Comcast bandwidth limits

It looks like Comcast will be limiting people to no more than 250Gb/month starting in October.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080828-its-official-comcast-starts-250gb-bandwidth-caps-october-1.html

While I'm not in-world as much as I used to be, and probably won't be affected, I imagine that this will be a problem for many users, especially since Comcast is the largest broadband ISP in the USA.

- Ace

P.S. Obligatory question... is anybody worried?

How many hours of SL would that be?

That's quite a few......a billion is a big number. But, if a couple has an account and two separate computers connected through a home network with a router, it could impact more than you might think.

With the telcos' new fiber networks popping up Comcast might rethink their decision soon.

your bandwidth will vary according to what you do in SL. It cant be broke into hours. But like Ace Im not in SL nearly as much as in the past. Im with TWC so no effect, so far but if it became a problem for me SL would be the first I would cut back.

A lot depends on how much you move around in the world. If you visit more places, and your client has to reload more textures and other SL geometry more often, then it could rack up quickly.

Add in streaming music/video and I would imagine that some power users might be bumping into the ceiling.

- Ace

That's kind of lame that they would do that considering they were just ordered by the FCC to stop filtering traffic for people who use file-sharing applications like bit torrent, kazaa, and such. So instead of letting people have unfiltered access to those services that they pay to have, they cap everyones monthly usage with a blanket limit.

It's not hard to see where Comcast gets supplemental income..
*cough*RIAA, MPAA*cough*

http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/Comcast-250GB-Monthly-Cap-Goes-Live-October-1-97294


250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 - 3 GB. To put 250 GB of monthly usage in perspective, a customer would have to do any one of the following:

* Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
* Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
* Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)


Also TWC is testing a metered broadband in Texas now.....
http://consumerist.com/5012441/time-warner-cable-begins-testing-metered-internet-in-texas

Time Warner Cable had said in January that it was planning to conduct the trial in Beaumont, but did not give any details. On Monday, Leddy said its tiers will range from $29.95 a month for relatively slow service at 768 kilobits per second and a 5-gigabyte monthly cap to $54.90 per month for fast downloads at 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap. Those prices cover the Internet portion of subscription bundles that include video or phone services. Both downloads and uploads will count toward the monthly cap.

Since I rebooted my computer and logged into SL earlier today (8 hours ago), I have received over 1,000,000 ethernet packets, and sent over 400,000 packets. Typically, Ethernet packets are ~1500 bytes, but can be smaller. Let's assume that the minimum packet size that would be sent/received is the basic IP packet size of ~500 bytes (yes, I know the exact sizes; I am trying to keep the math simple ). Next, I also use this system for forums and other applications, so let's assume that 25% of the overhead is www/dns/etc.

Doing a bit of calculation gives us 1,000,000 * 0.75 * 500 = 375MB received and 400,000 * 0.75 * 500 = 150MB sent. Presuming that is around the average user's quota for the day, we will have 11.25GB received and 4.5GB sent a month. Now, if those packets are closer to the max size, on average, you could have a max of 3 times that amount or 33.75GB received and 13.5GB sent per month. Still well within those limits, with a LOT of cushion for increased activity.

Quite within the range of most people.

Now, I don't care much for bandwidth caps. It is quite clear that Comcast and the other ISPs are WAY overselling their bandwidth. However, I am a bandwidth pay-per-use supporter. Just like about every other utility, you pay for volume of use. I don't think people should be penalized or have their service cut off if they use too much, the price should just incrementally go up dependent on usage.

That said, I also don't want to be charged for the MASSIVE amount of garbage bot traffic that is directed to my IP address, trying to hack into my computer. Easily several 10s to 100s of gigabytes a month can be directed to broadband IP addresses. As such, they need to tighten up their networks and start coming down hard on people who have had their machines cracked and zombified. One warning, then off goes the net.

So, basically, pay-per-use is not yet there where I would trust it to be an accurate representation of the actual traffic used.

