Comcast will enforce download limits beginning in October

http://www.comcast.net/terms/network/amendment/

Today, we're announcing that beginning on October 1, 2008, we will amend our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) available at http://www.comcast.net/terms/use/ and establish a specific monthly data usage threshold of 250 GB/month per account for all residential customers.

250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 - 3 GB. To put 250 GB of monthly usage in perspective, a customer would have to do any one of the following:

* Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
* Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
* Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

Unless you are a heavy p2p user this should not effect you. 250GB is very large amount of data. You could for example watch youtube 24/7 for 40 days before you would hit that limit. I think this a very good compromise compared to them simply cutting people off using services like p2p as was reported recently. I've advocated from the start when it was first reported that interference of a particular service should not be tolerated. This is very generous limit and should only effect the crowd that are really abusing the system hard.

Never thought I'd say it but good job Comcast.

I'm going to install bandwidth meter on my system just to see what kind of bandwidth i'm using. I know its going to be well below that limit but I'm curious to find out what it is. I'll post some results when i have them.

Verizon has been doing this for quite a while. My sister's son used to download A LOT, music and God knows what else. She was notified she was being put on a business plan because of the high amount downloads. She changed providers to get around it. I guess my biggest question is will Comcast pass the cost of enforcing this onto it's customer base?

When I heard about ISPs beginning to charge for data useage, I installed NetStat Live:
http://www.analogx.com/contents/downloa ... rk/nsl.htm

My total for last month was 10.7 Gig, and this month, 12.16 Gig. I stream stock data and read many pdf files. No problem.

John

Thanks for the Link.

I used that years ago.

I forgot about it.

With the speeds Comcast has a small percentage of people running high bandwidth services like p2p can severely impact the service which is their claim. That link above or another new release claims this will only effect 14,000 customers out of millions. What you have is situation where a small percentage of users are using most of the resources which are shrinking themselves. This is the first step in getting away from the "unlimited" bandwidth and provide metering. Having said that 250GB is a lot... I use a lot of resources myself but I know it doesn't approach those numbers. By getting rid of or limiting the abusers they will be able to maintain the integrity of the network for the rest of us.

One issue that is going to crop up is as people want more and more legitimate media content like HD video this limit is going to play a factor sooner or later.

billw wrote: I guess my biggest question is will Comcast pass the cost of enforcing this onto it's customer base?

There's nothing to pass on, they are already metering your usage anyway. The only additional expense would be the cost of the phone call to let you know you have gone over the limit.

If you have a router and networked computers tomato can get your aggregate totals.
http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato

Cape I wold be afraid of replacing my perfectly good firmware in my Linksys router with some other firmware.


I'm curious to see how this is going to effect both Dish and Direct TV with their HD VOD? HD movies seem to take up a lot of bandwidth especially the new 1080p that they are going to be making available for people to download.

Tomato is not "some other firmware"!
Back yours up and flash it back if you do not like Tomato.