posted (edited)
"We've listened to feedback from our customers who asked that we provide a specific threshold for data usage and this would help them understand the amount of usage that would qualify as excessive," the company said in a statement on its Web site."

So they had a cap all along, it just wasn't officially announced?

Sort of. They'd turn off your ability to connect to anything silently. Force you to contact them, get told to contact their other office, and they'd give the shpeel about excessive downloading being the cause, give you that as your official warning, then if you trigger their automated monitor red-flagging system again your out for good.

Had mine toasted once already. Of course they don't actually close the account, or terminate the ability of your cable modem to connect to them, they just make it so you can't connect to anything aside from them. Which is of course shady, but they get away with it.

While the cap is "generous" in relation to others, it's still a cap, and they're a monopoly in any real sense of the word. Most are too far from a substation to get ADSL, but they can get cable, your other options are satellite and dial-up in most cases. FIOS is still in it's infancy really, and isn't offered unless your in a very densely packed area, or in a rich one as Verizon is of course wishing to maximize their cost to benefit ratio.

I do and have been paying for their "gold" service, meaning 8mbps down and 768kbps up. I'd be fine with the usenet/newsgroup business model, and it would probably be in their best interest to do so.

I just don't get how they can state this without giving tools to gauge, but I guess that's never been a concern of the cell companies either when you exceed their package deals. You'd be hard pressed to find an online pay service that limits download allowances that doesn't give a tool to view how much you've used in the period your allowed. But I guess logic doesn't need to apply when you have too little competition and enough power to re-define it.

Edited by Yasha
Grand Master

Rohdekill

Posted
Posted
How are we suppose to use the web like streaming radio, video and all the normal things today if the providers won't upgrade their lousy networks?

Do they think that crappy copper is going to last forever?

BTW: 250GB isn't that much when you have multiple computers attached and more then one user.

You wait for the providers of these services to take ISP capping companies to court. I'd say they would have a fairly strong arguement.

Makes me also wonder how much productivity will drop in the office as home users will download/browse more at work.

Rising Star

LiqHead

Posted
Posted
haha. ignorant?

you fit the bill my friend.

so anyone who dl's close to 250GB a month must be doing illegal stuff.....

god knows i've never heard of xbox live demos (easily a gig a piece), itunes, netflix, online radio, etc.

i agree that 250GB is plenty for most but saying anyone who is bitching is doing something illegal is as ignorant as it gets.

i can't wait until sites like youtube and netflix go full hd.

you're just retarded.

No, YOU are the ignorant one (and I am not your friend). If you surpass 250GB a month you are NOT doing anything productive & if by chance you do legit stuff you need the business account.

Grand Master

Andrew Lyle Global Moderator

Posted
  • Global Moderator
Posted
I'll trade my 60GB/mo. for that.

haha amen to that. I think the highest Rogers offers is 80GB or 100GB. I don't go over that, and nor should anyone who hits over 250GB a month! What are you downloading?

Grand Master

Echilon

Posted
Posted

I can't see why anyone would use that much bandwidth. Possibly if you're watching HD videos all day every day, but bandwidth in the UK is capped by most ISPs at 30Gb/month. Unless they're hosting high traffic websites, I think 98% of users wouldn't need 250Gb.

Veteran

-Hiroshi-

Posted
Posted

I can't really put into perspective how much 250GB of usage is.. I don't think I even hit 90GB. My only problem is that I game A LOT, and when I use my PC I easily get to 2GB a night when I download various sounds, maps and models, so while I'm a bit nervous, 250GB is A LOT..

