Thread: Who's upset about the 250GB/month bandwidth limit imposed by Comcast?

Are there any other Comcast subscribers on the forum? If you're not familiar with it: Comcast, which is the second largest Internet Service Provider in the United States has imposed a 250GB bandwidth cap to all residential subscribers as of October 1st, 2008. (LINK)

Now, I'm a fairly technical person... maybe not the most technical when compared to the members on this forum... but to the average Joe, I'm a right-out geek. However, I don't feel at all restricted by this bandwidth limit... the fact is that there is a ton of outrage over this by people that won't even come close to being affected. While, I can see the concern for the few that will be affected (People that run some private servers from home or people that use online data backup repositories)... but am I the only one that thinks the outrage over this is way overblown?

To me it's like... a 24-hour McDonalds decided to change its hours to 7:00AM-3:00AM because the one guy that gets the munchies at 4:30AM just isn't paying the electric bill and night manager's salary... except, for some reason... all of those prime-time fast food lovers are going nuts...

I don't like limits as much as the next guy, but this isn't the government here... it's a private company offering a service... they make their own rules and rightfully so... so if their change in rules don't affect you, then I personally think you or anyone you know then you shouldn't complain about it. Personally, I think this is just aftershock from Comcast's P2P throttling that the FCC banned recently.

I don't want to be a Comcast fanboy here, but I've been with Comcast, Cablevision (one of the top 10), Time Warner (I think one of the top 3), and Earthlink (I had a stint with their DSL in the early 21st Century)... and Comcast is by far the best service that I've been with.

bandwidth limits are stupid. The equipment costs the same amount to run whether you make maximum use of it or it sits there idle. I can see throttling bandwidth during peak times so everyone gets the same amount, but having allocated total bandwidth sounds like their IT guy is an accountant and doesnt really understand the technology. Just go with a different ISP ASAP, you will have nothign but headaches from them.

As for teh 4:30 munchies, I generally patronize the sotres that are open when its convenient to me,. If McDonalds is closed when i need a burger adn Wendies is open, Ill probably start going to Wendies durign normal hours too. Thats also a bit fo a non-uissue, since any fast food joint that doesnt have a night crew probably doesnt do nightly cleaning, and I wont be eatign there anyway. If the crew is there anyway they might as well be open for that one guy.

I'd, personally, be just fine with 250GB....we only get 60GB with Rogers here. :/

I use Rogers, but I don't think I'd even use 250GB in a year, let alone in a month.

For the average household, 250GB/mo is defiantly more than enough. The problem we have, is there's eight uni students (myself included) with an addiction to "bandwidth consuming activities" living in the house. 60GB doesn't get real far.

I believe that they previously had an undefined bandwidth cap.
Don't get me wrong on this one, but it's good that at least they publically set a limit so people can SEE if they're approaching it.
Of course, I do not agree with bandwidth limits anyway. Screw the ISP and get another one. People in the US really have to stack to the good ones since more and more ISPs seem to be turning evil.

Let me see... A 2GB limit (or 1/125th of 250GB) would allow about 280,000 porn pictures @ 256KB each to be downloaded, per day, every day for 30 days.

Nope, shouldn't affect me.

NO WAIT - my math was wrong. That's only 4096 pictures per month... They're going to ........ some people off.

edit#2: Math still wrong. 250GB is about 32K pictures @ 256KB each per day. phew.

You mean 10GB/day isn't enough?

I mean, if you're worried that it's only enough to download 4 hours worth of DVD quality TV and panicing over what to do with the other 20 hours in the day, then maybe.

My ISP has a much better idea that midnight to 6am doesn't count to your monthly allowance, so if you've got a lot to grab, and the sense to schedule things, then you don't lose anything when the network would otherwise be pretty idle.

I think this would affect gamers most. And the comparison between the average joe's bandwidth usage and an the average gamer's bandwidth usage is pretty disparate.

Originally Posted by robwhit

I think this would affect gamers most. And the comparison between the average joe's bandwidth usage and an the average gamer's bandwidth usage is pretty disparate.

Yes, gaming and running a chat program liek Ventrilo or Teamspeak eats enourmous bandwidth without it necessarily being 'illegal downloads'. Once again the industry is 10 years behind the times on what is actually occuring in their field. The base assumption is that using a lot of bandwidth either indicates illegal activity, or that it in some way harms the ISP. As stated above, the equipment costs the same to operate whether you use nothing or all the available capacity. It really boils down to the ISP's not wanting to expand capacity to meet demand and needing some way to justify that decision. Bandwidth isnt a typical commodity, if you dont use it t doesnt accumulate. When I sign a contract I am contracting for a certain bandwidth rate, not a certain total download amount. If They are goign to switch to a total download based model then I want my entire allocation in one second. If I buy 1000 pork bellies I expect them to all be delivered at one time, not trickled in 2 or 3 at a time as they feel liek it. If on the other hand I contract for 50 pork bellies a day that doesnt mean I want all 1500 at once either. If they are going to switch to an allocation based model they need to be extremely exploicit about what they are selling. Many ISP's tried this model in teh early days, compueserve even had a connection time based model. In the end the market determined that what people want is unrestricted access at the fastest rate possible.

Ultimately I think they are just trying to switch tot he same business model as cellular service, because the math is simpler which means they need less technically saavy managers, which is alwasy a bad thing even if you can get away with it.

I really dont understand what everyone is complaining about. I pay 45 EUR / month to get 20 GB monthly (this includes up and download). And I even have to share this with 4 people... do the math yourselves (to #GB/daily_per_person) because I know I'll cry otherwise.

Let me just hope my savings that are in the bank will last till the end of the year or even better that my bank will last till the end of the year (these days one can never know for sure), and maybe Ill be able to upgrade my internetconnection to another provider (more expensive but at least a higher limit).

:edit:
On the other hand I can understand that people feel upset about it, in the end you were used to a certain service and now the quality of it is less but you probably pay the same monthly fee.

Originally Posted by abachler

No, it bothers me because it makes no sence, they arent increasing prices because the cost of bandwidth is goign up, they are arbitrarily puttign restirictions on use that are out of touch with the technollogy. It would be like a taxi charging you not by the mile, but by how many hot dog's the drivers cousin can eat.

They're doing it so they won't need to increase prices for the 95% of people who don't come anywhere close to that limit. Why should I have to pay more for bandwidth that I'm not using?