Comcast Considering 250GB Cap, Overage Fees → 250gb is a lot more than most of you think.

I do agree that caps in general suck. Especially when comcast users are not use to being capped currently and started there service when it was un-capped. It would also be unfair for comcast to start charging people fees without first getting a new contract clearly outlining the new plan, signed by every customer. You should also have the ability to check your current usage and an option to auto suspend service once past the limit. So, at first i was a tad upset.

Then i thought about it.

250 gb is more than anybody i know currently uses. And im sure a lot of us are extremely heavy p2p users that think we go over the limit when were likely no where close. Lets do some very "rough" estimates pretending that someone watches regular definition movies every minute they are awake during a 1 month period. First i would like to say that if anyone is this lame then i really dont care if comcast charges them up the ass. They would still be getting there moneys worth at the rate there downloading when you consider the hundreds this would cost in movie rentals or even worse dvd purchases. Likely thousands a month. And come on everyone...dont lie. Almost nobody pays for there downloading. Its all torrents and the like.

So, 720 hours in a 30 day month.
240 hours your asleep.
480 hours your awake.
So you have the rough potential of 240 two hour movies.
700mb per movie is the current standard.
240 x .7gb = somewhere around 168gb per month. Even in this extreme case you would still have 82gb left over to play with. Thats another 117 movies you could download each month that you could never even watch because of the lack of possible time.

The point is, NOBODY watches 240 movies a month! Let alone 240+117. People say i watch too many movies and i only watch 10-12 a month!!!! And it is not sustainable anyways.
1) Almost nobody can torrent a movie every 2 hours unless they are heavily seeded and there are only so many movies that popular.
2) You would run out of movies/music/etc that your interested in pretty fast. Eventually you would run out of movies of any type. Almost no older movies that weren't extremely popular are available so that limits amount of available movies substantially.

HD video. The first thing to realize is that while our technology supports it in small amounts it is definitely not supported in large amounts even without a 250gb cap. Can anyone on comcasts residential plans currently download 4.4gb every 2 hours? I cannot do that on a fast web site. And i cannot come anywhere close on torrents. Especially since the HD torrents are hardly seeded compared to low-def. Even if i left the pc on all night i cannot normally DL an entire HD movie. Besides, 250gb is about 57 HD movies!!!! Who needs 57 HD movies a month!!! If you can DL 57 HD movies without going passed the cap then what the hell are people doing to go over 250GB?????

Someone could try to argue that there is also other things going on like music, voip, video conference, but there is not. Your already watching movies! You cant do all that stuff at once anyways without splitting speeds. So it just cancels it out for the most part. If you take time out to do something else on the net your going to use less bandwidth anyways because file sharing is a bandwidth hog. And if you do several things at once (eg: p2p, surf, video conference) your wasting bandwidth buy missing your movie or leaving your voip off the hook. You still only have 480 hours of awake time. People going over 250gb a month is just ludicrous.

Port scanning, pings, mal-ware, pop-ups, etc... account for very little in the long run compared to file sharing. I doubt it ever reaches higher than 200mb a month. Maybe 1gb tops with a bunch of mal-ware on your machine which is YOURS and not comcasts problem. You dont expect the city to maintain your car just because your taxes pay for the roads it drives on.

So, i strongly believe that anyone that is ACTUALLY using the content they are downloading will never go over there limit or even come close.

My conclusion: Not enough people go over 250gb to make a difference in regular users speeds. I think comcast would have to limit it to 50gb to actually speed things up. But of course this really has nothing to do with speeding up comcast. They just do not like copy infringement. They want to charge us for the internet to get to media and then charge us again to download it. Just like comcasts on-demand movies.

Your simple math clearly explains how 250GB is currently a reasonable cap to include most normal use, if not all normal use. It explains how it's almost too high.

