What do Comcast banwidth caps mean?

[Daniel ~]

Written by Daniel
Thursday, 20 September 2007

Comcast speaks out on bandwidth caps, says they only affect 0.01% of users
By Eric Bangeman | Published: September 19, 2007 - 11:40PM CT
ARS Technica

Over the past several days, there have been a number of rumors and lots of discussion about the issue of bandwidth caps and Comcast. There have been a number of reports of users having reached some sort of bandwidth limit—reportedly 90GB—and having their service cut off by America's largest cable ISP. Ars spoke to Comcast today in an attempt to find out what's going on..... Front Page

[Gizmo]

ISPs have to play a numbers game on bandwidth, because bandwidth costs money. They typically sell the user far more bandwidth than the user will ever take advantage of (a 6 mb connection works out to 1.5 TB/month) in order to provide them with a fast immediate connection, while operating on the assumption that the user will never come close to using that much actual bandwidth. If they charged the user the actual cost of that pipe, the user would never pay.

Unfortunately, this creates situations where it can be argued that users are not getting what they paid for, since someone who actually DOES use that entire bandwidth allotment is actually far exceeding the assumptions ComCast made with regard to pricing of the service.

If the assumptions made by ComCast (i.e. the limits) aren't spelled out in the service agreement, they really should be, so that users know what they are actually getting. Since the number of users hitting the limits is a very small portion of the overall user base, it sounds like ComCasts limits are probably pretty reasonable.

[Samuknow]

So are they DL the library of congress or what? Maybe the NASA database.

I just can't imagine hitting the ceiling unless you are up to no good. I DL quite a good bit and I am sure I never even scratch the surface.

[Daniel ~]

Smacks forehead! Zombie nets! I wonder if those using up all this banwidth have been taken over and are using a LOT more than they think they are?

I've never been as FAST as they say I am, I've never heard a peep from them about my usage and I've been up so long I've forgotten what it's like to be down, I lose power 3 times more often than I lose Cable over the last two years.

[dsio]

Originally Posted by Samuknow

So are they DL the library of congress or what? Maybe the NASA database.

I just can't imagine hitting the ceiling unless you are up to no good. I DL quite a good bit and I am sure I never even scratch the surface.

90GB of pr0n a month is doable, I think.

I wouldn't know of course because I never touch the stuff, but in the interests of science, I would be willing to attempt it for AOA.

Blu-Ray quality pr0n would make it easy.

[Daniel ~]

This isn't something we could order you to do! This would have to be on a strictly volunteer basis... Bless you son!!!!!

[Samuknow]

What is is willing to do for science. What a man. We need true hero's like this in the world.

[noob]

I use torrents for sending files to my family, and any opensource app which supports it.

Because I leave it on 24hrs, and usually seed until it hasn't had a connection for about a week, I can go through ~70GB a month.

But then I will download several distros, just to see what they look like, and anything else that looks good, and is linked to them. Then their windows equivalents, etc.

But I feel I may be an exception to the rule of people with large bandwidth usages - and I actually have a true unlimited package - from when my speed was limited to 256kbps dl and 128kbps ul