and where is the wardriving plan?

Posted at 9:51 pm on Aug 28th, 2008 by redfireant3

While the limit does suck, it is a reasonable one, and I do like that they have a steadfast limit, rather than a flexible “what ever we feel like it” one.

Posted at 10:07 pm on Aug 28th, 2008 by Hellmark

I wonder how many times you’d be able to get away with saying your internet was being stolen by 1337 h4xx0rz who ran you over the limit.

Also, what about bandwidth from unwanted ads?

I remember racking up 500 megs of downstream on a slow day….60 gigs a month if I did nothing out of the ordinary.

I’m glad I’m not in a Comca$t area.

Posted at 10:10 pm on Aug 28th, 2008 by Matt_

although i doubt i will, im still concerned with getting close to it, i play games way too much. i doubt 2142 or xbox live take up very much though.

Posted at 10:18 pm on Aug 28th, 2008 by th3m43

so… is that GB or Gb? Bits or Bytes?
250GB seems good, 250Gb sounds like a kick in my balls. Good thing I haven’t gotten it yet =]

Posted at 10:26 pm on Aug 28th, 2008 by Andrew

gb : bits. gB : bytes

Posted at 10:36 pm on Aug 28th, 2008 by Bill

At Comcast’s supposed 12Mbps (1.5MBps) you could theoretically hit the cap in under 2 days. Interestingly enough, that’s just over the amount of data I could theoretically download with my 768Kbps AT&T DSL every month:

Cable: ( 250,000MB / 1.5MBps ) / 86400 seconds ~= 1.9 days
DSL: 96KBps * 2,592,000 seconds (30 days) ~= 237GiB

Posted at 10:47 pm on Aug 28th, 2008 by Stephen Crosby

hey, andrew and bill, you can’t do capital letters here.

and yeah, I think comcast’s cap is acceptable. and at least they’re not hiding it.

Posted at 10:51 pm on Aug 28th, 2008 by Clayton

One might argue that at 250Gbytes a month you should be using a business package anyhow. If this is just for residential I’m not sure I mind too much.

Posted at 12:34 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by Blind

I love how the picture is a series of tubes.

Posted at 12:58 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by Chris

I wonder how many coffee shops/ lounges/ general hotspots will be hindered by this?

Posted at 1:19 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by Solenoidclock

retail stores who provide wifi connections shouldn’t be using a residential connection to provide wifi access anyway. They’ll be using a business account so they can claim back any tax returns and they get a better level of service, even if its a slighty more costly.
The general hotspots run by normal users.. well they’ll have to either limit the speed or turn it off when they hit the cap.

Posted at 2:06 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by mark

@Mark

What about college students? I live in an apartment with 3 other students. I know that in the past few days I’ve hit 30Gbytes in Windows Updates, linux isos, and a few game demos and that’s purely legit usage.

Together we easily break a 250gb/month limit. Should we upgrade to a business account?

Posted at 3:19 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by Dave

Yeah, maybe it’ll teach people to start using WEP encryption and mac address filtering, instead of leaving it open for the whole neighborhood to mooch off. Once they notice their bills goes sky high because some neighborhood kids was downloading porn all day, they’ll think twice about just using the newly bought router as a plug and play item.

Posted at 3:19 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by thach

Well, I have companies that don’t know the meaning of the word unlimited, like the mobile broadband around here with a 3 gigabytes cap a month.

If it isn’t unlimited don’t advertise it as being so.

Posted at 5:28 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by No1

Cry more you weaklings there are plenty of places in the world where 250gb a month would be a significant upgrade.

Posted at 6:29 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by bluedodo

what no hack ?!?

Posted at 6:36 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by mem

Well, I live in a small place in Europe called Portugal and I have a 20GBytes month limit (but with unlimited at ‘happy hours’, aka between 01am and 09am).
Of course this doens’t represent the majority of services in the rest of the UE, but at least they still don’t ’shap’ P2P, so I keep’em running all night long :P

Posted at 7:35 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by icebrain

Where’s my rollover gigs?

Posted at 8:07 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by Sudo

is there a way to monitor your usage? how do you know when you are getting close? can i install something on my router?

Posted at 8:20 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by oneshot417

fourtunately here in finland we don’t have any of that limit nazi policies. the prices are a bit salty, but in exchange i can download to my hearts content. 24mbit adsl2+ for 45e/mo.

in 30 days i could easily download 4.5 terabytes, if i had the space and material to download (and a fast enough server).

Posted at 8:27 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by Entropia

I despise Cable companies. They think they own your soul. I’m tempted to sign up for Comcast service and leave a constant connection going to myself so I can sue them for false advertising.

