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Comcast To Cap Data Transfers At 250 GB In October
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Aug 28, 2008 07:10 PM
from the crimp-in-your-style dept.
from the crimp-in-your-style dept.
JagsLive writes with this story from PC Magazine: "Comcast has confirmed that all residential customers will be subject to a 250 gigabyte per month data limit starting October 1. 'This is the same system we have in place today,' Comcast wrote in an amendment to its acceptable use policy. 'The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted.' The cable provider insisted that 250 GB is "an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. ... As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage,' Comcast said Thursday. 'If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,' according to the AUP."
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Typical Home Bandwidth Usage? 656 comments
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[+]
Comcast Appeals FCC's Net Neutrality Ruling 242 comments
Ian Lamont writes "Comcast has filed a court appeal of an FCC ruling that says the company can't delay peer-to-peer traffic on its network because it violates FCC net neutrality principles. A Comcast VP said the FCC ruling is 'legally inappropriate,' but said it will abide by the order during the appeal while moving forward with its plan to cap data transfers at 250 GB per month."
[+]
AT&T Begins a Trial To Cap, Meter Internet Usage 421 comments
An anonymous reader writes "On the heels of Comcast's decision to implement a 250-GB monthly cap, and Time Warner Cable's exploration of caps and overage fees, DSL Reports notes that AT&T is launching a metered billing trial of their own in Reno, Nevada. According to a filing with the FCC (PDF), AT&T's existing tiers, which range from 768 kbps to 6 Mbps, would see caps ranging from 20 GB to 150 GB per month. Users who exceed those caps would pay an additional $1 per gigabyte, per month."
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So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Funny)
The swine ! (Score:5, Funny)
How can I possibly make it through a month at 250 G? I, um, have a condition, yeah, that's it, that requires I download unlimited amounts of data from the internet. This is cause an undue hardship. As if comcast has the RIGHT to take this from me. If my connection weren't actually my neighbors, I'd SUE THEIR ASSES pronto!
So what shall I do Slashdot? How can I get my umlimited back? Get a bigger Wifi antenna? I heard about that but what about bandwidth?
Parent
Very insightful point made in article (Score:5, Informative)
That statement actually relates well to a very insightful point made at the end of the article:
You are lucky to have some genuine competition in the form of FIOS. If I could, I would switch to that in a heartbeat, even if I had to pay a relatively large installation fee (probably up to 200 dollars). Unfortunately, just about everywhere I go I'm locked down to one provider. In the tiny town of Jackson, OH, I am restricted to Time Warner Cable (another company working on a cap), and before I was transferred here I lived in Minneapolis, subject to Comcast. I suppose I could potentially get DSL, but that is so much slower than cable it almost doesn't count as competition in the broadband market, and satellite is so latency heavy it doesn't count either. That leaves cable standing alone, unless you are lucky enough to have true broadband competition through FIOS.
In my opinion, cable providers are starting to stifle innovation and competition the same way large cell phone providers do. They see one company screwing the customers with a cap, and figure, "Hey, I can do that too! Now I can keep more money for profits instead of network upgrades." And with no competition to force changes on them, that's the way things will stay. Both cell phone companies and cable companies are able to stay the way they are because of huge barriers to entry... you can't lay another set of cable lines in every town, and it's prohibitively expensive to try to set up another nationwide cellular network. In instances like these, the government does need to step in to regulate the monopolies/oligopolies. My water company doesn't put a cap on how much I use because the government regulates that monopoly (granted, I do pay more the more I use, but if the cable companies went to that model without government intervention, it would probably be priced like the cell phone companies price text messages: 10 cents a kilobyte or something ridiculous. That's why I'm currently opposed to anything other than a flat rate from them).
Parent
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose I could potentially get DSL, but that is so much slower than cable it almost doesn't count as competition in the broadband market
how fast is your cable connection? with adsl every person can have a 24mbps connection, to themselves which doesn't matter how much anyone else is using it nearby.
Cable last I checked is shared on a circuit common to at least a few households, so your mileage may vary depending on neighbours. still, if you can get faster than 24mbit on cable consistently I may consider switching from dsl to cable myself.
Parent
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:5, Informative)
I've got the choice between Qwest (turd sandwich) and Comcast (douchenozzle). I tried Qwest for less than a week before calling Comcast and asking for an install, and I dropped Qwest the day after Comcast was installed. Even with the unknowns, the service quality difference was undeniable.
