Comcast to institute 250-gig cap
I don’t know yet whether I should be outraged about this new policy, mainly because I don’t know how much bandwidth I actually use -- Comcast won’t tell me. By policy, the company won’t tell you how much you’ve used until you've already exceeded the cap. If you exceed the cap again within a year, Comcast cuts off service.
I got the warning last year after I went on vacation and a buggy program (TVTonic, the company that helped NBC bring Olympic downloads to Windows Vista Media Center) kept downloading video over and over again. Before I figured out what was going on, I pleaded with Comcast to tell me how much I had used and when the peak download times occurred, thinking someone was leeching my network. The Comcast rep couldn’t have been less cooperative.
I figured out the problem on my own and have been in Comcast’s good graces ever since. But to this day, I don’t know how close I’m coming to that usage cap. While 250-gigabytes sounds like a lot, I use my Internet for downloading movies and TV shows on Xbox Live, playing video games online, my Vonage phone line, Skype video calls, streaming Brazilian radio stations, uploading and of course, regular Web browsing and e-mail.
Maybe that adds up to a lot of data; maybe it’s well short of 250 gigabytes. The bottom line is, I’ll never know, thanks to Comcast’s poor customer service.
I understand that Comcast needs to make a return on its investment. But by keeping users in the dark until they’ve exceeded the cap, the company is going to chill a lot of legitimate uses of the Internet. And that is going to make its service a lot less valuable.
Hey Ken -- I think this way should help you get a rough estimate of your Internet usage: when you view the properties of your network connection (whether ethernet or wireless), that little box pops up showing "Activity: X bytes sent, Y bytes received." For example, I've had a wifi connection at home for 3.5 days, and I've received about 3 gigs of data, so I'd extrapolate somewhere between 25-30GB per month. If you think about the 250GB limit, it's pretty sneaky, because at 50GB per Blu-Ray DVD, it means you could only download maybe 4 HD movies per month (whether legally -- through someone like Netflix or iTunes, or illegally -- through, say bit torrent) -- until you presumably had to pay Comcast more money. A nifty little workaround to net neutrality, eh?
ReplyDelete-Ed
Unfortunately, I have a lot of off-PC usage (Xbox, Roku, iPod Touch, etc.) that can't be measured through Windows. And those are the things I'm really worried about. Fortunately, most movies I download via Xbox Live are 4-6 gigs (Microsoft uses a fairly recent compression scheme, and 720 resolution, so it's not quite Blu-ray quality).
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point on network neutrality -- I'm sure a lot of people will just use Comcast's on-demand services to avoid running into the caps.