This reminds me of AT&T telling me I had to pay over twice as much for the internet on my phone because, “smart phones use data differently”. When I told them to put a tech on the phone that would explain the difference between “differently” and “more”, they shut up.

I don’t like the idea of them regulating you, but I can understand if they want to limit the ability of people to do stuff that’s illegal (different). But, I draw the line at limiting “unlimited” bandwidth.

Posted at 8:46 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by M

“Is it worth policing 1% of your customers?” Well, yes, if they’re using 60% of your bandwidth and pissing off 15% of your customers.

Posted at 8:47 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by sweavo

In Ireland, its hard to find *any* provider that will give you more than 100gb p/m download cap. The average used to be something like 60gb.

luckily for myself, after months of searching I found possibly the only provider offering unlimited download usage.

The thing is, legit or not, theres always advertising about “always on” broadband. Well to me always on means I can use it whenever i damn well please – not that I can leave it connected to the net but do nothing, thats defeating the whole point of it.

I have to say 250Gb for residential use is very fair, only the top 1% of people will ever breach that, and those that do probably should be paying extra anyway.

Posted at 8:54 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by Spoofy

is there a way to monitor your usage? how do you know when you are getting close? can i install something on my router?

Posted at 9:10 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by oneshot417

$60 month a month? i’m going to be kicking my heels for joy the day that other providers iron the wrinkles out of their wireless solutions. the comcast regime needs to go.

Posted at 9:15 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by m@!

@20: I don’t really think that would work. I just did a quick browse of their current offers, but I don’t believe are they offering anywhere that it’s unlimited service. And with this new acceptable use edit, they are in fact openly saying it’s not unlimited, so I don’t see how you could possibly get them for false advertising.

Posted at 9:45 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by daenris

@#4 & #5-

You guys do realize that HAD lowercases all posts right? That makes your posts collectively the most confusing thing I’ve seen in a while.

Posted at 9:50 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by M4CGYV3R

There’s a reason they’re referred to as ‘communistcast’

Posted at 10:12 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by medix

Ok I’m on booth sides of the fence here first of all I don’t feel it is right to limit things that were previously given larger quantities, for instance Bite size snickers.. remember when you were young and Halloween totally rocked socket!!! Now your older and you you may or may not have notice that bite size candies are even smaller then you remember its not that you got bigger, they got smaller see this article http://candyaddict.com/blog/2006/09/08/fun-size-not-so-fun/
Meanwhile back at the hall of Comcast “insert cheesy eighty’s transition sound bite here”
Taking things away from ppl is going to piss them off and you will hear stories from grandpa “in my day internet usage had no limit, and fun size candies were bigger”
I run a home network with five computers a isa server with a few gaming pc’s if all of the sudden there “internet” shuts off because of max usage or or or it starts to charge me even yet more for going over my limit this with surely cause a problem. Here is the deal I have a simple cell phone plan and I use it sparingly but in the rare occasion I go over my “allowance” thanks mom and dad “phone company” I get charged and that’s ok for a completely mobile device, but a utility piped in my home that has always been abundant shouldn’t be roached..
in the case of cable how do they know its not the neighborhood, it would almost totally have to be dsl and dynamic ip, any one see a problem here… oh yea you can run out of numbers or be so many proxies deep nobody would have the same internet anymore. It would be penned off like quadrants of cattle farms where is you would exceed your limit getting where you need to, and grandma and grandpa are just happy to play canastas and get e-mail every once in a while. You know what I’m glad there are ppl who don’t use much internet.. more for ppl who depend on it.

Posted at 10:38 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by kvmanii

Comcast already had a “cap” of 250gbytes/month. (by “cap” I mean, it was specified in their usage policies, but was not an enforced limit.) all this “policy change” does is state that they’ll be *contacting* anyone that goes over this cap.

also, I *do* live within the comcast monopoly. I say “monopoly” because there really is no other choice. we have no other cable provider (our community leaders make sure of that), and dsl & satellite services in our area are crap. we may not like comcast’s overhanded policies (injecting into my torrents?!?), frequent outages (three separate instances this month at my house), and poor service (wasn’t “fiber-to-the-pole” supposed to mean no more lost digital signals?)… but there really is no other choice.

Posted at 10:38 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by RWL

@27: “Commiecast: The People’s Cable”

They installed FiOS in this place a few months ago. Time to go comparing service.

Posted at 10:43 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by pragma

is there a way to monitor your usage? how do you know when you are getting close? can i install something on my router?

Posted at 10:44 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by oneshot417

I’d kill for 250 GB. My ISP (Cogeco) caps us at 60 GB.