Compare:
Qwest charged over 50 bucks a month, required a 1 year contract (you could only cancel penalty-free within the first 30 days, I got out just in time), and had a "max speed" of 3Mbps. I was lucky to get 2Mbps. The modem was such a POS that if I refreshed servers on Steam, it would drop all connections for about 10 seconds as the buffers overflowed. I only fixed that by putting it into bridge mode and configuring my router to handle all connectivity (DD-WRT on Linksys WRT54Gv2).
Qwest's site was often down or not working, and their tech support/customer service was nonexistant.
Compare that to my service thus far with Comcast:
I called up, and was told that the 6Mbps for 20 bucks a month was only for existing customers, but that they could give it to me for 25/month (plus $3 if I wanted a modem rental). Install was normally $99, but they knocked that down to $50 because I asked. When I got the modem plugged in, it had trouble synchronizing with comcast, and wasn't finishing the setup. I called tech support, and the guy didn't jerk me around at all. I explained what I'd tried, he said "sounds like you know what you're doing, since all you need is the firmware, how about I set that up for you, and I'll give you blast for free (16Mbps down, 1-2Mbps up)?"
I thanked him, the modem came up, and the performance has been consistently good. I get about 10Mbps down, and 5 (!) up. My pings are between 10-50 (versus 60-200 on Qwest). Now that there's a hard cap, I'm even happier, because I have an official limit to monitor.
Sure, it's not FiOS, but cable, in this area, is a hell of a lot better than DSL.
Parent
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:5, Insightful)
200ms = "relatively"?!?! No offense, but WTF are you playing, WoW or something?
I'll admit I mostly play FPSes (TF2, CS:S), but as near as I can tell, anything over 80 is noticeable, 100 is pushing it, and anything above 120 noticeably affects gameplay. 200ms is almost unplayable and literally halfway to dialup pings. Once you factor in display (5+ms) mouse (5ms) and whatever internal delay on your system, it adds up quickly.
When was your ping issue resolved? Mostly I call it a myth because when the Cable vs. DSL war first emerged in 2000-2001 they had to come up with some sort of downside to cable. Even 8 years ago it was "in some cases cable may..." Eight years have passed and people still spout that shit off the same way they spout off how the Corvair was "unsafe at any speed" even though GM had resolved the issue with roll bars before Nader's film made it to theaters. I suspect cable companies solved the problem with capacity long before broadband made its way to the general population.
Parent
Re:Very insightful point made in article (Score:5, Interesting)
My state is trying out regional broadband served by the power district. I think fiber options from all the major vendors will be coming shortly. After all, if they lose these customers they're probably gone forever.
It's not like bandwidth costs a lot of money. If I moved closer to work I could have 100Mbps for $50/mo. Get this - my wife won't move because the area where I can get that from the power district is "too rural". So much for that density argument, eh?
Anyway, kudos to the power districts that are willing to step up and say: "People need broadband. If you won't serve 'em, we will."
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Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Insightful)
And what about that user that wants to see 3-5 movies a day? You see, they sold the service as "unlimited" then introduced limits. So maybe they should remove the bold red 150 point "UNLIMITED" from their advertisements. It's all about truth in advertising. If you have a limit, it isn't unlimited.
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Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Insightful)
yea, that's why my kitchen and bathroom faucets stop working if i use more than 250 gallons of water a month...
it's not hard to calculate how much bandwidth the average user requires each month and then take that amount * the number of subscribers you have, and make sure that your capabilities can match that level of traffic. of course, this doesn't work if you oversell and _advertise your service as "unlimited"_.
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Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Funny)
I'm going to pretend that you don't mean that. It would otherwise hurt me inside.
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Re:So much for unlimited internet (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference is.. the telcos bill you for each call.
Do you want the ISPs to start billing per-megabyte? It's like any business - you advertise a maximum usage that is financially tenable for the business at a given price, with various usage assumptions factored in (time of day, contention ratio etc.), and offer that to the consumer.
Anyone going substantially above the expectations of what you get for your money would be subject to excess charges - someone has to pay for the above-average usage.
Granted, it's a stupid thing that American ISPs have advertised "unlimited" in the past, but there's no good reason to bitch now that they've come clean about exactly what they can handle, and what the expectations are.
