The 250GB cap has been active for 10 months: where is Comcast’s bandwidth meter?
Friday, August 15, 2008. That was the day Comcast confirmed rumors that it will be implementing a 250GB monthly cap for downloads and uploads for users of its residential internet service. The cap was set to go into effect on October 1, 2008. At first, the internet was rabid with rage, throwing all sorts of negative names and adjectives Comcast’s way. With time and thoughtful discussion, most understood that the 250GB cap won’t harm most users. In fact, it might do more to increase the consistency of speed and throughput on Comcast’s network.
Shortly thereafter, reports began to circulate that Comcast would make available a bandwidth meter to its customers to track their bandwidth usage. Comcast confirmed that such a tool is indeed coming, but didn’t say exactly when. And here we are now, a full ten months after the 250GB cap has been set in place. Yet we still don’t have an official bandwidth meter!
A quick tweet to Comcast’s friendly customer service rep (Frank), yielded that there is no ETA at the current time and that the meter is currently in testing. So what’s the hold up? Does it take a multi-billion dollar company a full year to develop what appears to be a relatively simple piece of software?
If you’re concerned about the amount of bandwidth you are using, there are a number of third-party programs that can do the job on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Click through for the Cnet video for the Windows and Mac tools.
In a later post, we will explore the best way this meter application should be built. Stay tuned!
6 comments to “The 250GB cap has been active for 10 months: where is Comcast’s bandwidth meter?”
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12. July 2009 at 12:30 am :
Probably going to work like Shaw here in Canada – if you pass the limit they send you a little letter saying "please watch your bandwidth use or we'll disconnect you". I think they don't monitor every connection, which is why they wouldn't be offering a bandwidth meter quite yet. They just watch for certain parts of the network using a lot of bandwidth and install monitoring at that location. It's cheaper that way…
13. July 2009 at 12:04 am :
and in the meantime, we'll just threaten all of our customers, treat them like criminals/usurpers, and rake 'em over the coals in the meantime. Don't download anything, even legal. You wouldn't want to cross our imaginary line that you have no way of knowing if you're even near.
Sorry, this just doesn't cut it. Universal threat requires universal monitoring and a meter universally available, not a “we'll tell you when you've done wrong — trust us.”
16. July 2009 at 3:18 pm :
That's interesting. You're right in that it would be too much of a hassle and too expensive to monitor every singleconnection, but if it could be automated and they could have an alert pop up every time a household/subscriber goes over their limit, that would probably work best for them. That way they would be able to up-sell the customer to something like a business plan. I'm no engineer, but I imagine that could be done on a node level (per neighborhood, maybe?).
24. July 2009 at 10:35 am :
Bit meter is good but I like ShaPlus Bandwidth meter, it show just the information required. How much bandwidth used in the current session, today and this month. It can be downloaded here http://www.shaplus.com/bandwidth-meter/
27. July 2009 at 4:07 am :
Thanks Chris! Do you think that a bandwidth meter would be more effective if it were to run on the ISP side? That way, it can track bandwidth use for an entire household, rather than per machine. This would save a user time, since he now only will need to check a single location for internet usage, rather than check every machine that's connected.
- Alex
7. April 2010 at 2:45 am :
STEAM games are nearly 20gig each now(download to play after paying), a blue-ray film is about the same, and every day more and more people are switching to ethernet/internet storage. I use MioNet to download and access my music CD's or anything else stored on my ethernet drive at home, from anywhere in the world.
You should also consider the fact that there is more than 1 person in an average household. People in my household play online video games, watch CNN, MLB, and the broadcasts are usually HD, and can reach 2gb in 1 hour of news.
You should be able to use your service to it's fullest 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, using your bandwidth to it's fullest. That is the basis that most people use when choosing what level of service is best suited for them.
Comcast has enough network capacity to deliver the bandwidth without capping the amount transferred. Our household is on the most basic service, and received a notice that we had gone well over 250gb last month, and if this happened again that our service would be shut down for 12 months.
FiOS and Satellite are looking better and better.