Posted at 10:49 am on Aug 29th, 2008 by tiuk

Those who agree with comcast, I applaud your reasonableness. The trolls whining about “false advertising” or sharing a line with a bunch of other people, FOAD. I’d much rather they do this than raise everybody’s rate 5 bucks a month to cover losses from that 1% that downloads 5 TB/mo from usenet. I might come close to the cap, actually, just torrenting TV shows, but I think it’s reasonable to have a “normal” package with a quite high cap like this, and charge extra if you really suck down exorbitant amounts of data.

Posted at 12:56 pm on Aug 29th, 2008 by James

How many of these == 1gb?

http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/Shustek/12C-Vacuum-tubes.gif

Posted at 1:09 pm on Aug 29th, 2008 by Kacela

Policing 0.1% of your user base probably isn’t worth the effort. But it’s the camel’s nose under the tent. Once people accept this (because it doesn’t affect most of them) I suspect Comcast will start to ratchet the cap downward.

Posted at 2:09 pm on Aug 29th, 2008 by Orv

i respsect comcast’s right to do what they want and i do think that 250gb is reasonable. the issue i see is that you have no indication of your usage until you’ve gone over the limit. also i’m not too happy about there being no other options in high speed internet that are worth subscribing to.

perhaps they should divert a bit of that ridiculous marketing budget into better infrastructure.

Posted at 2:30 pm on Aug 29th, 2008 by will d.

Remember this counts combined upload and download.

if you download 1Mb of data, a data counter may record 1.2-1.3MB bandwidth used as while your downloading, you are constantly sending ack packets

if you were to download a 150GB torrent, you would probably use 300GB of bandwidth

bandwidth usage is also counted any data received, which means if someone decides to packet flood you over night using a connection with a 10Mbit upload which many dsl and cable providers give, they can push you over your cap within a week

bandwidth caps are bad

at least it is not as bad as satellite connections where they may give you a 300-500MB bandwidth cap

they just want to find ways to make people spend more

a bandwidth cap wont do anything to reduce network congestion

so it wont stop your cable internet from reaching diapup speeds during the hours of 10AM-11PM and all day during weekends like with time warner cable in the queens ny area does.

these isp’s cry about people using too much bandwidth and their hardware from 15 years ago cant handle it

they constantly want to add more and more people to their service and offer larger and larger speed packages with out investing in better network hardware

if you want to sell a internet service then invest in enough hardware to handle everyone on the network at the same time

you don’t see real estate agents selling the same house to 500 different people

if you went into a restaurant and ordered a 2 pounds of Salisbury steak and 20 other people ordered it also, but wheres only enough steak for 10 people, what would you do if the chef came up to your table, and cut your steak in half then gave it to the other person who didn’t have any because there was only enough for 10 people, and they didn’t reduce the price or give you a 50% refund, would you be happy?

this is what isps are doing. 1000 people pay full price for a 10mbit connection, but the isp only has enough bandwidth to support 500 people, rather than just spend a little bit of their billions in profits to add a extra server, they just choose to limit everyone so there forced to share, essentially getting half of what they paid full price for

Posted at 4:14 pm on Aug 29th, 2008 by Naruto Uzumaki

and forgot to add

just because others are not doing something that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be doing it also

so what if many people don’t use more, everyone is different.

when you get internet service you are paying for the speed.

most people who have computers barely know how to use them so the most they may do with it is send email

users who are more skilled will do more on the PC and will use more bandwidth.

95% of the US is considered illiterate or below requires reading level does that mean those of us who can read properly should be required to act dumb and pretend to not know how to read properly to

what ISP’s want to do is force all users to be their favorite kind of customer

it is like those workout gyms that people join, you agree to a 2 year contract for only show up for about a week then quit but keep paying the monthly fee due to the contract, ISP’s like those customers also they want people to buy a 15mbit connection and only use it once in a while and even then only use it to check email so they rake in more profits from those users.

they feel that people should pay them and expect nothing in return.

most computer users call tech support services or take their computers into places like circuit city and bestbuy to fix simple problems like spyware

because most of the people do that, does that mean we should be forced to do that also

ISP’s need to stop adding limits and excuses for not having enough bandwidth. most of their hardware is 15 years old. and the more people they trick into signing up for comcast, the more they are going to ration off the bandwidth instead of expand the network

Posted at 4:27 pm on Aug 29th, 2008 by Naruto Uzumaki

lol i use mutch more than that every month lucky i live in the netherlands ^^
and i have the best isp in the country xs4all maybe some of you know their old name hacktick^^

Posted at 6:13 pm on Aug 29th, 2008 by The Angellick Trooper

Alright, just a note of interest, 150GB download does not equate to 150gb of upload. If this was true you could never download at speeds higher than your upload. As for the rest of the comment I’ll just scroll on by.

