Earthlink Announces It Must Honor Comcast Cap

LostCluster writes "For those in Comcast territory, a popular way to get around Comcast's 250 GB monthly cap was to sign up for EarthLink Powered by Comcast Service, where there was no cap. Forget about that.... Earthlink just posted an FAQ explaining that Comcast will enforce the cap against Earthlink customers starting July 1."

Couldn't they at least provide a meter?

[e9th]

According to TFA, they won't notify if you approach the limit, and the only way to find out your current usage is to call them. Now that's handy.

So?

[harlows_monkeys]

I just checked my Comcast usage. I practically live on the internet. Here's my usage:

15 GB so far this month.

17 GB for April

22 GB for March

15 GB for February

On the list of things I'm going to spend the effort to care about, people who have trouble with a 250 GB cap is far enough down the list I'm afraid I'll never get around to it.

Re:250 gb is a shit ton of data though....

[rolfwind]

Then you had jackshit for bandwidth. My math might be off, but 250GB 24/7 per month is like a constant 100 kb/s.

Re:Couldn't they at least provide a meter?

[Itninja]

If you use Comcast (at least directly), you have a meter:
https://customer.comcast.com/Secure/UsageMeterDetail.aspx [comcast.com]
Not sure if EL allows that though.

Re:So?

[Itninja]

Yes. It's here: https://customer.comcast.com/Secure/UsageMeterDetail.aspx [comcast.com]

Re:So?

[twidarkling]

And I just downloaded 6 GB today alone. All video files from independent producers. I could download a hell of a lot more, too. It's not difficult to blow past a 120 GB limit legitimately, especially if you do something like netflix on demand. Hell, if I had netflix-on-demand, I'd probably blow past 250 GB without trying, and still have 2 weeks left in the month.

Re:So?

[Charliemopps]

A 250GB cap that will NEVER EVER get raised. It seems like a lot now but I can still remember buying a 90 MEGA byte hard drive for hundreds of dollars and being astonished by it's size. I copied ever disc I owned to it and declared I'd never need another drive. Comcasts limit is there for one very nasty reason. Soon we will stream HD strait to your home. This is a cap that will prevent you from watching that stream. That's why its there. To prevent you from having choice. They want to retain their monopoly.

Re:So?

[tabrisnet]

Just this [calendar] month, my flatmate and I have the following stats:

    - Roku: # me, Netflix & Amazon VoD
                    in: 46.67GB 46667040679
                    out: 373.73MB 373734958
    - skuld: # flatmate. anime, Netflix & iTunes
                    in: 43.16GB 43164082021
                    out: 1.61GB 1613538080
    - mimir: # both, mostly me this month. Linux ISOs & anime
                    in: 29.17GB 29172312574
                    out: 549.06MB 549057857
    - total: # other stuff is included in this, I wanted to only highlight the biggest numbers.
            in: 131.38GB 131377255738
            out: 10.67GB 10672545785

And we've done more, mostly a lot more Netflix. the Roku can only download legal content, and 100GB isn't _hard_. I could put on another 30G this weekend (3 day weekend).

Re:I transfer 200gb a week...

[iamhassi]

"Which was purchased by Comcast after they went bankrupt."

-1, Inaccurate

No, Charter Communications was not bought by Comcast [wikipedia.org]

Re:Perspective

[BlueStrat]

...a massively high data cap, such as a quarter of a terabyte per month?

That depends on who is doing the defining of "massively high" and for how long into the future we're talking, doesn't it?

As many have already mentioned in other posts, 250GB/mo isn't that much these days even without p2p, and I sure don't see that trend reversing or even slowing. I wonder how "cloud computing" and bandwidth caps will work out?

Strat

Re:Couldn't they at least provide a meter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't work for me. I get to my "Users & Settings" tab/page, but there's no usage info anywhere to be found...

Re:Couldn't they at least provide a meter?

[koick]

I logged in and didn't see the usage information, so I entered a chat with one of them. She informed me that if you don't see it on your User page that it's not available in your area. She said, "We have just launched the usage meter and we are doing our best to have this accessed by all users". I find this ironic since I live within the city limits of the sixth largest city in the US, and, get this, it's the HEADQUARTERS of Comcast.

Re:Perspective

[Andy Smith]

"good enough for England"

I said UK. England is just one of four countries in the UK, and it's not the one that I live in.

UK != England as USA != California :-)

Re:Perspective

[Rising Ape]

Not always. My O2 connection is unlimited, for example. It's usually the BT resellers that have the low limits.

Even so, I probably average about 25 GB/month. I don't know what people are doing to go over 250.