Comcast sets traffic limit

GIR 08-29-2008

250 gigabyte cap

US SERVICE PROVIDER Comcast has confirmed that it will limit subscriber traffic to a total of 250 gigabytes per month. The draconian restrictions are slated to be enforced by October 1.

An official statement claimed the company had "listened to feedback" from customers who requested a "specific threshold for data usage". According to Comcast, the new traffic limit will, "help [subscribers] understand the amount of usage that would qualify as excessive".

The service provider also noted that the bandwidth cap was set significantly higher than the median monthly usage of 2 to 3 gigabytes. To illustrate its dubious claim, Comcast reckoned that a user could download 125 standard-definition movies per month before exceeding the limit.
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Im liking it, it will slow down some piracy. and increaseign bandwidth speed would be nice to counder the cap for some people.

spawnschickishot

omg i think i watch more than a 125 movies per month lol is that bad for me?

Hsoolien

This really won't affect most Comcast customers, hell that's five full Blu-Ray discs a month, which feature way less compression then most online HD movies, the only people I see this hurting are pirates and people trying to run a commercial website via a domestic link which is against the contract anyways.

Raven

I wonder how this is going to affect gamers, especially the ones who play some of the latst online games. We go through bandwidth within 1 really good day of playing.

Hsoolien

From what i can find, if you play WOW 20 hours a day you use less then 10GB a month

Nina

With Unreal Tournament or Qauke you could surpase that easily. WOW is different becuase for the most part you only downloading stats data, movement, things like that. With Unreal Tournament, especially someone that plays on alot of custom servers you get alot with downloading all the maps and mods.

Even for me right now in the last 14hrs 33 mins with just small amount of browsing I'm am 100MB now. No youtube or any heavy media site, just this site and a few sites to shop on.

Raven

My usage
1 day 19 hrs 15 min - 589MB
some video usage, alot of browsing, no gaming yet

250GB is still around 9GB a day so its not like its will hurting most of anyone unless you have atleast 3 or more people gaming together online, maybe the.

Hsoolien

if you max out UT2004 connection allowance to most servers 20 hours a day still puts you at around 100GB a month. 250GB is really quite a bit, and there are very few people that can legally exceed that unless you have four or five gamers in a house online ALL the time, in which case they'd need an upgraded connection so they could play smoothly.

Dream

At first I was actually worried about this but until I see how much data is transfer while playing UT. I'm not really all that concerned about it. We definitely need to do a UT test.

Chello

I just tried joining a server that we used to play on. Less then 30 min of play and ownloading mods and play I did about 175mb of data transfer.

Raven

Well from the few stats we got doesnt look like it will effect much of anyone. Like Hsool said 250GB i really alot to use. It would be similar to putting the speed limit at 100mph. Few people would even go that high an then so much traffic you be lucky to even be able to go tht fast some times.

Hsoolien

As I pointed out earlier in the posts, this a cap that will only affect people that doing illegal activity, or disregarding their EULA, I'm not sure how much he does now but at his hey day of DLing every music video he could get a hold of Gir was only hitting about 15GB a month (on a provider up here that at the time had a recommended limit of 10 GB)

Nina

Even with illegal activity, it would still take them alot of time to use all that. We been playing UT on a new server all day and we barely at 200mb. That included downloading the maps for the first time. 9GB a day for downloading is alot. The cap would hardly affect anyone.

Raven

I asked about this and he responses with this.

Lynn

I just love it when Sinny breaks down stuff, with examples and everything. Even trying I don't think it would effect anyoe really.