Posted at 6:14 pm on Aug 29th, 2008 by Dan k

Complete and utter bullshit. I hope a class action gets started over this.

Like streaming music? Too bad. Have a slingbox or equivelent? Sucks to be you. Use ventrillo on your games often? Sucks to be you. They’ll still charge 49.99 a month (My shared webhost charges 15 a month for a terabyte of storage and ten terabytes of bandwidth, approximately.

While I doubt I could hit this without them bitching, I can certainly transfer at least 2 terabytes a month without them batting an eye or throttling me.

Someone needs to push legislation that forces states to not give exclusive contracts to communication lines so that we can have some competition. In Japan they just run the freakin’ fiber optics up to the house, in great britain it’s 24.99 a month for landline phone, and it comes with FREE high speed internet.

“Those are both islands though! They have less distance to traverse!”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fiber

Utter BS.

Posted at 6:23 pm on Aug 29th, 2008 by Wolvenmoon

@37: That’s true in general, but he was specifically talking about BitTorrent. A fair number of trackers enforce a 1:1 ratio, so in that case he’s right.

Marketplace has some experts saying that this is really about discouraging video-over-IP, since that could cut into Comcast’s cable TV revenue.

Posted at 7:13 pm on Aug 29th, 2008 by Orv

I think it is bull.

If they have such a great network, then the small percentage of the 250g/mo users aren’t going to make much of a difference.
I’d hate to have a lan party and not be able to get internet for the rest of the year.

they also advertise speeds as “up to” __meg, but you rarely get that speed,
they claim to have offer “fiber” but then still run copper cable to your house,

Perhaps the water company should limit you to two showers a week, advertise good water pressure “sometimes”, and supply your house with a garden hose.

these idiots need to wake up and see that the internet has become a utility in this culture.

maybe you should switch to verizon fios fiber-to-the-premesis service, and comcast can, well, you know.

Posted at 4:24 am on Aug 30th, 2008 by Aud1073cH

Offtopic, but I just happened to have visited the place in the stock photo. It’s an art installation in the old Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, where Al Capone was imprisoned for a while.

Posted at 2:28 pm on Aug 30th, 2008 by vladsinger

250 gigabites would rock for me…

In Alaska the broadband packages you pay for include a throughput limit. I’m paying for the package that limits me to 5 gigabites a month. I host a website for my family and have 4 computers connected to the internet most of the time. Most of the time I can stay under limit (unless I decide to download some new Linux .iso’s or listen to Internet radio)

I can play W.o.W. or watch youtube videos with no problems.

Something I’ve done to help include installing a proxy server to store a cache for all the computers in my house. I noticed a big improvement on usage after that.

Posted at 2:29 pm on Aug 31st, 2008 by Breeegz

Cool use of my picture, thanks.

Posted at 10:02 pm on Aug 31st, 2008 by monoglot

while torrents are more bandwidth hungry

standard ftp downloads will also push your limits

maintaining the connection and sending ack packets takes up bandwidth

if you don’t believe me, head to a website, and copy a download link for a file and write down the size of the file

after that open a program like netlimiter and have it monitor bandwidth usage for that download only

you will see that a 1MB file may use 1.1-1.3MB bandwidth to download that 1mb file and while the download is going you are uploading also. it may be a slow upload but it adds up

so you cant expect to do something like download a 250GB rainbow table and expect to be in your limit, that 250gb rainbow table may take 260GB of bandwidth or more

and this cap wont improve service quality for those who don’t use the full 250gb cap as it wont stop those users from doing a full speed download, sure they may be cut off at the 250gb mark but if they were to hoard bandwidth until they reach that limit, it will still give the other customers a slow internet experience

it is like hot our current banking system is.

if everyone who has a wamu checking account were to all go tomorrow and withdraw all of their money, then wamu would not have enough money to to give to everyone and the company would go bankrupt as said on the ch11 news, they don’t keep enough money to service all account holders, they invest the money then hope that everyone doesn’t rune up and demand all of their money.

during the great depression, everyone had a bandwidth cap on their money. if you had $500 in your account then you could only take $500

but because economic problems caused everyone to withdraw all of their money for fear that the banks would loose it, the banks went out of business because they didn’t have enough money for everyone

(the government later put out a insurance policy for economic problems)

it doesn’t matter what the bandwidth cap it, if theres not enough bandwidth to go around then the network will still lag during peek usage hours

Posted at 11:24 pm on Sep 1st, 2008 by Naruto Uzumaki

i was wondering about gaming.

how much of that 250gb will xboxlive/wow/browsing

and everything take up?

i would imagine alot

Posted at 11:18 am on Sep 5th, 2008 by dwight

i was wondering about gaming.

how much of that 250gb will xboxlive/wow/browsing

and everything take up?

i would imagine alot

Posted at 11:18 am on Sep 5th, 2008 by dwight

Seriously, 250gb?! Most UK ISP’s offer either unlimited or something in the range of say 40gb and really even with things like internet radio on constantly and pc/ps3 gaming I’ve never once hit that 40gb. Seeing as I haven’t read the whole article, I’m guessing this is based on cable companies including things like tv packages.