They expect $XX per month, you expect YY gigabytes per month. What's wrong with putting that down on paper rather than "uh, yeah, use as much as we consider viable.. we'll tell you when you hit it"?
We could have unlimited internet plans.. but would everyone be willing to pay extra to expand the infrastructure?
Parent
Which is absolutely fine (Score:5, Insightful)
Provided they tell you that up front. Not telling you and still capping your service is most charitably considered sleazy and is hopefully something they could get sued/prosecuted for.
And what about the screwing around with P2P traffic? Are they still going to do that and pretend that they aren't?
Re:Which is absolutely fine (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree... about time they finally told us what their REAL bandwidth limit is.
Now the next step is throttling connections when they reach 80% of that limit, so that they won't exceed it (Reach 80% of that 20%, and they'll throttle it even more, and so on). Then you can pay an extra amount of money for a larger bandwidth cap, like 500GB or 1TB per month.
Ta-da! Everybody happy.
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Re:Which is absolutely fine (Score:5, Insightful)
Ta-da! Everybody happy.
You must be new here!
I'm pretty sure that there is a significant minority (majority?) on this site which absolutely will not be happy in any capacity until their internet connection is faster than their LAN, has no cap whatsoever, and is free.
Parent
No, it's not absolutely fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
250GB in a 30 day month is 8.3GB a day, 355MB/hour, ~6MB a minute, 101KB/sec.
Or, 809kbps. On a connection which is advertised as being at least 6mbit/sec.
It's also the beginning of the end- they'll use this to justify limits per week next. Then per day. They already have a hidden cap on uploads; they advertise a 768kbit upload limit, but if you upload at more than 384kbit/sec (the old limit) for more than about 4-5 minutes, your connection gets massively crippled, not just until you slow back down to 384kbit/sec, but until your upload drops *dramatically*. They call this "powerboost", but it's really "ripoff technique" to let them advertise one speed, but actually have another.
You know what still gets my goat? That comcast has for more than a decade had an incredibly hostile AUP that banned any form of mailing list or discussion group hosting, yet you people only started screaming about your "rights" and network neutrality when they brought the hammer down on your precious porn and TV episodes.
Parent
Re:No, it's not absolutely fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
What doesn't make sense is how a company that pays by bandwidth hopes to alleviate its problem by controlling traffic. I may only download 1 movie a month, but if I do it during the same hour as every other house in my neighborhood, Comcast still doesn't have the bandwidth. Comcast is using the excuse of low-bandwidth to restrict traffic, purely for profit. They won't upgrade their network to provide more bandwidth, but they'll try to charge people more to use it (I am making the obvious assumption that they will soon offer 250+ GB plans for a premium price).
Comcasts approach to controlling bandwidth issues would be like a local government saying too many people drive too fast on the roads during rush-hour, so they decided to raise the tax on gasoline. That won't slow people down, it just means they can afford less gas, and run out 75% of the way to their destination. Those who can continue to pay the price of gas will continue to drive their Corvettes, while the rest of us take the city bus to the local library to check our email after our children downloaded too many freakin movies off our netflix account.
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Re:And a meter would be nice (Score:5, Insightful)
How does Comcast help its customers track their usage so they can avoid exceeding the limit?
There are many online tools customers can download and use to measure their consumption. Customers can find such tools by simply doing a Web search - for example, a search for "bandwidth meter" will provide some options. Customers using multiple PCs should just be aware that they will need to measure and combine their total monthly usage in order to identify the data usage for their entire account.
Does not help!
In order to enforce their 250GB limit they first have to measure it. It would seem very simple for Comcast to display the current measurement on my account page.
I can't think of any reason they would want to hide it -- except to hide the fact that most customers are using only a few percent of what they are paying for.
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250 GB (Score:5, Funny)
Re:250 GB (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:250 GB (Score:5, Insightful)
It sucks already. If you watch one HD movie a day, you'll exceed the quota.
Of course, Comcast wants you to watch HD movies through their expensive pay-per-view service instead of downloading them...
Parent
Re:250 GB (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, I suspect that's why they're doing this now. Call me cynical, but my gut says this isn't about bandwidth at all.
