You hear so much tough-talk and blustery grand-standing these days over data capping that it's hard to take any of it too seriously. A recent announcement by Comcast, however, is sending chills down the collective spine of Engadget (and seriously threatening to put a crunch on Thomas Ricker's... er, "movie" downloads). The company recently confirmed that it will begin capping its residential broadband service at 250GB per month (or roughly 124 SD movies) come October 1st, and could simply terminate customers who violate the cap more than twice. Of course, 250GB is a pretty large chunk of bandwidth, so you'll have to be entertaining some pretty hefty habits to break that bank. Then again, who likes the Man breathing down their pipeline?
posted Aug 29th 2008 9:28PM
"Then again, who likes the Man breathing down their pipeline?"
Not me!
ditto!
I dunno.. it would depend on how pretty he was :p.
sorry to cut but i have a question that nobody has answered yet. does this cap include streaming video from say hulu or youtube? if it does i hope charter communications doesn't adopt this.
THATS BULLSHIT.
I used 150GB down this month and 25GB UP
and i know that i did not download many things just P2P tv programs. thats stupid
What the fuck!?!?!?! At least this won't happen for a while for Cox users who are always around a year behind Comcast!!!
I'm laughing so hard because I know Comcast will lose a lot of customers. AT&T is going to get a crap load =D
@v3xx
it is applicable to everything u get from the net. say goodbye to downloading those movies to your ipod n xbox.
there is no way videos on demand is the future if they start capping bandwidth like this. i cant imagine how much 1080p movies would take up..
Jeeze, comcast already limit throttling dl speed so, now they even limit bandwidth, this sux. Booo comcast, I might just switch back to Earthlink or sumthing.
Ahhh 250GB!!!!
Us Canadians are capped at 90GB on our highest speeds - $100 a month, 8 Mbps.
Rogers sucks!!!
@erhan
you do realize that 150 + 25 = 175 and that 175 < 250, right? So you would be doing OK under the cap.
Oh goodie, right in time for Docsis 3.0!
You know, when Comcast makes these announcements, my area doesn't seem affected (which is kind of odd because I live in the suburbs of DC, which is almost Comcast's backyard). I've never experienced capping of any kind during the last few years. If anything it's annoying that they have increased there prices about 4 - 5 times for internet and digital TV. The cool part is we get HDTV DVRs for free for every TV and the internet speeds are much faster than as when we started (currently, 10mbit/1mbit, but the internet2 at college is a beast though [full gigabit ports/speed, w00t], sadly I don't live close enough to campus).
When Oct. comes around I'll do a mass loot of linux isos and see if I get capped/a phone call/etc.
darkstar,
You don't have to *imagine* how fast 1080p content would use up 250gb, all you have to do is break out a basic calculator.
Do not fear. I am sure comcast will let you buy more bandwidth. :) (how this is legal, I don't know) lets hope the throttling ends now and we see docsis 3.0 in october.
@brandon Too bad they already do. And have been for a while now.
http://www.cox.com/policy/limitations.asp
...yeah...it makes Comcast's new policy look like a godsend. However I don't think they've actually enforced it..since I use them too and haven't had any letters about it etc.
That's massive compared to what we get in Australia. $70/mo for 50GB, and we're slowed to 56k speeds if we go over. Bandwidth limits are usually split into peak/off-peak too (ie. 20GB between 0700 and 0100 (peak) and 30GB to use during the 'off-peak' time).
Your kidding!
I'm paying $50 for 7GB a month.
I'm paying $60 for 25GB. I don't want to see Comcast ruin broadband for America - tell Comcast it's NOT okay! Get a new provider! Get FIOS if you can, and if you can't ring em up and tell em you want it where you are :D
Wow. I used to feel like the US had the shaft with our comparatively inferior download speeds. But what good are download speeds with horrible monthly caps like that (and prices...even if they are AUD, are horrible). I truely pity you folks in Austrailia. I hope your telcoms get some sense knocked into them soon :-(
It reminds me of that ad being run by whatever phone company in Australia at the moment who claim that 3gig a month is "generous" and "huge".
I could go over that in an hour.
Sooo... greetings from Korea, land of someones unsecure router every block or so.
Fios is from Verizon, who are corporate shitheads just like comcast
250 GB is HUGE!
Here in India, I am paying equivalent to USD 23 for 8mbps link with a 6 GB cap. ugh! At 8mbps imagine how quickly I run out of my quota.
18/1 Mbps for 50 euros in Spain. No bandwidth cap.
Wow, I've used around 1GB today watching legal streams today. And that's just 3x25 mins...
