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.

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Originally Posted by abachler

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.

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Most of these ISPs report that %5 of their users use up %95 of their bandwidth, as long as the cap is around double what the average person could ever need I think it's a fine idea.

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.

I am happy to see Comcast actually posting an official cap. They have always inflicted bandwidth degredation to me after a certain point. Except when I was living in Oregon. Why do this? Well first off I should point out that in nearly every other country unlimited bandwidth is unheard of. Secondly, with a show of hands, how many of us rent out web-space? Now be honest here, I won't tell Comcast.

Either a lot of hands just went up or a lot of people just got a good idea as to how to make their old computers useful. I think a 250GB cap is a fair enough... Although, believe it or not, I can exceed it if they give me a chance. Especially when I was doing web hosting.

>> I believe that they previously had an undefined bandwidth cap.

They merely kept it a secret and advertised it as such. Reportedly, before announcing the cap, people would get very angry letters from comcast, banning their IPs from the network, or something like that.

If I could pay $.01/Mb each month for internet I would. That way I can pay for what I use, and hogs can be hogs and line the telecommunications industry's pocket.

I use way less net these days, but once upon a time bandwidth was a 5.2GB/day habit for me. Though even at that rate, I would be fine with the 250 cap. Fine indeed :)

This would definitely affect me since I regularly download patches, SDKs, and play games online. If they restrict my bandwidth I'll probably restrict my payment that month.
:D

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Originally Posted by master5001

...Well first off I should point out that in nearly every other country unlimited bandwidth is unheard of...

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Is it? I have never heard of limited bandwidth over here.
At least never something that makes it to news. And of course, my own connection is unlimited.