Services like Amazon Unbox and the iTunes Store are reducing their non-Internet (cable TV) offerings to mere commodities. By making TV shows available for immediate purchase instead of having to wait a year for them to come out on DVD, many people are realizing they really don't need cable TV. Worse for Comcast, many find that they would pay less per month to buy a season pass for the shows and own the recordings instead of only being allowed to time shift them for a limited period of time.
Add to that the impact that online movie download services (Unbox, iTS, NetFlix, etc.) have on pay per view movies, and you'll quickly understand that this has virtually nothing to do with their bandwidth costs or preserving quality of service for other users and everything to do with anticompetitive price fixing and consumer lock-in....
Make no mistake, if bandwidth were the culprit, the would be charging based on how much traffic came in from off-network sites, not for all traffic across the board. They would be in favor of P2P and would be encouraging services like Unbox and iTS to use P2P designs to maximize the efficiency of customer delivery. Instead, they're deliberately creating barriers to scare people away from obtaining TV and movie content from anyone but them.
Here's hoping the next administration lets the antitrust lawsuits fly against Comcast and their ilk.
Parent
Re:250 GB (Score:5, Insightful)
Try a household with two parents and four teenage daughters like my sister's. A single HD movie worth of data in a day would mean that at least two people are at sleepovers.
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Okay folks (Score:5, Insightful)
I want my FIOS.
I want congress to SMACK THE TELCOS HARD. They have been collecting Billions of dollars in fees to provide Broadband and have delivered nothing.
I want the money paid back with interest NOW!
Re:Okay folks (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Here come the "In Australia..." posts (Score:5, Insightful)
you are complaining about 250Gb?!? jeez, In Aus I have to pay $120/month (~$100US) for 25gb onpeak, 40gb offpeak ( that's 65gb/month for those of you who suck at math). I WISH I was in a position to bitch about 250gb/month.
Here we go... here come the Australians who inevitably pop into internet usage cap threads with their "In Australia we pay $500 a day for 10 mb up and down transfer... you should be happy with the restrictions your ISP is placing on you."
Dammit Australia, just because you have crap internet, the rest of the world shouldn't have to accept it!
Parent
Re:Here come the "In Australia..." posts (Score:5, Insightful)
"Dammit Australia, just because you have crap internet, the rest of the world shouldn't have to accept it!"
There's a little thing called 'living within your means' which used to be considered a virtue. That's why we laugh at people who have ten times as much stuff as us and yet feel more hard done by. Grow some restraint. It'll be good for you.
Also, if you guys have ten times as much bandwidth as us, you'll make websites loaded down with useless Flash and vidcasts which are ten times bigger, you'll write operating systems which are blithely unaware that Internet is not a free commodity for some of us and have no concept of restricting transmissions to the necessary, and we'll get locked out of the Web by all your bloat.
So it's in our interest for broadband speeds charging regimes to be roughly the same all around the world - otherwise we end up the wrong side of the data gap.
And it's not crap, it's metered. You don't get free all-you-can-eat electricity or petrol or food each month - why should Internet capacity be different?
If you really want absolutely unlimited Internet with a charging regime completely uncoupled from usage, that means you want to socialise the cost of communications infrastructure. Fine, that's a valid political position and it's got some merit to it, but in that case you guys should already have free healthcare and be advocating for a Universal Basic Income [wikipedia.org].
Parent
Re:Okay folks (Score:5, Informative)
You forget....
They also collected billions in TAX DOLLARS to fund the build out of their infrastructure.
I say the Feds audit every one of them hard.
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Re:Okay folks (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh. What you *should* want is for your local government to stop giving your ISP an unfair advantage [denverpost.com]. Then other ISPs could start providing service if they wanted to. I don't know where you live, but the reason your broadband options suck is almost certainly the fault of your local government, and not some evil plot by the ISPs. Your local government being stupid isn't a problem for Congress. But hey, maybe you're right and there's really nothing the Internet Service Providers want more than to *not* sell you internet access.
What? They're obviously delivering the internet service you agreed to buy, otherwise you wouldn't be posting on Slashdot right now, amirite?
Oh, and by the way, once you give your money to a company in exchange for goods or services, it's not your money anymore. You don't get a say in what that money gets spent on, it belongs to the company you gave it to. Just like your employer doesn't get to tell you what you can spend your money on after they pay you.
How does this bullshit get modded "Insightful"?
