6 replies to this topic

[Saint_Michael]

Well everyone was expecting this to happen and not just for Comcast but all of US ISP companies and what not, but with Comcast striking the first blow the question is what will 250GB bring to it's customers? Well, 50 million emails, over 60,000 songs downloaded and 125 movies and if you hit one of those marks well expect Comcast to send you a nasty letter or a give you a nasty phone call to stop doing illegal stuff on your computer . Of course the only people that would break the 250GB mark would be major torrent users, e-mail spammers and most likley bot programs as well but I wouldn't be surprise if they lowered that to like 150GB of BW by next year. Personally I do my fair share of 2 of those three but not enough to blow that much bandwidth in a month but I only can imagine what it will do to the youtube users though.


SOURCE

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/arti..._customers.html

[adriantc]

I have to admit I live in a country were piracy is extremely common, but this kind of restrictions seem abusive. What are the users going to do? Return to the stone age of the Internet... just imagine that you can download with 30-50 mb/s, but only a few GB? That's not a good way to wage war with piracy! Why not lower the prices of software licenses, movies and music so more people can afford them rather then simply downloading it anyway. I don't understand why they don't realize that it is better to get something rather then absolutely nothing.
I can't help to make a comparison with the former communist regime in my country. Although we had an enormous cereal and meat production, food was scarce in the stores and people had to wait in long lines for they piece of bread or meat. Its the same with this situation. I remember back a few years when I had cable I was limited by the bandwidth, but that was because the infrastructure couldn't support the traffic. But todays infastructure does just that so there is no reason to go back to old habits.

One thing that I am afraid of is that this anti-piracy movement can bring the attention of Hollywood, Microsoft, etc. They may see this as a viable solution and they could finance or at least encourage this movement.

@Saint_Michael ... I won't be that pessimistic... The only good thing about the capitalistic world is that is encourages competition. So as long as there is one company still offering unlimited bandwidth most clients will change. So once their profits start going down they will eventually have to reconsider they "limited bandwidth" policy.

[midnightvamp]

Well, I'm actually surprised that this is the first company to formally set a limit to the amount of bandwidth that their customers can use. I honestly thought that would have already been set a long time ago. I know there are many people that have received notices saying they are using up too much bandwidth, and have been told to stop, or they will no longer be able to continue getting their services from whichever provider it was they were with. I've also heard that people weren't told before hand what the magical number was before getting cut off completely.

I've also heard about people receiving a cap on their download speeds from their internet providers, and several companies have actually admitted to internet throttling, which is essentially limiting everyone's download speeds during certain times of the day. They claim that it shouldn't effect the majority of people, but I've even seen that one first hand... when I'm trying to download a torrent, and it maxes at 30k/sec right until the clock hits 2am, and then it jumps up to 200k/sec +...

Mind you, all that's made me do is use more direct downloads from sites, because while my torrents seem to be capped at 30k/sec for certain times of the day, I am able to download the same file from a direct source at full speed. I'm just waiting until that gets capped too. It's always fun when you pay for unlimited high-speed, and they put limits on you, and force your downloading speeds to go much lower. I wonder if that would be considered false advertising, seeing as my unlimited has a limit, and my high-speed, isn't always high?

[cangor]

Wow that's interesting... I don't have comcast so I don't have to worry... yet but it's surprising that they would do such a thing. Oh well, with that kind of limit there's no way a normal person is going over it...but like if you seriously had to do some major uploading like for web/database development that could be kinda stupid. Or what if your neighbors are leeching off your wireless internet connection (yeah come on, don't say you haven't done it before...) and they use up all your bandwidth? "we're sorry, but your bandwidth limit for this month has been reached. limit will reset in...27 days." imagine all the horror call to tech support. Well I guess that's another reason to secure your network. ^^
I guess it won't be a big deal for 99% of customers...but I wouldn't like to have that kind of restrictions anyway, even if I would never use that much bandwidth. Hopefully my provider (Qwest) doesn't do such a thing for a very...very long time.

[etycto]

i know, i heard about that on webware and i was shocked and i personally think comcast is a little monopoly ish seriously they're like the only cable internet company and the only cable company here in florida at least. i dont think i can go past the limit with my regular browsing but the thing is that i'm using vonage and it's a VOIP so i dont know weather or not i will reach the limit within the first month of this. but the worst part is that after the first afend your internet could be suspended for a WHOLE YEAR. that scares me personaly because i'll be in big trouble if i dont have uinternet for an entire school year i will fail. that would also mean no phone.

[Saint_Michael]

midnightvamp, on Aug 29 2008, 01:47 PM, said:

Well, I'm actually surprised that this is the first company to formally set a limit to the amount of bandwidth that their customers can use. I honestly thought that would have already been set a long time ago. I know there are many people that have received notices saying they are using up too much bandwidth, and have been told to stop, or they will no longer be able to continue getting their services from whichever provider it was they were with. I've also heard that people weren't told before hand what the magical number was before getting cut off completely.

I've also heard about people receiving a cap on their download speeds from their internet providers, and several companies have actually admitted to internet throttling, which is essentially limiting everyone's download speeds during certain times of the day. They claim that it shouldn't effect the majority of people, but I've even seen that one first hand... when I'm trying to download a torrent, and it maxes at 30k/sec right until the clock hits 2am, and then it jumps up to 200k/sec +...

Mind you, all that's made me do is use more direct downloads from sites, because while my torrents seem to be capped at 30k/sec for certain times of the day, I am able to download the same file from a direct source at full speed. I'm just waiting until that gets capped too. It's always fun when you pay for unlimited high-speed, and they put limits on you, and force your downloading speeds to go much lower. I wonder if that would be considered false advertising, seeing as my unlimited has a limit, and my high-speed, isn't always high?

Actually Comcast isn't the first, Charter and Time Warner have been working on caps as well. You are correct midnightvamp, and that the ISP are fighting the torrent users by capping BW usage as the only way to drop the amount of BW used from torrent users, which is in the 1000s terrbytes daily.

[adriantc]

Saint_Michael, on Aug 30 2008, 07:43 PM, said:

Actually Comcast isn't the first, Charter and Time Warner have been working on caps as well. You are correct midnightvamp, and that the ISP are fighting the torrent users by capping BW usage as the only way to drop the amount of BW used from torrent users, which is in the 1000s terrbytes daily.

There is one important question to be answered... Is this bandwidth capping the result of actual bandwidth prices or just the result of pressure from the market to stop piracy by any means? Because if Time Warner is also in this the answer is becoming obvious and unfortunately not very optimistic for the users. I guess the industry is becoming frustrated by the inefficacy of other methods and takes radical actions. I'm in no danger since I don't live in the US and I can't say I download more then 50GB per month but I don't want to have one extra thing to worry about!