Posted at 5:21 pm on Sep 6th, 2008 by edd

Im also in a place with only comcast ( i have) and qwest dsl

i pay 80 bucks for my internet alone and it claims to be

8 meg but many speed test later i says i get 1.2 meg thats

bs also outages are often and the node “loses my mac addy”

then again im heavy into torrents and the like and i pull

about 400 gig/month (up and down) and they have yet to bug

me and my ratio for most sites are very healthy

all in all i hate comcast but it works as long as they dont

send me the letter also fios is coming ever closer to my

area…

Posted at 12:55 am on Sep 7th, 2008 by jimmx

What I don’t understand is all the whining about a 250 gig limit?

Seriously, the ones that whine about this are probably downloading illegal torrents anyways. Would you prefer Comcast just to turn their records over to the FCC & have them fine you or incarcerate you for piracy?

With online backups you can very easily do incremental backups! I doubt that you have over 250 gigs a month that change on your hard drive that you would actually want backed up a month.

With the throwing a lan party & then not having internet for a year? it’s 250 gigs a MONTH not a year!

Overselling the internet?? Would you prefer to pay for a DS-3 line into your house for what? about a grand a month? go ahead! I’ve had both Comcast & DSL and as far as outages were concerned they were equal, no more no less. I work on computers for a living & when I goto clients houses there’s tons of things that can be done to speed up their connections, sometimes yes it’s the installers that made the mistakes, but you know what? People that complain about their connection being slow because it’s 1.2mb vs 8mb which is what they say they’re paying for, but then leave their torrents downloading/uploading all day and all night.. what do you think you’re neighbor’s doing?? perhaps the same thing.?.?

I have found out one thing about human nature, NO ONE is ever happy & love to do nothing more than complain about everything. When it works, they’re charging you too much, when it’s down or maintenance is being done it’s the worst thing on the planet. It’s too hot outside, it’s too cold, too wet, too dry etc. It’s not that far off from everything. Sometimes just suck it up & be happy for a second. Life’s short.

Posted at 9:44 pm on Sep 14th, 2008 by JB

@JB, I am a MCSE so I do know a little about this. *BTW* You sound
like a Comcast employee. If your not they should hire you.
To be honest, Comcast’s decision seems to me to be about
television, not the Internet. Comcast’s business is still
centered on providing cable TV at $100, $150 a month.
Internet video is starting to challenge traditional
television, whether its reruns on Hulu or live convention
coverage on MSNBC.com. Comcast wants to sell movies on
demand over its cable system, but Netflix, Amazon and others
are selling movies over the Web for less. And video and
movies, of course, are the largest bandwidth hogs on the
Net.
So you know for future referrence, the torrent was blocked
by Comcast so I guess one would need to let it download all
night. This will now change because of the FCC ruling,
Second for someone who works on computers for a living
should also know it is not the FCC job to fine you or
incarcerate you for piracy. Those responsible for this would
be the BSA and RIAA. Just thought you would like to know.

As it stands now, I have four systems on my network, 3 of these systems are online
playing games such as WoW. The other is used by my wife and
myself who use the net for everything from shopping to
research for college courses. 250 gigs sounds like a lot
and it is when viewed from today’s standards but on the same
token it is the equivalent of 4 hours of HD TV, This move
could easily hinder the grow and advancement of the net.

The network is over sold. You should know the results from
past experiences when AOL over sold their network. Constant log
offs and such. Again do the math, If I can get rid of one
person who uses 250gb, I can take on 125 new computer
illiterate clients, charge the top dollar and use the same
amount of bandwidth.
Whether you use 250gb or 3gb in a month you should be
against this cap. Specially when one looks at how much it
cost per month for the connection.

Posted at 10:28 pm on Sep 14th, 2008 by Hotwired

I hate the idea of bandwidth caps. Unfortunately, I myself
have a cap of 70gigs per month. I rarely reach that limit.
I have only once received a warning a few years ago. At
that time I was doing a lot of bittorenting. I actually
didn’t know that I had a cap until last week when a friend
told me that my isp(ACCESS) had a cap. They also hide that
that have a cap. I didn’t know for 6 years.