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Re:Okay folks (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two indecent issues here.
First, you are absolutely correct that a local-government granted monopoly is probably one of the major sources of any individual's current ISP selection woes.
But there's also a second issue, as described here [newnetworks.com]. It's hard to describe the issue in a way that doesn't sound radically biased, but the simple fact of the matter is that the telecom companies committed to deploying massive fiber networks and managed to squirm out of it (mostly thorough regulator-capture).
So this isn't just a local government failure. It's also a massive federal government failure, from which there is perfectly good reason for US residents to feel cheated out of decent speed data infrastructure.
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Re:Great sentiment... (Score:5, Informative)
Comcast hasn't used the word "unlimited" in ages. They don't have to, almost no one thinks in terms of "how much can I download," they just look at the speed numbers.
Instead they just refer to their service as something vague like "always-on, high speed Internet access."
Which is still a complete lie, based on how often my connection goes down. Sure, my modem is always-on, but whatever's at the other end sure doesn't seem to be.
Parent
Just get a business acct... (Score:5, Informative)
And hell, if you're a little devious...those connections will run fine split into a MythTV box with an analog card, to get all of extended basic, and if you split that off into a HDHomerun...you can scan and get all the unencrypted QAM Digital and HD channels out there.
At least..so I hear. Anyway, that should more than compensate for a slightly higher monthly fee for internet service....
$150 a month isn't so bad, really (Score:5, Informative)
Much as I hate it, I'd rather spend the money on a Comcast Business connection than worry about whether or not I'm getting close to some artificial cap.
I FTP things in and out of my apartment all the damned time, including backup image files and the like, let alone dealing with torrents or streaming video. I'm sure I transfer more than 10GB a day.
Disgusting as it is, I don't have any other high speed alternative.
Boiling a Lobster (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe the plan is, this is fine now so nobody gripes. Same as it ever was, I don't notice the cap so there's effectively no cap, right?
In 5 years, 250GB will be used up in a week. Now they're saving money, and charging you if you want any more. The thing is, that 250GB cap has been there forever. Same as it ever was, right?
About Time (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm actually oddly happy about this. I was contacted in the past about going over the mysterious limit (I did about 400GB that month,) and since then I've been living in fear that I may go too high again and get my service cut for a year. Now that an actual known limit exists, I can easily monitor my usage accordingly via my WRT54GL flashed with Tomato.
A 250GB limit is more than fair, and as long as it is fully disclosed in advanced, I have no problem with it. Having secret, constantly changing limits with undefined penalties for violations is not acceptable for any contractually agreed upon service.
Reasonable. Now, a request... measurement. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is perfectly reasonable if they're up front about it. I have a request... I would like a method to see what my consumption so far is so I can plan appropriately.
Data limit? (Score:5, Interesting)
Notice that it doesn't say anything about if the 'data limit' is uploaded data or downloaded. My guess is they'll make it combined.
Also, since there IS now a limit that can be tied with the monthly price, can we sue spammers/advertisers/etc for $.0000002 per kilobyte? I think its a very generous rate to give them, since cell phone companies like to charge $.10 per kilobyte.
"Unlimited" Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
And I'm sure Comcast will make an effort to hide that little bit of information in the fine print so you don't notice it.
Honestly, they can't call it unlimited anymore. Unlimited has a set definition. It's not open to interpretation. If you introduce caps, or limits, well, you're giving a different service.
It would be nice if Comcast actually did something surprising... like, you know, give a good service? That would be tits.
Comcast Bandwidth Cap Hits October 1? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, looks like all my porn for the next 6 months is getting downloaded in September.
And what of VOIP? (Score:5, Insightful)
So say you have Comcast's triple-play or some VOIP service that rides out of your house on your Comcast connection. You get cut off for one reason or another, such as exceeding this cap. Is your phone service dead, too? Better have a mobile phone if 911 needs to be called?
Re:And what of VOIP? (Score:5, Informative)
So say you have Comcast's triple-play or some VOIP service that rides out of your house on your Comcast connection. You get cut off for one reason or another, such as exceeding this cap. Is your phone service dead, too?
No, Comcast's VOIP service is out-of-band from regular IP. Skype and others, yep. Funny how that works out to Comcast's benefit, eh?
Parent
More info (Score:5, Informative)
On the Comcast Network Management page [comcast.net], they note that:
Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 - 3 GB.