I'm glad I have an ISP that charges for 2mbit but seems to cap it at 6mbit. Without any GB restrictions.
Excatly!
I would love to have 250GB a month! Right now i am stuck with 14GB on peek and off peek (so 28GB in total), and that is with 512kbs or something at $60 a month.
But really, it cant totally be blamed on the telcos. The main reason for sucky internet here is that there are hardly any underwater cables to get our internet. If there were more, i am sure the strain would be taken down, and our plans would get faster and cheeper
heh, you guys have it real easy!
i'm paying 30$ for 1 (yes ONE) GB per month for my wireless Broadband (3.5 G) HSDPA.
that's absurd, if i wanted 3GB per month it's 60$ and it goes on..
I do my heavy download at work :P
I was about to get really pissy about this, but then I read about other broadband providers considering limits in the 5-50GB range. So I'll just be only slightly pissy.
While I agree with you that the cap is certainly generous, it's not the size of the cap that bothers me. I feel like my habits fall well within the 250GB a month range.
Now they've said, "Here's the cap for everyone, it exists". I think that it will be much easier for them to start decreasing those caps slowly and most customers won't say anything, and when it starts to become the norm, who is stopping Verizon FiOS from adding caps to their service or any other ISP?
Good point - but adding regulations to my bandwidth in general just seems like blasphemy. And it would be nice if they countered that bandwidth regulation with some added features - like letting me freakin stream espn360!!!!
640K of memory, er um, 250 GB of bandwidth should be enough for anybody
I like how they still brag about the fast download speed in their ads. So it's great we have fast downloads and then they say you better watch what you're downloading. Q.
They actually have two speeds - "Fast" and "Banned for Life." What a delightful deal.
I have 8Mbps service from Comcast. If they give me an actual 8Mbps all the time (which of course they don't but they pretend to--even higher in bursts they say), then in less than 3 days I'll use up their 250GB cap. What am I supposed to do the rest of the month?
Simple, just sign up for 10 accounts :P
And what are people going to do when Comcast is the only provider available in their area? I'm glad I live in an area where I have alternatives.
....Comcast is the only one in my area. Verizon sold the Fios lines in New England so i have no hope of it coming here :-(
Massachusetts and New York are lousy with FIOS. So it's not all New England, and even then, Fairpoint is a good alternative to Comcast. But what about the people who live too far from the central office?
Data capping like this sets a dangerous precedent, especially when we're only going to be using more and more internet services as time goes on. This restriction by Comcast seems more like an admission that they can't keep up.
@mike: comcast just sold their lines in my area to fairpoint. we're fairpoint now :-) thank god.
@ JMM
not all the fiber was sold in New England. I was able to get FoIS here in Coventry (RI). Oddly enough we were able to get it because we live in an older section of a manufactured home park where ultily poles are still used (funny how the newer homes can't get FoIS yet due the underground cabling)
I hope though this doesn't become an industry standard
At least they are being honest about it.
Agreed.
They are being honest, and they've set the bar high.
If you're using that much, then you should be paying more (and they should provide a way for you to pay more) to do what you're doing.
This isn't just youtubing and email, here...you'd be doing a LOT of downloading to hit this limit.
You can hit the limit in legit ways too. Netflix is coming out next month for Xbox Live so streaming/downloading HD movies on a nightly basis will hit the cap too.
Plus think about all the services that are going to be going across the internet next year. Comcast is shooting themselves in the foot with this one.
If you don't have the infrastructure upgrade it if not lower speeds. Don't put a cap because you can't keep up...
So Microsoft sells me a unit and a subscription to it's XBOX Live. They also charge me for the content I choose to watch. Now Comcast is saying pay the "piper" for choosing to do those things. Trapped? I think so...Q
That's what is really bothering me about the cap. To be honest to exceed 250GB in a single month doing normal internet stuff, including torrents, seems unlikely. However, Microsoft and others are trying pretty hard to establish IPTV as a real alternative to cable television. So if you're using your internet for all the stuff your doing now plus all your TV and movie watching any kind of cap is going to be a problem. I think Comcast knows this too.
speaking of xbox live how much bandwidth does it actually take? never actually looked into it. i wonder if you play a few hours a day how much you'll use in a month
Games probably don't take that much. Downloading a video on the other hand...
Gaming is more about latency than bandwidth, i.e. how fast the water is going to flow versus how much fits in the pipe. Normal internet i.e. email and browsing adds up to so little it's inconsequential. The real big ones are the downloading of music (to a very small degree), videos, and programs.
Better start stacking up on those torrents people...doomsday draws near.