Well, bandwidth caps of any size make me a sad puppygirl as a matter of principle.

So i just checked att.com. DSL for my area 6mbs downstream, 768k upstream, $35.00/month.

Is that a good speed for SL comapred to regular broadband?

The answer to this question determines if I change my service.

DSL = Dedicated SL

I actually downloaded a nice lil' app that shows Bandwidth use and even creates a log of it just in case you're curious.

http://www.rokario.com/

So far, 1 hour of SL doesnt even come close, let alone hours of playing graphics-intensive games online & downloading stuff.

BUT- should Comcast pull something I will *definitely* be looking elsewhere- for TV & Phone service as well!

Is there a way, on my Windows XP computer, to determine how much bandwith I use in an hour or a day or a month?

Edit: I guess I was posting as someone was writing the answer. There is an app for it.

Across America Porn addicts are crying silently ...

Thats why I stick to just plain ol' Pics! Got any???

Miss ya, Toy...

XOXO,

- Ace

Oh poo, and I use Comcast, too. I dunno if this will affect me, but I still dun much like it.

At the height of my RP/Combat addiction, running 1.5 meg, 128 draw distance with most options at mid level settings for oh 12 - 18 hours a day I was hitting around 90 gig a month as measured by my ISP. This would of course include my browsing and email which I assume would be a minor percentage of the total.

Well, I could limit my on line movie viewing and go back to getting them in the mail. The online movies and TV shows tend to reek anyway -- except I don't want to give up searching for cool old progressive rock videos on Youtube.

It looks like it wouldn't make much difference though. I wouldn't come close to the cap.

write a letter to comcast, and tell them they are losing business based on this decision. Then find another ISP.

Although the first limit mentioned was 250 gigabytes, further on, the caps mentioned were 5 gigs and 40 gigs.

Not time to breathe a sigh of relief yet.

Just in a short time of monitoring my usage of SL in high traffic areas, it doesn't look like my SL use will come close to maxing out my new Comcast bandwidth limit.

The real problem with the Comcast limits come not now. Comcast's move serves to set a ceiling on the amount of technological progress that can be made with the internet.

I don't have numbers, but it seems to me that the amount of bandwidth "necessary" to make full use of the internet has grown exponentially in a few short years. Streaming, high quality media is still a relatively new phenonmenon to most casual users. Advances in what the internet can do is only possible to the extend that the physical infrastructure can support it.

Now that Comcast holds local monopolies over anything cable in such a huge portion of the country, it no longer has to worry about innovating. It can sit back on its current infrastructure, stress out the infrastructure more with new services (Comcast is making a huge telephone push now- using the same cables that cannot support your television and internet right now), deteriorate service overall and have great leverage to gradually increase costs since competition is prohibitive.

Even though it may be true that 250 Gb per month is enough to serve most users today, it may not be enough to support the next great revolutionary internet technology, meaning we don't get to experience that great next revoluntionary internet technology.

Obviously, they're following Australia's lead.

We've always had monthly caps and some ISP's, not all, include uploads, too. If you go over your monthly allowance, some ISP's charge a ridiculous amount, whilst other's (mine, for instance) will "shape" your bandwidth to something around dialup speed.

I have hard enough time downloading anywhere near 40 gig per month, so I would imagine 250gig may be ample for most users.

I dont get it?

If the EU can take Microsoft to court for being a "monopoly", why can't the same be done with Comcast?

Or is it that most users are too clueless to know any better?

I don't have Comcast, but if my ISP were to do something similar, I doubt I'd have to worry. I don't think I'd use 250 GB in 6 months, let alone one.

Because cable companies operate as legal monopolies. Local governments, through regulation, allow only one cable company to operate within its jurisdiction. The rationale is that cable television is a "natural monolopy;" because expensive infrastructure must go through public right-of-ways, cable is only possible if a local government precluded competition.

They also operate as a franchise........and those franchises usually come up for renewal every 4 to 6 years. Go to your city council meetings and voice your gripes to them. They control the renewal.