‘Cause Your’re Going To Run Out Of Fingers And Toes Quick
I know this sounds hard to believe, but there WERE other bits of news over the weekend other than Sarah Palin and Hurricane Gustav.
Comcast very cleverly used these two media meltdowns to slip out their announcement that they will start capping customer Internet bandwidth usage beginning October 1. This came as no surprise whatsoever to anyone who follows the industry news and related blogs, it was just a formal announcement of something everyone had been waiting to hear for some time.
The cap will be 250 gigabytes downstream and upstream per month, roughly equivalent to filling three typical laptop hard drives to capacity. Comcast equates this to downloading 50,000 songs a month, or sending 40 million e-mails. In other words, the cap has been set high enough that the majority of average Internet users won’t have to worry about it, at least initially. This is, frankly, Comcast’s response to getting their hands slapped over throttling throughput to curb BitTorrent and other P2P traffic. They fully expect that the cap will only be an issue with the heavy-duty downloaders, who, it seems, they are sure are up to no good. If you read some of the comments in that link above, one valid counterargument is that the increasing popularity of streaming high-definition video will challenge that assumption relatively quickly.
Personally, I am not worried about getting anywhere close to 250 GB per month, even given some of my downloading habits, but I do think that Comcast has committed one big faux pas in the process. They didn’t make any provision for their customers to be able to monitor their own bandwidth usage. This article at Download.com offers some quick reviews and links for some free monitoring tools for Windows and Mac PCs, and I would recommend trying out a couple even if you’re completely sure that you’re not going to hit the cap — it’s useful to know how much you ARE using, because another likely development in broadband services will be the transition to a “metered” model where you pay for what you use. That particular concept is being tested right now in a couple of markets and may prove more popular with the cable companies AND with lower-usage consumers.
Increasingly we are watching more Netflix, Instant View movies…I wonder where that will put us. I wonder how soon this 250GB “cloud” will start descending and become fog?
if the movies you’re watching are in HD, then you had better download one of those monitoring packages and start keeping tabs. Standard def movies are only a couple of gigs, but an HD movie can be four times the size. You could be knocking against the cap if you were watching several movies a week.