Except for this limit has nearly always been in place, they just didn't say it was unless you went over. The article is somewhat misleading for that reason. Comcast is finally just coming clean about it.
I still hate them though. No one around here except for Comcast, so I'm stuck with 'em.
If my kid was using too much of my bandwidth, I'd use traffic-shaping to let them keep doing their thing without bothering me. Maybe Comcast should just de-prioritize high-bandwidth traffic instead. Oh wait...
This is what you get for suing them for traffic shaping.
The traffic shaping would have been fine if it was actual high bandwidth users that were targeted, instead of, you know...everyone.
You've got it right here. If we're going to sue Comcast and say they can't de-prioritize undesirable traffic into a smaller bucket to allow more critical applications like voice and video a guaranteed pipe then this is what it has to come to. All those P2P jerks had to complain that their torrents were going too slow and now the rest of us high-cap users with legitimate reasons to exceed 250GB/mo are screwed. I frequently use my connection at home to exchange MRI scans with several clinics and each scan can be 1.5-2GB. I only need to do 4-5 a day and I'm on the short list of folks they'll be disconnecting.
People need to understand that the more applications we run over the same pipe, the more we need to pay attention to how that pipe is managed. This is the worst possible scenario for everyone and all you folks who are complaining about this should have seen it coming.
@CoffeeDragon:
Sounds to me like you need to be paying for a business line rather than a residential line, dontcha think? According to the article (and Engadget) the cap only applies to residential users.
First they always had the cap SO suing them did not cause them to replace things with a cap the cap was always there for the most part.
Second they were not SHAPING traffic they were physically interfering impersonating and disabling traffic and effectively crippling peoples connections.
I could live with some traffic shaping.
CoffeeDragon: you may think that your mri scan is more important than everybody, but you are just as bad as the people doing torrent, you are still using more than the average people. This sucks for everyone not just you. I don't think I ever exceed that, but any kind of restriction will lead to more restriction later.
please please please bring fiber to atlanta, att.
I second that
I 3rd that.
x3
As soon as u-verse is available in Marietta, I'm switching from Comcast.
Please Please Please
I have att uverse in atlanta and all i can say is it is so much better than comcastic. when we had comcast if you had a problem then it could take forever for them to fix, but with uverse i feel like they actually care about the customer. I'm pretty sure too that att will not instate a bandwidth cap anytime soon for uverse because they are trying to get customers from comcast and that is one great advertising campain.
While I applaud them for FINALLY!!! giving customers a solid bandwidth limit instead of just cutting them off after they reach some arbitrary number that only Comcast knew. It's too little to late for me Verizon is installing Fios in my area and I will be dropping this fucking company the second it becomes available.
It's not even that they're giving them a solid number now. What urked me before is that they advertised their service as "Unlimited Internet", when it clearly wasn't. Now, they better not keep advertising with 'Unlimited', and an asterisk.
For what it's worth though: I couldn't handle this cap. I like high definition, and those videos get quite large as you can imagine. 1080p, sometimes upwards of 100MB for a minute thirty second trailer. I watch things that are lots longer than that too. I'd hit a 250GB limit in half a month, easy.
Why can't we be like our Swedish friends with their 100mbit/s pipes? D:
i was dl 200gb a month. comcast demanded i pay more per month or they would terminate my service. i switched to verizon and never looked back. though verizon is slower... at least i can dl all i want!
comcast sux!
In Australia, almost everyone are capped and the average is, wait for it, somewhere around 2 GB a month. We could only dream of 250GB.
Yikes, I can do 2GB in about 40 minutes..
You guys need to understand that you, will hardly break that download limit. I have a 12GB limit here in Australia at 10Mbit speeds so seriously, grow up and don't complain. 250GB is A LOT you won't go through it unless you are downloading at fast speeds 24/7
I don't think it's the actual limit that bothers us. I think it's the fact that I see no disruption in my service that they claim is happening. They have charged us a pretty penny and never bothered us with limits in the past and now they claim the pipes are all jammed up. Some of us just do not believe that...Q
250GB is allot of bandwidth but why would any customer be happy with that when they where "suposadly" getting unlimited service before this epeshally when I'm sure this new limit don't come with a price cut on there monthly service fee.
Oh for shit's sake... Just because it's worse somewhere else doesn't mean there's no right to complain about it. If that was true, then no one could complain about anything since someone is always worse off (which really wouldn't be that bad). You can complain all you want about your situation, but don't say we don't have our own right to do the same (you're just as ridiculous as us when put in perspective with a Cuban).
