DSL Reports broke the story earlier this week that Comcast is planning on testing using bandwidth caps and overage fees to try to rein in what they feel is a problem with P2P downloaders. The cap that they are apparently considering is 250GB/month, with a $1.50/GB fee for every gig over the limit. Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider offers a very good explanation that puts a 250GB limit into perspective:
In practical terms, 250 gigabytes is:
- A LOT of Web usage. Your typical daily Web/email/IM usage is probably somewhere between 10-50 megabytes — maybe 100-200 if you’re watching some low-quality YouTube, or 300-500 if you’re watching a few hours of Hulu every day. So normal Web users won’t have any problems. (1000 megabytes = roughly 1 gigabyte.)
- A LOT of World of Warcraft. Downloading game patches uses a bunch of bandwidth once in a while, but normal game play tops out around 30-60 kilobytes/second, or maybe a 100-200 megabytes an hour run rate, according to one blog. Another user says normal usage is closer to 1-5 megabytes per hour. Continue to play until your eyes bleed.
- 2500-4000 MP3 albums, or 50,000 3-minute songs. Depending on quality/length, an MP3 album is somewhere between 60 and 100 megabytes. Amazon says its 3-minute MP3s are about 5 megabytes. There are only 43,200 minutes in a 30-day month, or enough time to listen to 14,400 3-minute songs. So you’ll be ok.
- 170-250 iTunes movie downloads. Digital movies in standard-def run between 1 and 1.5 gigabytes. “No Country For Old Men” is about 1.3 gigs, friend-o.
- 50-60 HD movie downloads. These run closer to 4-5 gigabytes each. So theoretically, this could be a problem, one day, for people who download more than 2 movies a day. Do you know any of those folks?
So: If you download one HD movie a week, six standard-def movies a week, 5 albums a week, play a ton of WoW, and surf a lot of YouTube and Hulu, you’ll still struggle to use 100 gigabytes of bandwidth per month. We think you’ll also struggle to listen to all that music and watch all those movies. Also, you should get out more. It’s nice outside! Go for a walk.
In other words, 250GB/month is A LOT for your average user, and still pretty generous for all but the most hardcore downloader. Ars Technica suggests that Comcast is trying to get the FCC off its back about a variety of complaints by offering a much more transparent way of determining “bandwidth hogs”, since there have been many customer complaints about being abruptly shut off by Comcast without prior warning or disclosure of how much is “too much”.
Meanwhile, today at DSL Reports, “Karl”, the writer who broke the story on Tuesday, has a lengthy list of criticisms and concerns about the implications of this plan, including the eventual moving to billing customers for their Internet usage on a “per-byte” basis.
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