That puts the cap in a little more perspective, not that the 2+ TB/mo users will think it's reasonable.
Re:More info (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a lie.
The reality is that a large number of accounts, say 15%, aren't registering any bandwidth at all. Comcast is real screwy when it comes to canceling, moving, or enabling service. Every time I have had to change service I had to contact them multiple times and was overcharged each time. They will charge you for service before it is installed. I know from insiders at the company that this is deliberate.
Another 25% are using the modems in USB mode which throttles their bandwidth to about 1 megabit or they are using very old computers or equipment which slows their connection. It's very difficult to go over the cap at these speeds.
About 3-5% are maxing out their connections, usually through downloading usenet feeds and, to a lesser extent, running bittorent trackers.
So what about the other 65%? I seriously doubt they're only downloading 85 MB per day. That's a handful of flash videos. I suspect it more in the 2-3 GB PER DAY range, or about 90GB per month. And it's rapidly going up.
This is headed for another FCC dust-up because I'm CERTAIN that Comcast is going to exclude their VoIP and their video download service (Comcast is partnered with Hulu) from this cap.
Parent
Well, am I grandfathered? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because when I signed a contract with them, it said NOTHING in regards to usage limits. To the contrary, we decided to go with Comcast specifically because it was advertised as "Unlimited".
Are they rewriting my contract without notice? The contract says that they will notify me in writing of any changes, and thus far, have not.
Alternative to caps (Score:5, Interesting)
It's still beyond me why they can't manage to offer a sliding scale...
First 100 GB... You get at the full bandwidth.
For each additional 50 GB, it drops by 25% of whatever it was last.
First 100GB = 100%
100-150GB = 75%
150-200GB = 56%
200-250GB = 42%
250-300GB = 32%
300-350GB = 24%
350-400GB = 18%
400-450GB = 13%
450-500GB = 10%
Now you've got a system where no one ever finds their connection suddenly shut off on them for the remainder of the month.
Instead, it just keeps getting slower and slower to the point where much over 250 GB is going to have slowed so much they'd really have a hard time going much further anyway... and those 5GB movie downloads they used to get within an hour now need to run all night, if not all day and all night, and so are no longer appealing anyway.
Though, to be fair... Funny how it's only those companies that make money by charging for the delivery of TV and movies that seem to have issues with users using the kind of bandwidth needed to get TV and movies without them.
Re:about time (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Still practically unlimited for most (Score:5, Interesting)
If I flood your IP address, 250 GB can disappear pretty fast, and there's really nothing you can do about it. Whether your router drops the packets or not, they'll still be counted against your quota.
Similar if you fire up a p2p program, and download a video or game level or whatever. Once you end it, thousands of other people are still going to be sending packets to your IP address, checking whether you're back online and can share the file.
And it gets worse -- it doesn't even have to be you. Someone else might have done heavy file sharing, and then in the periodic reassignment of IP addresses that Comcast does (to prevent people from running servers), you get that IP. And all the request traffic, which can continue at high volume for days or weeks.
These are all weaknesses with the IP protocol, but it hardly seems fair not to have a system that takes this into consideration.
Is this a problem? Well, according to my router, I have had 18 GB in traffic (in + out) for the month of July for one of my WAN lines. According to the provider, it's been 27 GB. That's a rather big discrepancy. At the same ratio, if your router tells you you have used 180 GB out of the 250, you won't have 70 GB to go, you will already have exceeded the quota and are subject to whatever disciplinary actions Comcast might have in place.
Parent
Re:Still practically unlimited for most (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm. Would this include upload as well? I'm thinking that if you happened to have a number of highly desirable files in your P2P folder, other people grabbing a copy of your content might kick you up. Might this actually be the objective of such "reasonable" caps, to make people think twice before hosting such content?
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Re:Still practically unlimited for most (Score:5, Informative)
Wait until you start downloading Blu-Ray from content delivery services.
Blu-Ray is an optical disc format.
It says nothing about the codec used to encode the video.
Many early Blu-Ray discs were nothing more than high bitrate MPEG-2.
Now everyone uses VC-1 (Microsoft) or H.264 (MPEG-4) because they are vastly more efficient.
I think what you meant to say was "Wait until you start downloading high definition video from content delivery services."
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