Recently I have been monitoring my usage with NETMETTER.
It works awesome because it tells you the bandwidth for
the day/week/month. It will also guess at what your
bandwidth will be at that day/week/month.

The last part is you think home connections have bad caps,
look at cell networks for laptops. It’s $100 for 6gigs of
data, and the speed is less than stellar. Their are now no
truly unlimited cell connections in Canada.

Posted at 7:05 pm on Sep 15th, 2008 by stuart

WOW. 250gb/months. I would KILL to download 250gb in a month without aaa
my speed getting cut to 15kb/s. I have wildblue, and the 12gb/month
limit that comes with it. Seriously.

Posted at 8:45 pm on Sep 15th, 2008 by St.Jimmy

I am just a general hotspots users.. well I’ll have to either limit the speed or turn it off when they hit the cap…!I’m not too happy about there being no other options in high speed internet that are worth subscribing to. I have known opticomm can design build and operate an advanced fibre network incorporating high speed internet, free-to-air analogue and digital television-service, …supposedly a state-of-the art fibre network, offering up to 100mbps now… The instant reaction of the people is exciting …!

Posted at 3:02 am on Sep 16th, 2008 by High Speed ISP

internet in australia sucks. we pay tonnes more than
usa and we don’t even have an option for unlimited internet.
most people are on caps like 3GB. And you’re complaining about 250gb…

Posted at 1:38 pm on Sep 17th, 2008 by i want more intrawebs

I am very against this. Its not like they are introducing the cap now.. its been around for a while just not officially. I got my wrists slapped by this one.

The issue is more for the future. What happens when IPTV evolves? Just saying that comcast will adapt to new technologies is not good enough because if they can get away with this now they can keep on doing it as long as it is profitable for them. The internet will have to bend to their bandwidth ceiling.

This is de-evolutionary for technology as a whole.

Posted at 11:44 am on Sep 18th, 2008 by Mark Esler

WOW… I go through 200gb every week folks, 250gb a month would just kill me.

Does this make me an abuser of my isp’s bandwith….NO they have plenty!

Posted at 10:21 pm on Sep 18th, 2008 by Dave

omg!! its 250gbytes in downloads at a speed of 1.5mb/s!!!!

Posted at 12:17 am on Sep 19th, 2008 by andy

250gb is fine, I have comcast and download a lot of movies and shows every month. When the limit wasn’t announced I was worried it was around 100-150gb a month so I stayed under this limit to be safe. Now I can download even more media with no problems. Stop whining whiners.

Posted at 5:53 pm on Sep 21st, 2008 by nowhining

oneshot: installing 3rd party firmware (such as dd-wrt) may allow you to monitor your bandwidth. do not do this if you do not know what you are doing, and don’t blame me if you brick your router.

honestly, unless you’re running a major website or downloading everything you can can (dozens of movies/albums) and running bittorrent 24/7 to keep your ratio crazy high, you don’t need to worry. gamers will not be affected. At all.

Posted at 10:36 am on Sep 23rd, 2008 by mrhappy

Praise the lord for fios… my 20/20mbs connection is truly unlimited.. hehehe

Posted at 1:59 pm on Sep 23rd, 2008 by hOnk

the problem is we already paid for all the lines and the bandwidth along wiht all the new bandwidth they have to put in to accomidate their users. its like putting a toll on an existing road that the tax payers already paid for and then just pocketing the money because that is their end goal is to tax and regulate bandwidth on the internet all of the biggest communications giants got together along with the government and they are going to try and turn the internet into a cable package not only will you pay for extra bandwidth but any site not put out by one of the six big companys will cost you money to visit. they also plan on taxing emails. the internet is killing their power over the people through newspapers tv and radio. they want to control and regulate your content and what you can or cant do on the web. they are going to lock it down under internet 2 and screw us all over. go read their internal documents.

Posted at 7:52 pm on Sep 24th, 2008 by joe

to :thatch:
fkng wrd

-hero

Posted at 12:03 pm on Sep 25th, 2008 by -hero

i lol’d…hard.

If you are using 250gigabytes a month (which is roughly the same as 500 cd-rs), then…geez. wow.

good luck getting such a plan in australia for under $AU100 a month. they dont even exist for home users.

And anyone that runs more than one machine in a house and doesn cache updates once for re-distribution within the home network ought to be banned from using the internet.

Streaming music? Have you not heard of streamripper and its re-proxy feature?

I would lol harder at netnubs if their stupidity didn’t also impact on the enviroment i have to live with.

