05 October 2008

Comcast usage caps - usage caps in general are bad

Dearly Beloved,

I live in the USA - land of the free etc. Well apparently not so free any more. Comcast the largest provider of cable internet in the country (I think) recently introduced new policy that limits the amount of bandwidth that any user can take advantage of. Claiming that the average usage is only 2-3 GB a month they have set a new limit of 250 GB a month.

So you say no problem right? Actually you should be scared and you should be concerned that the limiting of usage becomes a big issue.

On their website - they claim that this is really not going to hurt. So I downloaded their recommended (freeware I might add) tool to see how much I was using:

http://www.shaplus.com/bandwidth-meter/index.htm

In the space of 10 mins I was using more than 3MB a minute. (I like listening to Pandora). Sending and receiving emails etc is one thing but usage of the web and watching webcasts and downloading documents is a common activity. I understand that AOL and others especially in UK have already imposed limits. This is getting ugly.

Anyway - I think I will be OK - but - you might want to consider how much you actually use. Remember I am not hosting a server or anything like that so this is plain vanilla activity.

You have been warned - this isn't exactly comcastic.

Cheers

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