It's official: Comcast starts 250GB bandwidth caps October 1

[Warrian]

Originally Posted by lendarios

What would be your bandwidth consumption if you watch Hulu shows an average of 25 hours a week? Basically i dont watch tv anymore i just watch hulu full seasons shows.

According to Hulu, they stream around 700kbps. so that averages out to be around 300MB an hour. So... 25 x 300 = 7.5gb over a 25 hour period. I'm not sure about HD shows.

[The Ancient]

Says their 720p streaming (is that new? I haven't seen that for most shows) is 2,500Kbps so that's like 28gb over 25 hours. Still doesn't put you anywhere close to 250gb a month on it's own.

[Kaio]

Well, 28gb is purely for download. You are usually going to upload random bits of data at times. And you may also visit a lot of webpages, play mmorpgs, or watch more videos, maybe 2-4 hours a day.

You still won't hit the limit now but 250gigs is the highest bandwidth cap i've seen thusfar. Time warner tried to make 40-60gb caps on their high-end accounts.

[Disp]

Shit I remember when you could only use 20 hours of AOL per month or you'd go over your limit and they'd start raping you to the tune of like $3/hr. Once you over your usage, companies tend to fuck you right up the ass. Anyone who's gone over their minutes on cell phones can attest. But yeah 250 GB is a lot in today's standards.

[Vorph]

Sure, 250GB is a lot. But it's also been shown that the big cable companies pay about $0.01 per GB (don't have the article handy, pretty sure it was one of the ones about Time Warner getting the community internet shut down in that city in NC).

They already use throttling and traffic shaping to prevent heavy downloaders from 'hogging all the bandwidth.' If I download 250+GB in a month, but 95% of it is done from 2-8AM, why the fuck should they care? I actually only use about 100-120GB on average anyway, but that's not the point.

[KilyinRZ]

For the month so far. I've done a lot of file transfers (way more than usual) this month. I'd have to go on a torrent frenzy to break the cap.

Month: 2009-08
Download: 22.89 GB
Upload: 50.46 GB
Total: 73.35 GB

[Aamina]

I agree though, it sets a terrible precedent. Somewhat related: My ISP started sending letters to people who download movies illegally (not me, I don't really torrent anything illegal), and even stopped service on my friend's house for 3 days when he torrented Star Trek anyway.

Their base package now says you have a 5GB cap. That's right, FIVE GB. Naturally I got the next package, which has no limit, but I know some tard who doesn't know much about the internet but loves to download gets that package and gets hit with 50 dollars in overage fees because he didn't read the fine print.

[Lucifar]

I would imagine that when Hulu HD and Netflix start bumping into monthly bandwidth limits in non excessive circumstances, then ISP's are going to be pretty fast to work with the big providers to provide un-metered access to ISP localized content servers.

In the early DSL days in New Zealand, where the best that residential customers could get was 256k/128k D/U and 5 gig limits, many of the ISP's offered local game and file servers that bypassed the speed caps and didn't count towards capacity.

Of course you can argue that the ISP's have an incentive to do this right now, as it would cost them less to deliver a Netflix Movie to you from a server based in your ISP's local node/hub. But the problem is, you dont actually have any incentive (other than perhaps data rate issues) to use the local servers that your ISP paid to set up, as it's the same cost to stream from a server in Moscow as it is from the US.
By paying for a $/GB monthly allowance for worldwide and then getting unmetered to local hosted media services or offpeak bonus bandwidth I think actually produces a more efficient system which in the long run will cost less as well.

[Lucifar]

Originally Posted by Aamina

Their base package now says you have a 5GB cap. That's right, FIVE GB. Naturally I got the next package, which has no limit, but I know some tard who doesn't know much about the internet but loves to download gets that package and gets hit with 50 dollars in overage fees because he didn't read the fine print.