And YOU have to remember, this is a tech blog. Most of us are using waYYYYYYYYY more bandwidth than 8-20GB a month. Just my torrents & other http/ftp downloads reach into the 200GB range, then add my roomates shit & all the games/tv/voip stuff we do online & it hits 250 easily.
The funny thing is that people are complaining that "Oh now Comcast is limiting our bandwidth and not cutting our costs blah blah blah..."
Don't you people realize that Comcast has ALWAYS limited bandwidth? And it's ALWAYS been in the 250 GB range? Now that they're announcing the cap, people start complaining.
How about this:
Stop downloading HD porn, go out, find a girlfriend, get a job. Problem solved.
In Africa young children are forced to work 16 hours a day for one 1 meal, so you shouldn't complain about children in sweat shops only working 12 hours and getting 2 meals.
See how well your convoluted logic works?
@the aussie that wants us to grow up:
are you streaming/downloading 1080p movies from netflix?
please...do you even have 1080p?....
go play your commodore64...it doesnt need the internet.
us accepting this limitation is simply an invitation for more and stricter limitations....with internet media on an insane rise with full game DLs via steam, to full HD movie streaming (all legally), to CD quality sirius streams, to lossless music purchases...250gb will seem not so big in the near future.
when you get punched in the nose, and accept it, it's more likely the offender will sock you in the mouth next.
to those people from other countries with much smaller limits...what internet habits are the norm?....can you stream HD video, and everything?....if so, your limitations are awful, and i truly feel for you.
This is a bunch of bullshit I am switching to someone else within the next week or so.
The biggest impairment to technological growth for all things internet is now the providers. While 250gb is a nice chunk now, will it still be so in a year? Two? Build out your damn networks and invest for the future.
@250Gb per House. 4 college guys. 60Gb per head. I just got a 20Gb limit with my provider (videotron) and I can't do anything much more than download music, browse and youtube. No high-rez video streaming or movie downloads. Ive stopped playing online because I have no idea how to monitor it for now and @ $8/Gb over the limit, it would be very dangerous to try to "feel" it out.
I would love Bell sympatico to do this instead of throttling the networks. When someone tries to download a legal file and it is stuck at 30kbps instead of being at 300 or 600 or even 1mbps on some connections. It really sucks!1
Having a limit means people will reduce their download.
Whe you limit it at 30kbps. You just tell all your friends (50000 +) to do the same and then Bell will be having the "time of their life".
So in other words. This alternative solution to all the p2p and other problems seems to be doing better with comcast than with Bell's crappy "solution".
Oh and I dunno what Bell Sympatico you are with but they dont throttle their networks they have a cap just like rogers.
electronics customers in general are the most mistreated kind of customer i've ever seen, habitually. if they started making cars that had a mileage cap on them, and then installed cameras in your car that they watched to make sure you didn't do anything illegal, they wouldn't sell one car. everyone should just massively switch providers when they pull this kind of thing, let them know they are not necessarily in control if we don't want them to be. at least they provide a way for you to get out of your contract. Come to think of it, how many people do you think are going to torrent the everloving crap out of their connection to prematurely cancel their service. That would be beautiful.
Oh hells no.
I watch youtube 24/7, I upload documents for my personal business, I spend hours on ebay each day, and I rack up around 500GB bandwidth a day. Goodbye Comcast, Hello Cox (not sure what their standing is on caps?) or Qwest (depending)!
Dude, you can't do 500GB per day on Comcast. At 8Mbps down, and 500Kbps up, it would still take something like 6 days to use 500GB even if you got full bandwidth from Comcast at all times. You're wrong.
they are setting precedent for future download caps sure we wont be coming near 250gb now but 2 years from now we will and they will be ready
and this is why i have at&t and not comcast any more. I remember a few months ago when i still had it my download speeds where excellent but my upload speeds went down dramatically and now there all good on at&t. comcast is faster thought and I have the fastest!!
A phone call? Only one warning? No way to really know how much you are using? This won't end well.
use tomato firmware with your router.
fail
Get over it! I'd kill for 250GB a month, instead I'm stuck on 10GB per month, with an extra 5GB costing me $10NZD per month in New Zealand..
I'd be willing to bet there are currently less than 1% of users who come close to 250GB..
Bandwidth caps are normal for the rest of the world, its coming to the US and you'll just have to deal with it..
I don't see bandwidth capping it's a "norm" in the rest of the world.
Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, UK, Germany the list goes on
When I was in Hong Kong a couple of years ago, 100mb UP & Down Fiber Network cost less than US$30/month.
They use the network to provide 720P contents too.
