US Cable Support > Comcast HSI > What providers have the highest dl ul caps or no caps?

What providers have the highest dl ul caps or no caps?

If you have Comcast you should really have no problems whatsoever if you remain under 100GB/mo. Generally Comcast starts to send out warning letters to those who use ~200-300GB/mo.

What would be a preferred monthly cap for you? Do you do a lot of consistent downloading/uploading?

reply to joeym7
Unfortunately Comcast has no stated amount on this, so it really could be any amount. There been users posting less - as little as 35gig/month.

That is true, but is also rare. Others have mentioned this is because it is market dependent... if you degrade the quality of the network for others, there is a chance of receiving a letter in the mail

reply to joeym7
It probably also depends on how much is used at one time rather than the month.. An example would be if you have 10mbps cap and downloading all day (24 hours) on newsgroups you'd use up 105~GB ... There is a big difference from 100~ GB in a day and spread out over the month... 4-8GB files here and there probably wont be a problem but if you are just constantly on it then you might draw some attention.

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null

How can one determine how many bytes they have downloaded in a given period of time?

Thanks

Steve

Thanks for the links this should solve this problem

Steve

reply to dadkins

du meter - daily usage

reply to comcastuser
I am not overally concerned about my level of download, it probably is about 1GB or less most months but every now and again I go fetch a new ISO image of a recently released Linux distribution which usually is several GB's. I also occassionally watch online TV shows but that is rare.

Steve

If your usage is erratic (for instance, I sometimes upgrade my Debian machines, which is approx. 300-500 megs all at once), and other days don't use the service at all - then Comcast will be fine for you.

Furthermore, with the 64-bit processors, I'm running a 32-bit chroot inside a 64-bit environment, so I have to upgrade twice, which can reach 800 megs within an hour or two.

As long as you don't consistently download lots of stuff, you're fine. You have to understand how cable internet works, and that if you don't watch your downloads their speed is going to suffer. Cable internet providers don't typically offer "unlimited", but they do offer fast speeds. Those fast speeds depend on your neighbors on the network only using those speeds occasionally.

You're much better off with DSL, or Fiber (Verizon), because those are real internet connections.

Everything is oversold (or overbooked) -- for instance -- according to Comcast's spokesperson - the top 1% of users use 28% of the bandwidth -- but cable internet doesn't have the option letting that "be", if they are going to offer 8, 15, or more megabits per second, because those speeds are only there if people don't use their service. I'm on a rather low-usage node, and I routinely see download speed of 3400+ Kbs, at least for a short while (20 seconds or so). But if you're only downloading a small file or something, that really speeds things along.

Cable internet sucks. It's not a real connection, it's not zeroes and ones. It's BS.

Get DSL or Fiber if you can. Those are real. Then, you're talking terabytes, and that's OK. It's all just zeroes and ones. That's all it is. With cable, speed is the selling point, but they (any cable co.) can't maintain that speed. If I wasn't on such a low-usage node, I'd see 2500 or 1600 Kbps on the powerboost. They're basically giving you the entire "pipe", which is used by 100+ people, for a very short while. It's a shared network. The actual number of zeroes and ones you can transfer in a specific time period is rather limited. Unless, of course, that time period is 10 seconds. Then, you're traveling at the speed of light.

If you have no choice, and you only download things occasionaly, like I download updates to my Linux computer, Comcast is perfectly fine, and in fact, their powerboost really speeds the process along very nicely.

So it's up to you - but as far as the technology involved is concerned, any cable or satellite internet service is going to be inferior, and is going to have limitations.

Bandwidth is meant to be used. It's a tool. The bandwidth you're given with both sat and cable internet is artificially fast. You can't really sustain that speed for any significant length of time w/o running into problems.

But I've never had any problems, and the major downloading I do is when I upgrade the OS. Comcast is better than some other cable providers when it comes to that because they are more flexible, because they don't have a set limit. You'll run into problems if you do heavy usage month after month after month. If it's occassional, occassionaly downloading a larger file or two, you'll be fine, perfectly fine with Comcast. And you'll download that file pretty fast, too - with their powerboost.

reply to pokesph

UL to DL ratio

data from pokesph:

reply to stevephl

Re: What providers have the highest dl ul caps or no caps?

reply to devnuller

Re: UL to DL ratio

said by devnuller:

Wouldn't one most likely be running a server (AUP violation) to have an upload to download ratio like this

reply to devnuller

said by devnuller:

Wouldn't one most likely be running a server (AUP violation) to have an upload to download ratio like this

reply to devnuller

said by devnuller:

Wouldn't one most likely be running a server (AUP violation) to have an upload to download ratio like this

reply to swhitney2003

Re: What providers have the highest dl ul caps or no caps?

reply to dadkins

Re: UL to DL ratio

said by dadkins:

said by devnuller:

Wouldn't one most likely be running a server (AUP violation) to have an upload to download ratio like this

Not really... P2P maybe, perhaps ALOT of image/video uploads... could also be LAN traffic.

My VAIO Media Server streaming TV to this laptop is about 8mbps steady.
Watch a couple 1 hour TV shows and what do you have?

You have the DUMeter on that sending laptop with high upload!