The first post by derFunkenstein is right.

A scaled price for total bandwidth could be acceptable, but not $15 for 10 lousy GB. That's practically highway robbery. The first time they lower the cap, as I think probable, I'm gone.

This is a very touchy subject for many mass download and HD movie watchers. The main customer I see affected by this is one who constantly watches HD movies or TV shows.

I feel 250GB is a reasonable amount of downloaded info for your average and even a bit above average user. I download a lot of stuff and I doubt I would hit 250GB. I know on average I don't download 8.3GB of data a day. That really is a lot. I do know some people who would.

And be real here. Besides HD movie/TV show watchers, who on average, would be downloading more than 250GB a day? Either you are stealing games/movies/programs or you are a business. If you are a business I would expect you to pay more than "home" users anyway if you are taking up that much bandwith. If you're stealing stuff, your getting tons of dollar value stuff FREE so why not pay a bit extra?

If anything, Comcast should come out with packages that are different price ranges. Customers who would never even get close to 250GB let alone 50GB for the month should be able to purchase a lower priced package. Customers who "watch HD Movies" or what ever you want to call it and use more than XXXGB could purchase a bigger download package. Sounds stupid, yes, but people who are barely taking advantage of huge GB downloads should not be punished for the ones who are downloading mass GB's a month. They can be seperated.

No biggie at all.

It is a very generous offer.

Damm broadband people should stop bitching about bandwidth costs unless you live in one of the developing regions of the planet. The majority of the developed world got it very good compared to their businesses that need "dedicated" services that cost far more per month with far less allotted bandwidth.

Even if 250GB a month is considered "enough" by many, most Comcast customers (I believe) are at 6Mbps down.

That's roughly 2TB per month of bandwidth at saturation, so Comcast is going to be fining customers who use 1/8 of their total bandwidth when what they purchased was and is advertised as a "24/7 connection".

Adding upstream makes that ratio even lower for the customer, as does going to what many Comcast customers have: 8Mbps or even faster down speeds.

That just REEKS of passing the costs of obviously poor infrastructure management to customers. No smart consumer should support this.

You guys (most of you) are just crazy. There's nothing wrong with a cap. Speed and distance are two very different things. There's nothing wrong with having a low cap that's very fast, versus a high cap that's very slow. It's a very simple line-graph to draw.

Why would you expect your provider to give you unlimited everything when their costs are based on how much you use? Clearly, you've never run a business of any kind.

And now you're complaining of an 8GB daily cap -- 92K per second every second all the time. What the hell are you downloading these days -- and keep in mind you're not justifying criminal acts here -- that you go through 8GB each and every day?!

Even most pirates would have a hard time sharing that much, 250GB a month = a lot of HDD's over a short period of time.

Having said that, derFunk has it right, eventually this will keep creeping down.

Caps have always greatly annoyed me, I hate the concept and they usually don't give you any good tools to manage/monitor it. Usually, if anything, you have to go through a lot of clicking on their site to find a bar graph that is 12 hours old.

Also why is there a need? We pay a lot of money for a small amount of bandwidth compared to other places as it is. Will the rates go down because of this restriction?

For residential service, ISPs typically promise a certain amount of bandwidth for a specified price, implicitly assuming that you won't use 100% of that bandwidth 24x7. For Joe Sixpack -- who doesn't run P2P or high-traffic Web servers on their connection -- this works out just fine; bandwidth is available when needed (e.g. streaming videos), without it costing an arm and a leg.

If you want to max out your connection 24x7 with impunity, you typically need to pay for "business class" service.

As long as the caps are specified up front (no deceptive advertising!), I don't have a problem with the concept of caps in principle. You get what you pay for, and people who use more bandwidth should pay more.

Preserving competition is the key to making this fair for everyone. As long as no single company is allowed to have a monopoly on providing Internet service in any given geographic area, prices for a given level of Internet service should settle down to something approximating fair market value.

Comcast already has a monthly bandwidth cap.

A cap they won't put a specific number on even while threatening to cut off your service for exceeding it. People have been warned for 100gb, and not warned at 500gb. I was warned last month at ~400gb.

Furthermore, because they don't advertise this cap, they offer no way of checking your current usage so you're left to third party utilities - and for devices which won't run those third party utilities, estimates.

And when your third party software and estimates don't match their accusations, you know damn will which number they're going to use.

Lets look at it this way, that's A LOT of data to come across anyone's pipe.