Even though I advocate a lower "included amount" (I would change the terminology from "cap") and then lower per-byte charges than their $15 per ten gigabytes, say, perhaps $0.10 per gigabyte with 100 gigabytes included (or even 90GB or 60GB) would be more reasonable.

Yeah, your figures are a little skewed there buddy. For one, most people I know don't get 8 hours of sleep, it's closer to 6 per night, so add another 60 hours to the awake time. For seconds, the current "movie standard" is now 700-1400MB, not 700MB, there are far more 1.4GB movies showing up now than there are still 700MB movies. Using a figure of 1GB per movie is more reasonable.

HD Video. I'd like to know where you're getting your figures from. Maybe 40% of all HD content on P2P and News Groups is under 5GB, most is 6-18GB. You didn't take into account the fact that a VC1 rip is almost always 8GB, assuming it's 720p or pre-2008 1080p. Newer 1080p rips that are out are unconstrained in size based on recent scene rule revisions for 2008. A more reasonable figure for HD movie consumption is about 30 movies, which is easily watchable. Between the stuff I already have, and new stuff I get, I can watch upwards of 50 movies a month due to my job and schooling schedules.

I'll admit, I'm kind of unique in that I can actually use most of the content I get online. This is due to a pretty sweet job and schooling set up. I'm not speaking out against the 250GB cap, even though I could blow through that in 2 days if I really tried hard, a week or so without trying. The main issue I've got, is their overage fees and the DMCA crap. Charging $1.50/GB in overage is robbery, plain and simple, especially since there are so few "hogs." The people that don't use their connection up to their limit leave a lot of bandwidth floating around. I'd love to pay a fee per xxGB, assuming it was reasonable. Say $20 for the service connection and everything, then $20/100GB. I wouldn't even care if they charged me for the next tier up for using 1GB over, as long as it was reasonable. Comcast could get $100/mo or more out of me and many people I know pretty easily, but it's gotta be reasonable, not bullshit.

The DMCA thing is just crap, it just opens up Comcast to more attacks and crap due to some crappy dude crying because his song was used in a parody, or used as a 15 second loop somewhere, legally.

SOunds like if Comcast implements this, FIOS can pick up alot of new coustomers with the right advertising, even though most of the people wouldn't hit the cap. I'm using 700GB to 1TB a month now with FIOS and each month it keeps getting larger. It might even be more than that since I'm only guessing and some of the useage.

Are you sure?

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June... 975 gigs.. woohoo. You almost made a tera there.

Going forward I do see this becoming a real issue. Mainly from the upcoming HD video downloads like apple tv offers. I know that comcast would like to be the one to deliver HD content but many people will want to use other online services. 250 gigs may be enough for now. But I guarantee it will be a huge issue for comcrap in the future.

The point is, there going to be allot of legal ways to hit that number going forward. Comcast will not want to foot that bill. Its going to be messy. Too bad they just don't upgrade the infrastructure to accommodate the technologies of the future but CC is more about the bottom line and overselling nodes. Still way too much copper out there.

Just out of curiousity, what is it that you are uploading and downloading so much of? I'm not being judgemental, I just want to understand.
Also, does Optonline have invisi-caps?

Mostly TV shows (HD) and anime.

Optonline doesn't have any caps. I wouldn't use them if they did. My only problem is that i'll be moving to a comcast area soon and i can't deal with 250gb limit. I'd rather have verizon dsl at 1.5mbit than a capped comcast.

I watch a moderate amount of HD content and would not have trouble with the 250GB cap for the moment. Over the past 8 months, I have had a total traffic of about 1.3TB to my media box for an average of 160GB/mo.

Unfortunately, 400+ GB of that was last month and I got a warning phone call from Comcast.

The nitpicker in me wonders if they will be measuring in 2^30 or 10^9 GB.

Have you guys ever thought about just accepting that current technology does not allow EVERYONE to download 50 high def movies a month while still retaining good speeds?

The $50 or so comcast charges is for normal residential use. If your not normal maybe you should pay more.