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

[Cryptin]

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

I wonder how many customer they will lose over this? I recently switched fro Comcast to a smaller internet company with no limit. I do foresee many internet companies doing this.

[Malakriss]

Anyone Tried FIOS Yet?

I switched from Comcast to Verizon over a year ago. Never had one iota of regret.

[Tuco]

Anyone know statistics on how many MB's of data you download for every hour of average MMO gaming?

[Quineloe]

Originally Posted by Tuco

Anyone know statistics on how many MB's of data you download for every hour of average MMO gaming?

It's very little. I have a monthly bandwidth cap of 45gb total (because it's an ultradiscounted employeronly deal) and I only broke it once, on the 29th of august last year - and that was with absolutly excessive downloading every night.
A 250GB cap is so high, hardly anyone will hit that unless they're trying.

[Twobit Whore]

Well, most MMOs can be played on dialup, but even figuring double the average 56k modem speed only puts you at like 25-30MB an hour.

If you played 24/7 for a month that would be in the 20GB neighborhood.

[Arbitrary]

Originally Posted by Twobit Whore

If you played 24/7 for a month that would be in the 20GB neighborhood.

How is anyone going to get by on 230 gigs of porn a month?

[brekk]

MMO might not be a lot, but what about streaming youtube/hulu videos? how quickly does that add up.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

Figure 200MB per 40 minute episode.

[chaos]

I don't have any other options. FIOS isn't out to my area yet and Verizon, as a company, has the worst customer service I have ever dealt with. The only other option I have is DSL through Verizon. So yeah, sucks dick for those of us stuck with Comcast no matter what. But at least they'll (maybe) stop "traffic shaping" my fucking torrents.

[Manseed]

Right now I kill about 200g a month and that is me downloading every pirated movies/tv shows/porns as soon as I think of them.

[Soygen]

Man, I'm really going to have to monitor my Cheggit activity now. Fuckin' bastards.

[Ronne]

I'm still using ATT DSL because I refuse to give Comcast my monies. I'd love the 15mb/sec connection (not that I'd ever actually get that speed out of their shitty over-sold pipes) they offer, but fuck them and their bandwidth caps.

Way to take a step backwards there geniuses.

[Manseed]

I think this will lose them business overall. The common American is a big fan of all-you-can-eat.

[Sheaf]

They are essentially trying to do three things at once:

1 - Limit or get rid of the very, very heavy users
2 - Discourage other potential heavy users from signing up
3 - Putting in a cap that most people will find acceptable so they can lower it later

It's a terrible business practice and it often doesn't fly for other products. You won't often see a local gym telling its members that they are limited to 4 hours a day. Why not?

First, because the gym is playing the law of averages. They know there will be heavy users and they may even lose money on those heavy users. But they can make it up on the people who come in twice a month.

Second, those heavy users tend to be their most loyal customers and most fanatical evangelists.

Third, even for people that never get near a limit, they hate that there is one. It's always there looming over them.

I think this is a really stupid move by Comcast and it's going to bite them in the ass at some point.

[chaos]

Even if Comcast didn't have shitty customer service and they weren't doing the whole "traffic shaping" thing and they didn't oversell their lines, this decision alone would be enough to make me switch. As it is now I am simply waiting for the first opportunity to bail, but I have to wait for either Cox or Verizon to get on the ball.