said by joetaxpayer:I see the problem as this: Comcast isn't offering all the stats. If the average user is 50GB, and we're told 1 in 10,000 break 250GB in any month, it seems there's a fear that's far worse than the problem at hand.
We're told that the average is 2-3 GB.
said by joetaxpayer:Are we all so outraged at our 'right' to unlimited download that we don't care that it would actually be an effort to exceed the cap?
Some are clearly taken aback that there is any limit at all. These are the people that don't realize that they were sharing the connection with others, or they didn't know what that meant, or they didn't expect Comcast to oversell as much as they did.
Others know that they use more than 250 GB a month and are struggling with this new budget.
Some don't have a clue. They check e-mail several times a day and now they're worried that they'll only be able to check it a couple of times a week.
said by joetaxpayer:I have about 1TB worth of drives on my computer, most is video off of cameras. I can't imagine (aside from a professional handling video) the need for such transfer volume.
I've been over it once or twice when I was studying the Sandvine thing. I'm with you -- it took an effort to consume that much.
One person told his story like this -- he used 300 GB during the Olympics. He has two HD-DVRs and subscribes to a service that uses compression to 5 GB/hr. He downloaded all the Olympic video down to both of his DVRs -- 60 hours -- 150 GB each DVR -- times 2. He blew the budget in 2 weeks.
Now, being that he was downloading (and not uploading), and likely doing so through a CDN (instead of far across the network), he probably affected absolutely nobody. Since the CDN was probably used, I'm not sure if that fact helps or hurts Comcast's transit costs (I suspect it doesn't matter -- someone know?).
So, in his case, he hits the stated cap (or he would have, it starts Oct. 1). He still might be in jeopardy due to the invisible cap.
The cap used to be connected to avoiding huge impacts on others on the network, it is now about avoiding huge impacts on Comcast's bottom line -- and while Comcast does have a right to make a profit, if it's going to hedge its bets by using a cap, it simply must be disclosed.
And now it is.