It's Comcastic!

[Cereb Daithi]

Not sure if any of you have heard about this yet....

Comcast has confirmed that all residential customers will be subject to a 250 gigabyte per month data limit starting October 1.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2329170,00.asp

[krazyboi]

That sucks. Glad the fiancee works for Comcast and I'll be getting everything in business form installed at home for free

[chicken n waffles]

i don't think this will be as big of a deal as you think it will

[Cereb Daithi]

Only time will tell I suppose.

[Libra Monkee]

i don't think this will be as big of a deal as you think it will

I was thinking that. How much can you really download in a month over cable. Unless you just have bittorrent running all day everyday for the whole month.

[chicken n waffles]

i don't think this will be as big of a deal as you think it will

I was thinking that. How much can you really download in a month over cable. Unless you just have bittorrent running all day everyday for the whole month.

exactly.

[WRXWagon2112]

It's not bad unless you start to use your connection as your source for TV programs. Then all that streaming from Hulu, the networks, etc. starts to add up. How many HD downloads from the iTunes store will this take? Plus a couple movies from Amazon's Unbox service...

However, I don't mind a cap on internet usage so much (and I don't mind a per-MB or per-GB pricing scheme) as long as they 1) provide a means for someone to monitor their household usage and 2) don't advertise their plans as if they're "all you can eat".

Neither of which Comcast is doing. How can you say "we'll cut off your service once you reach X amount" and then not give the person a means to monitor their usage?

Even so, their cap is much higher than some other ISPs. I believe Time Warner instituted a 1GB/month cap in some markets.

--Alan

[sirwilliam]

I want to go hug my FiOS!

[Mr Kleen]

I'm gonna miss FIOS when I move to DC.

[Cereb Daithi]

Neither of which Comcast is doing. How can you say "we'll cut off your service once you reach X amount" and then not give the person a means to monitor their usage?
--Alan

That's probably what bugs me the most. I use 3-4 different computers for my internet alone. And they all access the web. Also online connections with my xboxes, wii, playstation... It's not exactly like I can count what I'm using to get a feel for what I should do. I eat up a LOT of bandwidth. I mean I burnt through probably around 30GB of data transfer on my windows rig within the last day and a half.


Is there some way to monitor bandwidth? Even something installed between the modem and router?

[moxnix]

My WRT54G with Tomato firmware can monitor my usage. Depending on your router you may be able to do something like that.

[WRXWagon2112]

This episode of Tekzilla went over some options to monitor bandwidth usage. Unfortunately they don't appear to have any show notes so you might have to jump into the download or flash video to see what they looked at:

http://revision3.com/tekzilla/packets/

--Alan

[ElZorro]

i don't think this will be as big of a deal as you think it will

I was thinking that. How much can you really download in a month over cable. Unless you just have bittorrent running all day everyday for the whole month.

And since they bandwidth throttle that to about 50kbps if you were BT'ing 100% of the time that's only 16GB/month.

[Cereb Daithi]

I don't seem to have much of a bandwidth throttle here....

[Mr Kleen]

I don't seem to have much of a bandwidth throttle here....

then quit yer cryin'

[Sabre]

Check out DU meter if you're on Windows. I've used it for quite awhile.