Well, I got my official email notification from Comcast that, for residences, 250Gb of bandwidth throughput is considered excessive in the future.
In the updated AUP, we clarify that monthly data (or bandwidth) usage of more than 250 Gigabytes (GB) is the specific threshold that defines excessive use of our service. We have an excessive use policy because a fraction of one percent of our customers use such a disproportionate amount of bandwidth every month that they may degrade the online experience of other customers.
250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of bandwidth and it’s very likely that your monthly data usage doesn’t even come close to that amount. In fact, the threshold is approximately 100 times greater than the typical or median residential customer usage, which is 2 to 3 GB/month. To put it in perspective, to reach 250 GB of data usage in one month a customer would have to do any one of the following:
* Send more than 50 million plain text emails (at 5 KB/email);
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song); or
* Download 125 standard definition movies (at 2 GB/movie).And online gamers should know that even the heaviest multi- or single-player gaming activity would not typically come close to this threshold over the course of a month.
Since word of this came out, I’ve been running a bandwidth monitor on my machine. Granted that my MMO playing hasn’t been heavy over this month, I have still, with 3/4 of the month passed, done about 3.5Gb up and down the pipe (per NetMeter). So I’m not too worried about this, even if we take the utilization from Margie’s machine into account. (Comcast says the average usage is 3-4Gb/mo).
It would be nice if Comcast actually provided a tool to monitor all this. According to their FAQ on excessive utilizaition, they are “in the process of creating a usage meter that will measure consumption for the Comcast.” One would think that they would have something ready before rolling out the policy, but they seem to feel comfortable enough referring people to Google “bandwidth meter.” The assumption being, perhaps, that someone likely to be running into trouble here knows enough to monitor their own utilization, though it still feels backward to me.
You want Comcast to provide a tool? Bog, no! They would choose one that would install on your computer and run as a TSR, have security holes, and probably bring in advertisements. Better to find your own bandwidth monitor.
(I never install software that comes with… anything, if I can help it)
I was suggesting that, since all of our traffic routes through Comcast, and clearly they are currently monitoring my bandwidth, it should be trivial for them to show what number they’ve got for us.
I agree, I have no desire to install anything of theirs on my PCs (or router).
Chances are you’re going to be well under the limit unless you’re a heavy user of BitTorrent and/or streaming movies. Those are the people this cap is aimed at. Your average video game, even the online-only types which MMORPGs are a part of, are designed to transmit as little data as needed to do the job and probably wouldn’t come close to hitting the limit if you stayed logged in all month long.
The potential concern is that a lot of folks seem to feel that the future is digital distribution for games, movies, and television shows. Some are predicting that Blu-ray will only have a five year life because they think digital distribution will kill it. If that does come to pass then those limits could be a problem if you make use of those services.
I’m sure Comcast will be more than happy arrange for some bargain rates for that sort of thing. 😛