Personally, I'm quite happy with my peak/offpeak setup that I get through Aquiss in the UK.

During "peak" times - 8am to 10pm - I am allocated 30gb/month of transfer. On average, I use about 12gb of this, max, and that's with an entire family using the connection.

During off-peak time, I am allocated 300gb/month - so I simply set any download to occur during this time. Seems like an entirely sensible way to do it, with the best of both worlds, although I'll admit I'm not a "hardcore" downloader. I tend to buy my games =o

Comcast is a big enough company that has ways around this. Traffic shaping/policing is nothing new to a big telecom company or even an ISP. That’ s one of the risk they take in offering this kind of service. Majority of the people order the cheapest service just to have it.

Working for a big telecom company we may put tons of customers on one OC3 circuit but the priority is low and each one is capped at what they are paying for. So as far as all those customers bringing down an OC3 is highly unlikely. That’s why we have a network center that monitors and directs the traffic. Also, that tech support isn’t the people you talk to when you call the ‘toll free’ number when you call about your account.

With that said there is a trade-off with what pay and what you get. People expect to have top notch customer/tech support while paying $40-60 for internet-not going to happen. They also expect a tech to come out in 1hour or the hold time to be 5minutes-no way. Other customers & businesses pay for that service and support and in turn get less speed, but they pay more for their router (Cisco/Adtran/etc), hire a vendor, etc. Majority of those customers are running dedicated circuits that cost more, only do one thing, and are on totally separate T1’s, OC3’s, and DS3’s in the network.

You ever wonder why an ATM machine goes so slow at some banks and not others? Or why when cash registers go down at a store, but it’s only for half a day? A bank might have a 56/64k and a store 256-512k, but they are both paying more total than your monthly DSL/cable/etc. sorry for the rant....

Damm torrent trolls.

Bandwidth costs $$$$$. If you want to do hardcore seeding, hosting or whatever. You have to pay up.

If you do not like Comcast? Then do your business elsewhere. Enough said.

you all have NO idea what bandwidth costs a provider. I do know, as I work for one. Here's the reality. High speed internet, fiber, cable, or dsl is a BURST circuit. meaning you have UP to your "paid for" speed for burst periods of time, in no way is it intended for you to have all that bandwidth available ALL the time. That would be a CBR or Committed Bit Rate service, and i'll promise you, you are not getting that for $40/month. A 1.5 meg (T1) CBR service starts at $400/month

I have to provide bandwidth for ALL my users, so here is where tiering comes into play. I'm sure you have all heard of slingbox. A single sling box connection draws or pushes (depending on the setup) 1 meg of continous bandwidth. Meaning, 45 users of a sling box could saturate a DS3 45 meg upstreak connection. 150 users could bring an OC3 to its knees. Now, comcast probually uses an OC3 internet pipe shared for hmm about 3000 customers, possibility more. We have th maintain the internet experience for EVERYONE, not just the 150 piggies.

Costs. the model for providing internet is oversubscription we hvae to, its the only way it works. I pay my upstream provider $200.00 for every meg on the system on aggragte average. If YOUR 3meg circuit is Downloading full stream constant for an entire month, you've cost me $600.00 for your $40.00 service. The economics aren't there to provide CBR service for Burst circuit systems.

The internet is changing to a pay as you go service, it's the only way it will survive as the bandwidth demand is outstripping the capacity of the internet. Expect soon to see hard caps for your service based on total downloaded content.

More torrenting for me :)
Time to get my "Free" version of the new kanes wrath expansion for command and conquer today

4GB a limit a month are you kidding me??. In case some of you have not notice but the trend is online distribution services such as steam which allows you to buy a game and have it download to your hard drive and its way more than 4GB

Does this mean no future for Downloadable content services such as steam,now amazon,itunes, Direct2Drive if this was the case??

Congratulations, you just won the Internet!

http://www.cnet.com/i/bto/20070902/comcast_tech_lolcat_270x244.jpeg

About time! Takes forever to download something if american comcast users are the only ones seeding it.

Yeah, I'm sure Comcast has the best interests of their customers in mind here. NOT

They've got something else up their sleeves I'm afraid, something like metered billing.

Quoting from Cyril: "Comcast will continue its traffic shaping practices for the time being, but the company says it plans to transition to a new, protocol-agnostic capacity management system by the end of the year"

This screams of them wanting to start tiered bandwidth/pricing... According to this article, TimeWarner has been starting to experiment with it in select markets. I'm guessing Comcast has been waiting patiently to see if TimeWarner can make it work before beginning their own pilot (assuming they haven't started to pilot it already).

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2008/01/tw_bandwidth.html
From the article:
"According to the report, new customers will be offered one of several "tiers" of broadband service, and the ability to track how much bandwidth they consume on the plan via a special Web site. If users consume too much bandwidth, they can be upgraded to a higher, more expensive, tier."

In short, my guess is they'll stop the persona of unlimited bandwidth and make those who use up more bandwidth pay a higher rate. Something like everyone gets a 16mb/2mb connection at $45, but with a 4GB limit per month. If you want to use more than the 4GB limit, you have to pay a higher monthly fee.