Posted at 3:07 am on Sep 29th, 2008 by Zeno

While Bit Torrent is a target for this action by Comcast, their primary goal I think is more of a down to earth anti competitive business decision. If an average High Definition video from iTunes Music Store (3-4 GB), Playstation Network, or xBox live marketplace (6-7 GB), then you could in theory watch 1 or 2 videos each day of the month and consume around 200 GB (if you get good quality movies). Say packet bandwidth adds only 10% to the total bandwidth, now you’re up to 220. that leaves you only 30 GB for the remainder of the month do do ANYTHING else with. Gaming, YouTube, Internet radio, surfing, email, etc. Lets say some company next year says, check us out, you can get 1080P movies from us. what if they up the bitrates for “premium” videos. What if… We don’t know how far technology could lead us, but comcast is intent to say… if you want to watch HD movies, you’d best watch them on our cable services, or we’ll cap your usage.

Basically, comcast is stifling the potency of the growth of competition to their HD, premium, and on demand services. Maybe a movie a day is excessive, but what if more than one person uses the service. What if billy watches downloads of a tv show in his bedroom each week, and throws in a movie or 2 as well each week. Jane watches a movie with her boyfriend once or twice a week. already, you might have 10-20 HD downloads in a month between 2 people. if mom and dad watch 2 movies a week, then they are teetering close to that cap, maybe too close.

It’s true that that might be an extreme case, but I for one canceled my comcast cable services 2 years ago, and never looked back. I get enough entertainment via the internet and the network TV chanels that I don’t need the other stuff. Guba, youtube and the dedicated TV show websites offer more than enough in entertainment to make up. I watch episodes of the mythbusters on DVD from the library. Yeah, I had to wait a good long while, but it’s free. Modern Marvels, Iceroad truckers, and countless other shows like those… I stream them.

I use bit torrent for downloading Fansubs. if you saw my DVD collection though, you would not be likely accuse me of any wrong. I downloaded Eureka 7 from youtube before it was released… I also bought all 12 DVDs, including the special edition box DVDs. same goes for countless other series. I even buy DVDs that are not available in english, just so I can legally own the program. I have a 5-6 foot long section of shelf space filled with Leiji Matsumoto DVDs alone (Galaxy Express 999, Harlock, etc). only a few are in english or even subtitled, but at least I OWN them legitimately. I download the fansubs (and will continue to do so as new episodes are translated by fansubbers).

I feel this is a fair use of even bit torrent.

The future of video is not cable, it’s internet video, and comcast is scared of a future they can’t have total control of. Their only control is to place caps that make it more difficult to use such services as bandwidth usage increases.

Posted at 5:22 pm on Sep 30th, 2008 by richfiles

250gb is plenty. i don’t understand what the bitching is about. are people signing cable contracts with guns to their heads? comcast is a company out to make money and if they piss off .1% of their base and make everyone else happy, I’m sure they don’t care. I work for an ISP and we have never had anyone hit 250gb in a month. if you don’t like it, switch services, it sounds like DSL might be better anyway.

Posted at 5:59 am on Oct 2nd, 2008 by rhett

Lots of people say 250 gigs is plenty but it’s not. nott at all really.
I hardly use bit torrent at all but I do use site like hulu and tv.msn. Also sites like crunchyroll and so forth……
Also webpage designer and devlop so transfering lots of stuff back and forth from servers.
I was called by comcast saying I’ve gone over 400 gigs, being told not to do it again type of thing.

250 gig limit may work for the avrage user but it won’t in the future becuse in the future when speeds are fast the internet will be used for many more things. 250 gigs is not a very high limit it’s fairly low and really comcast is not worth my or anyone elses time, Not just becuse of the 250 limit but becuse of a limit at all. A company that wants to control how much you download just to be able to up their profits should be ditched as soon as possible.

Posted at 12:49 pm on Oct 9th, 2008 by haterofcomcast

start the petetions!

Comcast and others can get away with this crap because, People who don’t realize or understand the exclusivity, of the web and dont understand what it means to have a 15 mb connection get one anyway just so they can have the best. I mean 70 of people just
use the web for myspace and email. People who understand what the web has to offer the convince and the knowledge and entertainment that can be found will take advantage of the web exponentially
and the more you use the web the more you find things to use it for. People get the best when dsl is more than enough. Also in many areas there is no choice. I mean you can choose the speed but its all the same network. People are paying the higher buck for the speed and comming no where near so they say, screw anyone that is actually knows about how to use the web it only cuts into out cable tv profits, and we can sucker more of theese check my email really fast and load youtube videos quickly. but wait ur limited to the speed of the server so u might as well have dsl while paying less. FFS its like buyin a lamborghini to the autoban AND NEVER TAKIN THAT BITCH OVER 50MPH!!! GET THE FCKIN HONDA GOD FUCKING DAMIT, SHOULD THAT MEAN I SHOULD BE LIMITEd TO 120 MPH……… ITS THE FUCKING AUTOBAN THERE IS NO SPEED LIMIT,
autoban being the internet very good analogy as the internet is a highhay of information that has no limit, never will and never can << within the laws of physics, and your isp is the car dealer and there service is the car. then i guess the web is ur destination. plz people buy a car that suites ur needs, i mean if i were lamborghini and old people where buying my cars and i could make more cars if the young woman or more likely guys who push the car and then need a new transmition
where limited to 2 transition under the warranty id prob do it. especially if you couldn’t get this transmition from anywhere else.

