According to Slashdot:
Comcast has confirmed that all residential customers will be subject to a 250 gigabyte per month data limit starting October 1. ‘This is the same system we have in place today,’ Comcast wrote in an amendment to its acceptable use policy. ‘The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted.’ The cable provider insisted that 250 GB is “an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. … As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage,’ Comcast said Thursday. ‘If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,’ according to the AUP.
What the heck? 250GB a month? Yes, for a typical, non-technological household, then the 250GB seems okay. What about my house? I have 3 PCs, 2 Laptops, 2 iPhones, and one xBox 360. I work full-time from my home and I am a software engineer. I manage dozens of large web servers and many of them make backups to my “backup server” weekly. Anywhere from 10-20 GBs will be sent to my pc every week. Thats 80-100GB a month. I also stream movies, music, tv, and many other things daily. I download games on Steam and my xBox, and download legal things via BitTorrents.
I can see myself easily going over the 250GB a month limit, several months in a row! I’ve already felt internet throttling when ever I download legal content via BitTorrent from Comcast. The last few weeks I’ve had days where my Internet just seems to stop. But my biggest gripe I’ve ever had with Comcast is this….
When I request business class internet, Comcast tells me I can’t, because I live at a residential address. Thats right, I can’t get higher speeds, or static IP addresses, or a better service level agreement because I work from home. When I asked why, I was told that if I really was a big business, I should get an office. Oh yeah? I want to spend $1000 dollars more a month to have an “okay” office, have to spend money driving to work, only so I can have a “business” internet connect? Oh yeah Comcast, I love the idea! You are so in touch with the home office.
Ugh, I’m tired of Comcast, but my only other internet option is DSL, which in my old neighborhood can only get speeds of 256K…. which is slightly faster than my phone.
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I could see imposing a limit IF there was a higher class of service available. But the fact that they won’t let you sign up for business service is incredible.
I’ve seen a rather interesting solution to this that employs multiple cable connections. Not coaxle outlets, but rather independent lines and subscriptions. Say that you are renting out a bedroom apartment and would like to offer free internet to the resident. That should double your bandwidth limit. Set up two wireless routers and just alternate use.