[ale] Comcast Caps Data at 250G/Month

[Forsaken]

On Sat, 06 Sep 2008 14:59:29 -0400
Pat Regan <thehead at patshead.com> wrote:

> When 4-8 gig movie downloads become commonplace enough and their
> network gets upgraded they will be very likely to raise the caps.
> Why would they pay to upgrade a network to a point that no one could
> use it?  It will just take competition, and they will start to have
> that in a few years.

I don't think it's unreasonable for a single person. Usage patterns
differ, but yeah, you have to work at it to transfer that much data in
a single month if you're the only one on the link. But again, for
families, this is going to not be nice. I share a comcast link with two
other folks, and ever since I saw this announcement hit, I tossed Cacti
up on a box to start keeping track of the links aggregate bandwidth
usage, and it's... interesting. I didn't start it soon enough last
month to really get an accurate reading of whether or not we'd hit the
cap, but if the average daily usage for that time period held true,
then we would have fallen just short of it. 

I also don't allow much bittorrent traffic to cross the link, I set QoS
up to allow a max of 100k through, and I'm also a firewall nazi, so no
using alternate ports to get around it.