Not to mention Japan or South Korea ~
When we payed for higher speed, we are already paying for a high bandwidth
And the people above mentioned it,
250gb seems not bad in today's standard, but think how fast technology grow.
iTunes is already offering 720P HD download, someday may be they will offer 1080P video download.
Average Blu-ray movies are around 25GB-40GB, say you watch One every Sunday~ You already used up half your quota.
The more important thing is,
once one provider start doing this, everyone would follow.
Some people may jump out and say you can switch,
but it's not true for a lot of US sub-urban (let alone rural) users.
Cable is the only source for high speed Internet for many users whom does not live inside the city.
DSL has distance restrictions and FTTH is too expensive if the total consumers are not high enough in the region.
I live only 9 miles from downtown of a metropolitan city and yet I can only choose between Time Warner Cable and AT&T DSL (max speed 1.5mbps)
When they push those higher speed packages to charge more, they should ensure their network are able to carry that kind of traffic.
For a home user, over 8GB/day is more than enough, but it's kind of an f-you with the already outrageous prices of internet and cable. It's especially annoying to the dozens of companies who have been revolutionizing the information era by relying on unlimited broadband for phone service, entertainment media, higher quality downloadable content and so forth. It's obvious that the general quality of downloadable media parallels the cadence of hard drive space/price and download capabilities. In the late 90's, we were downloading 640x480 photos at slow speeds on small hard drives. Now we are downloading multi-gigabyte HD films quickly and freely. At what point will the bandwidth caps begin to sap the proliferation of quality media on the internet?
And you know that they are eventually going to have different price plans per bandwidth sooner or later.
They already do. 8Mbps costs more. Don't think it increases your cap, not yet anyway. Would be best if it did. I assume they also have business plans where this cap won't apply. We might all have to find out more about those...
Just be happy your not in Canada Rogers caps us at 60GB!!! I do that in a weekend! then they just charge us extra per GB!
"roughly 124 SD movies"
Not that I condone such activity, but the majority of pirated SD flicks are ripped and encoded to fit on CDs (DivX players come to mind), so we're talking more like 700MB per movie. I hear even the inefficiently ripped are as little as 1.3MB in AVI format, so we're talking more realistically 200+ (if you have to be stingy when "sharing" [though I'm not sure entirely sure if uploaded data comes into play here]).
Regardless, as pointed out in the article that's more than enough to maintain such activity, though I'm still not entirely sure how this works. What about playing online games, how quickly does that eat up bandwidth? Can someone clarify?
I think the entire thing was just something to scare people with paranoia, but nw that it's a reality I'm a little freaked out by the idea of having Big Brother watching some of my friends' activities.
I still
Don't forget that if you're using P2P those movies should be counted twice, both down (the part you care about) and up. In fact if you're uploading to a ratio of 1.5 or so like you're supposed to, a 700MB movie would take 2.5 times that or about 1.8GB by the time you stop seeding it. So 250GB is about 142 movies...
And that's assuming all the control traffic is zero bytes (its probably pretty close). And that the html pages you browsed to find the torrent are zero. And that you don't do anything else, even update your torrent client, etc.
Personally I've got an Apple TV, a Wii, multiple Tivos, a laptop, a desktop, Carbonite backup of all my music (100GB) and photos, a windows home server, etc etc. Even if they give me a windows utility to track the usage on one of these suckers, that isn't going to tell me much about what all that other stuff is doing--downloading firmware, movies, service packs, backing up computers to the network, downloading video podcasts, etc. Will be interesting to see what all of this takes if I can figure out some way to compute it. Putting a windows program on one or two of these won't do it, and from what I can see my Linksys router doesn't expose any statistics to let me find out what I've used either.
Comcast needs to offer an online measurement that is kept relatively current, so you can check your usage over time and adjust if you're getting close. Its ridiculous that they don't. How come the cell phone companies can do this?
It's not like people SOLELY use their connections to pirate movies nonstop (well, most people), so browsing the web also adds to the tally.
If you think websites don't use a lot of bandwidth you'd be mistaken...nowadays each page can be a couple megabytes each, and if you stumble upon a page with large photos (let's say a camera review website with samples as an example) you can quickly tally up a few hundred megs in bandwidth usage.
When you consider how much of that bandwidth is largely wasted on huge flash advertisements you'll realize you end up paying money largely to look at ads, lol.
Om Malik had it right; Comcast can only get away with this if they provide a 100% reliable way to check your usage. Otherwise it'll be their word against yours.
That is almost 240 movies a month. This limit is directed at "seeders". If that is not good enough for you, get fiber.
Can you say fiddy megs? Say former "surewest", if you got da pipes.
if you download, you should be a seeder too