Even with this HUGE (>8gb/day) limit, does it REALLY hurt the 99.9% of their customer base that there is the 0.01% of the population that is downloading more than them? Does it *really* affect Comcast's ability to do business?

$15 for each additional 10GB used? Holy cats!

250GB a month is the foot-forward public relations number meant to be the number the press grabs on to in reports.

I have a feeling that number will go lower real fast over the next couple of years.

I'm a Comcast customer, and regardless of what the cap is, I'll be moving to another ISP if they start doing metered bandwidth. That is not the sort of business plan I want to support with my dollars.

Invest in infrastructure, not in policing your customers and starting up with the sort of "late fee"-type revenue streams the cell phone companies and banks have become so reliant upon. Fark that.

What a rip off. I legally download tv shows from other countries daily for my folks. I would exceed 250gb a month easily.

I don't like the cap concept, but the 250GB/month actually doesn't seem that horrible. I cannot picure myself approaching that in the near term.

I think it's quite safe to say the vast majority (of the .1%) of those exceeding that are pirates.

So, if this only affects .1% what is the point of implimenting it in the first place?

Bring on WiMax. My only decent options are Verizon DSL and Comcast cable. FiOS would be sweet obviously but once WiMax rolls out these physical connection ISPs are going to be forced to *gasp* compete. I can't wait.

I am currently on a connection with a 250mb/day limit for downloads. That comes out to 7.5GB/month, if I perfectly utilize my bandwidth, which is impossible, because my ISP forces me through a web accelerator so I get no incoming connections; i.e., no torrenting of Linux ISOs, etc.

So 250GB a month? Yeah, I dislike limits, but honestly? It's a hell of a lot better than what I'm dealing with. ;-)

[quote] I wonder if its a combined 250gb or just 250gb down? [/quote]

That's exactly what I was thinking. Up here in Ontario, Canada, many of us don't have the luxury of switching over to the competition: one company usually holds the contract for that neighbourhood (many of which are the new houses being built).

In my neighbourhood, we only are offered Rogers, which really sucks because it's only 60GB/month, which is composed of BOTH upload and download. My sister is always on Youtube, I'm always on xbox live or playing something else online or downloading tv shows, 60GB/month is nothing.

I also agree with those looking at the future and HD content will be eating up your bandwidth very quickly. When will the madness stop?!?!?!?

All this is making my crappy 6Mb AT&T DSL look nice. AT&T doesn't care about anything as long as you PAY $$$!

250GB is a lot now for sure. More than most would need, though as mentioned, connection sharing blurs the line a bit in terms of how much you can reasonably expect to use.

Still, here on Rogers with 60gb/month cap with amazingly throttled torrents/anything encrypted, 250gb would seem like a dream.

Still I am waiting to see the day when IPTV becomes more commonplace and ISPs start exempting their own traffic from bandwidth caps but not their competitors.

250GB a month? I'm stuck at 12GB / month here :(.

The 250GB cap may not seem like a big deal now, but in 10 years? Who's to say that game demos won't increase in size, or if legal HD movies won't also increase in size?

You forget to mention that Comcast plans to implement a rule in which if anyone receives 4 letters in 12 months that they've been downloading copyright software, then they'll disconnect them. It only effects illegal downloads, but who's to say what's legal and what isn't?

Maybe all the neighbors in my apartment complex would quit downloading so much at peak times. I get less than 200kbs from 5-8pm.

I hate them all.

:o)

http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2008/03/comcastbt.jpg

You guys should be happy. Where i live the cap is around 40GB and the connection 4 MBits.

My guess is they are trying to get this implemented now as a precedent for a different sales model for when this kind of usage isn't so obscure.

yay. pay more for less.
I can see them losing customers to the competition.

I think listed caps are a good thing!

What was wrong about how Comcast dealt with bandwidth issues was/is that they lie and hide which produced problems for users without their knowledge. At least with known caps, people can make intelligent decisions regarding their money, usage and which ISP to use to get the optimum capabilities that they need. All of which were sorely lacking with Comcast's previous policies.

Its 250GB down only

Meh. My company pays for my comcast. They can eat the cost.

The minute fiber comes to my hood, I'm dumping comcast, tho. If I didn't have a family (damn them all to hell) I would just move out of my house to a hood with fiber.

Whats the point in offering premium bandwidth (speedboost, 16Mbps dl etc..)if you are going to charge people with a bandwidth cap. This company is ridiculous, yet another reason to move to FiOS.