Charter Cable Capping Usage Nationwide This Month 369
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from DSL Reports, with possible bad news for Charter customers who live outside the test areas for the bandwidth caps the company's been playing with: "Yesterday we cited an anonymous insider at Charter who informed us that the company would very soon be implementing new caps. Today, Charter's Eric Ketzer confirmed the plans, and informed us that Charter's new, $140 60Mbps tier will not have any limitations. Speeds of 15Mbps or slower will have a 100GB monthly cap, while 15-25Mbps speeds will have a 250GB monthly cap. 'In order to continue providing the best possible experience for our Internet customers, later this month we will be updating our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) to establish monthly residential bandwidth consumption thresholds,' Ketzer confirms. 'More than 99% of our customers will not be affected by our updated policy, as they consume far less bandwidth than the threshold allows,' he says." But if they're lucky, customers will be able to hit that cap quickly.
Last sentence is stupid (Score:5, Informative)
The top paragraph points out that the 60mb service has no cap.
Re:Last sentence is stupid (Score:4, Informative)
I believe his point was that Allen may sell the company, and then all bets are off.
Wow, they are lucky. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Last sentence is stupid (Score:5, Informative)
The top paragraph points out that the 60mb service has no cap.
For now.
Re:Doing the math... (OT: Google calculator) (Score:5, Informative)
Sometimes, because of how advanced google can be at providing answers for everything and anything, I wonder if with Google we are moving towards singularity. I for one welcome our all-seeing eye overlord.
P.S. It amazes me even more to know that the link to this very Slashdot article was returned by the above linked google query even before I submitted this comment. Scary (and circular) stuff!
Re:New 60Mbps service (Score:5, Informative)
But if they're lucky, customers will be able to hit that cap quickly.
This refers to the 60Mbps service being offered. However, the summary itself says it will have no cap.
Still, at 15Mpbs, you can hit the 100GB cap for that service level in just 14 hours.
For the 25Mbps service, you hit the 250GB cap in 22 hours. Or, as others have pointed out, the 250GB cap allows you to average 760514 bits per second (about 750Kbps). If you download something that takes just 2 minutes at 25Mbps, that means you essentially can't use your connection at all for the next hour to bring you back to the average.
If you can't actually get the quoted max speed (which is usually the case), this helps a bit, but then you still end up in the situation of paying for more than they can possibly deliver.
Re:Wow, they are lucky. (Score:3, Informative)
The Rogers overage charges stop at $25. So whether you use 150GB or 1TB per month, your bill will only be $54.95 + $25.00 + taxes.
My bandwidth is regularly several hundred gigs a month on Rogers Extreme. I've done 1TB+ in a month before.
Re:$65 per mbps is a bit expensive, assholes (Score:4, Informative)
Except that when using 1 item one can easily be grabbing another. I have almost a dozen TV subscriptions via iTunes (I don't watch broadcast TV anymore). I subscribe to probably 3 times that many podcasts - some audio, some are video (and some of THOSE are in HD video - GeekBriefTV for example is in HD and comes out nearly daily). While I'm listening or watching some of those more can be (and often are) downloading.
I also have a paid (and legal) subscription to an "adult" video site that offers 5 full length DVD's of content every day - also in near-HD quality. While I don't download all 5 DVD's (we'd be talking 4-5 GB per day just on that one site), I do download 4-5 scenes per day from there, which totals a gig or 2 per day. And since I don't want that slowing down my any of my MMORPG's or Ventrillo client when I'm at home and playing, those downloads are set via a download manager to only actually run after I've gone to sleep or am at work.
And naturally having an Xbox360 too I'm often downloading either game demo's or outright game purchases from there.
The old "people just check email and look at the web" mentality just isn't hold anymore. It wasn't really holding 3 years ago, but the ISP's chose to stick their fingers in their ears and ignore the industry.