Comments on: The 250GB cap has been active for 10 months: where is Comcast’s bandwidth meter?

By: Logik

Logik — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 02:45:35 +0000

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.

By: alexluft

alexluft — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 04:07:59 +0000

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

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:35:14 +0000

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/

By: alexluft

alexluft — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:18:05 +0000

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?).

By: Jack

Jack — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:04:13 +0000

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.”

By: dobesv

dobesv — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:30:58 +0000

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…