Comcast capping bandwidth usage at about 90GB/month?
The battle for net neutrality might be in its infancy, and already we're seeing casualties. There have been murmurs that Comcast has been capping bandwidth usage on its all-you-can eat high-speed subscribers that have simply used more of their connection than Comcast is comfortable with, along with evidence the ISP has been monkeying with people's BitTorrent usage. Last week GameDaily BIZ got in touch with Charlie Douglas, a spokesperson for Comcast Corporation who confirmed that the company was indeed capping monthly downloads of its "excessive" users.
The actual ballpark figure Douglas gave GameDaily BIZ was "30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures or 13 million emails in a month." This number might not seem like a more than you could use, but as Scott Gilbertson notes on Wired's Compiler Blog, that number amounts to about 90GB, assuming you're going by the typical industry-standard song size of about 3MB. Clearly this isn't a normal usage number, as most people aren't downloading 30,000 music files, but the fact that Comcast isn't providing a clear number that's been set in stone makes this mysterious cap all the more troublesome, especially for users of Web based back up and file transfer tools.
Related: Will Comcast cut you off?
Josh Lowensohn is an associate editor for Webware.com, CNET's blog about cool and otherwise useful Web applications and services. If you've found a site you'd like profiled, shoot him an e-mail. E-mail Josh.
- Topics:
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Commerce,
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Networking
- Tags:
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Comcast,
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data limitations,
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BitTorrent,
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net neutrality
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These caps won't affect most customers. But if you're a power user, BEWARE! What happens when you reach the cap? Do you get cut off till next month? Or are they going to use their current policy: They call you and THREATEN to BAN you for a year for "degrading the performance of their network." Remember those "Unlimited" ads they used to have. There is a reason they don't use that word anymore. Too bad it's still stuck in our brains.
Comcast is going backwards. People don't want limits (written or unwritten) unless they know what they are and are ok with them. Instead of banning and capping, why not reinvest the profits you reap and increase capacity?
If you are thinking signing up with Comcast... I strongly suggest you consider someone else. But hopefully they don't have a monopoly in your market. I'm in the SF Bay Area and switched to AT&T. Yeah I was skeptical at first... but the DL speed is almost as fast (6Mbit) UL speed is faster 768Kbit. AND their site says they have no cap (on att.com's help "Ask Allie" type "monthly cap" for a reference). With their elite plan you also get free access to all of AT&T's WiFi hotspots. And my monthly bill is the same as before.