Grand Master

inactive

Posted
Posted (edited)
Do my gigabytes roll over like my cell minutes or do they just plan to **** all over me the first time I go over? I might download 400GB during a particular month then use 25 or 30GB on average the rest of the year. Guess I'll test out this new policy myself and see how eager they are to dump a long time account holder in favor of a cap.

exactly! ... cause i think i might be like that to as some months (maybe 1-2 or so) might go over that 250GB but the vast majority of the year i would be well under the 250GB cap... and overall i think personally as long as you dont 'average' more than 250GB a month in a year's time they should not do nothing to you.

o well, i dumped comcast a while ago (had it from the year 2000 (which is first when comcast internet was available in my area) all the way til 2005) for AT&T cause with AT&T i get more 'bang for the buck' ;)

cause even though i only have 384k (i.e. 40KB/s up/down) DSL from AT&T i only pay 15 dollars a month which is pretty good considering it's about 8 times faster (in a way 24times faster since when i was using dialup i could only be on for 8hours due to tying up the phone line) than dialup but only 5 bucks more than i was paying for dialup (i.e. Bang for the Buck ;) ) ... so unless your one of those people that download mass amounts of stuff or are spoiled with super high speed (i.e. 500-1000KB/s or more) then what i have is overall better than comcast cause im fairly sure comcast costs like 50+ dollars a month now which is pretty much OVER 3 times as much as i currently pay and i can still pretty much download just as much as comcast but just takes longer but i can still get stuff within a reasonable time frame (i.e. less than 12 hours in most cases depending on what i download)

plus with the 384k DSL i got you can slightly multitask vs when i was on dialup which basically ment only doing 1 thing at a time being either browse web sites or download stuff (now i can download while browsing sites and even though the browsing sites with my current 384k DSL gets noticeably slower when downloading, atleast i can do it ;) )... but basically all you people spoiled with 500KB/s+ connections try living with dialup for a few months and you will LOVE my 384k DSL connection. lol

but basically even if AT&T capped there service @ 250GB a month it would not matter to me since with 384K dsl the Theoretical maximum i can do based on a constant 40KB/s for 24/7 for 30 days straight is 103-104GB per month MAX which is basically 3456MB per day times 30 days = 103.6GB basically.... but i figure even with room for error cause of potential minor fluctuations etc i would still be able to a solid 90+ GB per month if i downloaded 24/7.

but anyways more on topic with the 'Comast caps consumers @ 250GB' stuff...

the way i see it is as long as it's reasonable then it dont matter... cause i dont blame comcast for putting a cap to a certain extent cause you get those people that ABUSE the heck out of downloading 'stuff' (i.e. people who 'collect stuff') who pretty much download EVERYTHING just cause they can and will never use the 'stuff' they get either which makes it even more pointless for them to download it in the first place... those are the people who ruin it for everyone else.... cause im sure you got those extreme cases where people download like 1TB a month on comcast.

cause basically if someone has a 500KB/s download speed they could potentially download up to just shy of 1.3TB (i.e. 1300MB) per month @ 500KB/s constant download speed and based on 30 days in a month.... even if they did half that there still way over the 250GB cap.

all in all though i think 250GB is 'reasonable' AS LONG AS they have that for a 'average in a year' (i.e. 3TB per year MAX) sorta thing... cause like my reply to the guy i quoted said... some months we might download more than 250GB but other months we will be well under the limit... so the way i see it is as long as you dont 'average' more than 250GB per month then comcast should keep quite ;)

but in general for me personally it's unlikely i would download more than 250GB cause i was just doing a rough calulation of what i might do on average if i had a fast connection and i figure around 100GB ish would be what i would do give or take a little.... and i even did a way above what i think i would do and im still fairly sure i would be under 200GB total per month..... so overall i think it's quite reasonable for comcast to cap @ 250GB.... and honestly i think the only people who would have a big problem with those are those people i talked about above who either 'collect stuff' or download stuff they will never need or use etc etc.

overall though only time it would really suck as far as a 'cap' of download limit in GB per month is if they capped it to like 50GB or something as im quite sure i would go over that consistently as im sure i break that mark a fairly good amount and i only have 384K DSL (i.e. 40KB/s)

also i assume this 'cap' is only referring to 'DOWNLOAD' speeds? ... or is that counting up and down for the 250GB total?

Edited by ThaCrip
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