US Cable Support > Comcast HSI > DOCSIS 3 Tiers and 250GB Monthly Bandwidth Limit?

DOCSIS 3 Tiers and 250GB Monthly Bandwidth Limit?

Out of curiosity, are you on a business or residential account?

Residential.

Yes.

I know carbonite limits you to 2-3 gigs a day and then throttles your connection down so low you stop backing up. So if you only do a couple gigs a day you will have plenty of room.
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Tech at the Beach.
I speak for myself, not my employer.

Thanks for the reply. I'm actually using Backblaze which does not throttle or limit.

I guess I will have to handle the throttling myself.

With the plan I pay for I could hit that cap in less than 24 hours of downloading and less than 5 days of uploading. In reality I would be doing both with backups running in the background.

It is likely that if I had not posted on this forum I would have hit the cap less than a day after the install tech left my house.

It seems like paying for more bandwidth should include a higher ceiling on that limit. I'm sure I'm not the first to post about this though.

Again, thank you for your reply.

Then I would suggest you look into a business class connection to fit your needs. I can't imagine backing up that much data every day constantly. Maybe once to get a backup started, after that it's only files that change.

I used to work in IT and had 50-100 users businesses that didn't have that much data to backup every day.
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Tech at the Beach.
I speak for myself, not my employer.

reply to goneplaid
Yes, people do not seem to grasp that you can pay more for TWO things

Speed & Bandwidth use.

Currently, the only variable available on the residential side is speed. On the business side there is (implicit) higher bandwidth use allowed as you go up in speed. Along with dramatically higher costs.

We can (and have) argue if this cost model is a good one for comcast, but for right now it is the only one they offer.

Throttle yourself, or switch to business class and pay more, or find a different provider (if that's an option)
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My place : »www.schettino.us

reply to goneplaid

reply to beachintech
Yes of course, I'm talking about an initial backup. I am a parent. I take photos and videos of my kids. Years of HD video and high res photos taken with a DSLR. Really nothing out of the ordinary in this day and age.

After the initial backup is complete I hope to not worry so much about the limit.

Then again, with all the various media streaming my family does (Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, Pandora) ... I suspect I will need to keep an eye on it.

reply to JohnInSJ

fiberguy, or anyone...

Do you know if the 'business class' service pricing is Dependant upon other services being bundled? For instance, the price I am paying for DOCSIS 3 service was substantially cheaper when bundled in with a Triple Play plan than if I had just ordered a la carte internet.

-update-

If anyone is interested. I just got off the phone with a business class sales person and they do offer bundled services (minus the premium channels). Unfortunately the internet speed available is half of what I have now at twice the cost. I don't think the monthly limit would come into play as much at least not enough to justify the price increase.

Thanks again to everyone who has replied.

reply to fiberguy

reply to fiberguy

If I remember correctly, you're in a DOCSIS 3 market - it sounds like rugby is in an area still pending the upgrade.

reply to goneplaid
the 250GB cap is a soft cap

so let the 1st backup run and then watch it the 2nd month

you can go way over the cap without repercussions

I think the official policy is you have to go over it two months in a row and be one of the top users in your area

Iswitched to a business account out of principle but would likely have never had issue witht he cap

reply to goneplaid
As DarkLogix said you likely won't have an issue with the cap. I'd say keep your usage below ~400GB or 500GB and if you're on a relatively uncongested node Comcast won't bother you.

I went a little over 250GB (probably 300GB by Comcast's meter) last fall doing an initial backup on BackBlaze (yay for maxing out your connection to a backup provider!) and didn't hear a peep from Comcast. That said, I was on 50/10 (for a few days) and 22/5 (for the rest of the month), though for a *little bit* over the limit that doesn't really matter.

On the other hand I have some friends who pushed 750GB (mostly downloads AFAIK) on their 16/2 connection. They got a call from Comcast to kick their usage down a notch. They did, and everyone's happy now. No disconnections, no overcharging.

I would go ahead and back everything up without throttling the connection down. You won't get your internet connection killed on your first offense.