ok take some breaths

if you look at the internet, its similar to what we see in processing power, the banwithd usage has grown and the rate at which it is growing is growing the the so called avrage user will be nearing the cap regularly within 4 years! the power user will be assed out!! and dose comcast give a shit. Hell no, they can kill 5 birds with one stone, protect their money invested in cable technology, increase sucker,,,, er im mean customer capacity, curb the growth regionaly since comcast does have entire regions monopolized u kno; stop video over ip, and people using servces like veoh and youtube insted of watching tv and their commercails like they want u. and throttle the growth of bittorent. But what about joe the plumber. When he gets home and boots up flgiht simulator that has been set to use google maps or he regualrly talks over the internet with voip or teamspeak and is still kinda running shit from home. Then maybe he has teen kids with laptops going throu that downloading movies and music shit untill about 30 when people grow up. some never do but anyway i meanshit holyshit gl for that guy bear in mind that since the day of aol just browsing the web and doing normal whings takes alot of bandwithd and the internet is growing .

Posted at 6:43 am on Oct 18th, 2008 by bickering west

Many people say 250 gigs is plenty but it’s nott at all reall specially in coming dayzz..
For an average user 250 gig limit may work very well 2day but in the future when the technology will be more advanced the use of the internet for many things will b increased at that time 250 gig will not be fair limit even 4 an average user…

Posted at 1:33 am on Nov 14th, 2008 by Broadband Packages

ya i agree with thee above block…

Posted at 10:49 pm on Nov 16th, 2008 by Landline Phone

Our ISP in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (etisalat) still hasn’t put a cap on any kind of connection yet, dunno if they are going to but the max speed you can get for residential usage is only 4Mbps, and its quite expensive here as well, 449 AED (approx. 122.25$ per month!)

Posted at 1:38 pm on Dec 18th, 2008 by kanz haz internetz?

For those whom are trying to monitor their bandwidth… I have a Linksys WRT300N Router with custom dd-wrt firmware flashed on it… dd-wrt keeps track of how much bandwidth (ingoing and outgoing.) I use in a monthly basis.

I recently just flashed it two days ago so here’s what I’m currently at.

december 2008 (incoming: 13364 mb / outgoing: 3047 mb) Eh ~1.5gigs not to bad.

Posted at 6:55 am on Dec 21st, 2008 by SsN

I can’t wait to find an other internet provider. I live in MI. In my area the only high speed internet provider is comcast. I have called AT&T, Verizon… They don’t have any other services in my area. I will have to move to be able to work with verizon, AT& T or any other internet service provider. I have the feeling that this company is keeping me in hostage. I thought America was the contry of competition not of monopole. I am sick of this BS. Comcast is like micfrosoft. Basically I have to pay this outrageous payment every month $60 just for internet. I am sick of paying these bastards. I am really sick of this company.

Posted at 8:41 am on Dec 29th, 2008 by Illogical Reasons

Well I got the call from comcast last month telling me I used 570gb of bandwidth. They actually called me a hog. I hadn’t heard about this until then so trust me I was suprised. I use my internet alot. I play games, watch HD video, and I’m a musicain and I transfer files back and forth online. I’m screwed now to, cause there’s no other choice for internet, and comcast said I can’t upgrade to commercail, cause I live in a apartment. Now I’m afirad to do anything online for fear i might hit it again and lose my internet for a year :(

Posted at 2:52 am on Jan 24th, 2009 by noluckforme

I just this today found out the reason they cut my net was this limit. Hadn’t heard of it until then. They said if they caught me over the limit a second time, I’m gone for a year. I guess it was a bit shocking to realize I had used 850 GB during the month in question, but hey, at least they didn’t realize it was a slow month for me. They’re not very fond of the “personal server” response. Guess I’ll be switching to a company with a dedicated line who’s not gonna give me crap when I’m paying for their new car, or maybe I’ll just stop being a cheap skate and upgrade to a business line. Even so though, my 21 MB/S bandwidth is truly pointless with a 250 cap. Disturbing. 75/month isn’t bad until you read the fine print.

Posted at 12:00 am on Jul 31st, 2009 by z.d