I agree that exploitive overage fee's are a farce. Some ISP's just ripping consumers off while they can.
We pass laws to set a maximum interest rate on credit cards (something like down to 19%PA from some which would charge 37%PA) so the government/society has obviously concluded that taking advantage of people who fail at math and/or fine print deserve some level of protection from business.
Meanwhile some ISP's offer differing bandwidth deals usually amounting to something like a $30 base fee $10 per 10GB. After going over your cap though, rather than charge another $10 or even a 2x 'penalty' of 20$ for 10GB, you are charged out at 5c/MB.
Just thinking about it gives me visions of one of their accountants watching their computer screen as a customer accidentally or unknowingly hits their bandwidth limit while downloading the latest Windows 7 RC ISO or Streaming some 720p Movie. The accounts eyes start doing the spinning $ thing as Slot machine bell sounds start going off in the background and neon lights flash thru the building.

Been a few big stories of this with mobile roaming fee's recently I suppose, but at least with those stories the carriers can talk bullshit and toss the blame between themselves by telling us how they are just passing on the cost of the international carrier,

[TecKnoe]

this is fucking lame, i got 4 people using comps in my house comcast is the only thing worth having everything else will just tank while they are all doing shit and im playing games.

not sure if fios is in my area i might have to check, but DSL isnt an option thier shit is garbage.

how would i check how much im using per month?

[Kaio]

ArsTechnica raped time warner when they showed that time warner's network costs actually went down 15% from the previous year. That pretty much showed you that their 5-60 gig limits (yep, 5 gig limit on the lower speed accounts) were purely for squeezing out more money and or trying to prevent a foothold on online video streaming.

Here is the article:
Time Warner rationale for bandwidth caps doesn't add up - Ars Technica

I'm gonna guess that comcasts bandwidth cost hasn't exploded. Based on reduced network costs in things I deal with like webhosting in the last 5 years and the fact that newer and much more efficient routers and other network equipment are coming out it should just get lower and lower.

[Blumpster]

Man, I remember when I was in high school I went to our ISPs website to get some new dial in numbers since the one I was using seemed to be a pile of shit. Well, there was a list of three numbers, and I dialed into one and it worked beautifully. Well a month later a 3k phone bill arrives and my parents freak the fuck out. Turns out the number was long distance and windows dial-up had "auto area code" turned on so I couldn't tell. Guess I didn't see the area code change or something...fucking dumb thing is it turned out the place it was dialing was TEN MILES AWAY. Real long distance there. Luckily I was spoiled and didn't have to lift a finger to pay for any of it. :P

[Requiem]

Originally Posted by Kaio

ArsTechnica raped time warner when they showed that time warner's network costs actually went down 15% from the previous year. That pretty much showed you that their 5-60 gig limits (yep, 5 gig limit on the lower speed accounts) were purely for squeezing out more money and or trying to prevent a foothold on online video streaming.

Here is the article:
Time Warner rationale for bandwidth caps doesn't add up - Ars Technica

I'm gonna guess that comcasts bandwidth cost hasn't exploded. Based on reduced network costs in things I deal with like webhosting in the last 5 years and the fact that newer and much more efficient routers and other network equipment are coming out it should just get lower and lower.

Agreed. If the connection you are viewing this web page through right now were to be maxed out 24/7 for one month, each gigabyte delivered would cost on average one third of a cent. And that's for the single best connection that you can even buy, the creme de la creme. The same IP backbone service that Comcast, Verizon, and the other 19 of the top 20 ISPs in the US buy in fact. If I were to go with something like Cogent, it would be one quarter of the cost. And this is just on the 1-10Gbps scale, nothing even remotely as large as the quantities that Comcast et al are working with.

This is down 40% from what the same connection cost last year at the same facility.

[Sharmai]

I just think they are trying to get this kind of thing standard so they can charge everyone more money across the board. It's obvious that online streaming is the way of the future but also fiberoptic lines that can handle it are coming too and if they could get people to start paying by the gigabyte they could screw us over like cellphone companies do with bullshit text messaging fees.

[Fuya]

With the capping and the fucking the customer out of more money per gigabyte, wouldn't this start cutting into the profits of company that rely on the internet? For example Google, Hulu, Microsoft, Ebay and a hell of a lot others I don't want to spend 20 minutes typing out. At some point I would expect the big boys of the internet to say "Fuck it! We'll make our own ISP".

By the look of Googles' stock price, I think they can pull it off.