Comcast bandwidth limits

I don't know exactly how it compares to cable (I haven't kept up with the bandwidth for a couple years) but it's not a bad price at all most places. It would be more than enough for SL though. It's not common that SL can download more than 1Mbps, except in brief spikes, much less 6Mbps.

repost from some discussion about it in another thread:


My take on it is that they are trying to deal with the extreme abusers -- downloading tons of movies and/or MP3s, etc...

Here is a nice lil app I use. Breaks usage down by daily, weekly, and monthly totals.

And the best part, it's free

640kbit/s continuously non-stop is an immense exaggeration .

My usage on my last 2 SL sessions (you can find the statistics at the end of SecondLife.log and SecondLife.old):

Run time: 28130.258 seconds (7 hours 48 minutes)
Total bytes received: 236,340,385 (67.21 kbits per second)

Run time: 2570.181 seconds (42 minutes)
Total bytes received: 15,377,800 (47.87 kbits per second)

(Divide by 8 to go from kbits/s to kb/s btw)

---

And people complaining about a possible 250Gb/month cap... mine's 15Gb/month and every other ISP here has one around that. Consider yourselves lucky .

I have a limit of 30 Gig a month. Even at my most addicted; leaving my avatar on for entire weekends, and staying on about 6 hours a night weeknights streaming MP3 Pro audio up for dj'ing and having voice and music enabled, visiting dozens of locations a night with my draw distance set to 256m. I only just get in the mid 20 in Gigs.

I think Comcast is smart enough (however evil they may be) to understand that they are likely to lose more than they gain if they chase off MMORPG people. I think they are targeting the bit torrent crowd with 3-4 gb worth of traffic they generate a day as they suck down every media file on the internet and share out their music libraries 24/7.

awww miss ya too..... had tons of fun back then

The speed you get with DSL depends A LOT on how far your house is located from the telephone switching station. If you are too far away, you will only get a small fraction of the advertised speed. I had Earthlink DSL, which used ATT phone lines, and was advertised as "up to" 6mbs. The speed I got was actually only about one twentieth of that advertised figure, far below 1mbs. That was barely enough to run SL. It took forever for new locations to rez when I teleported. SL has been MUCH better since I switched to Comcast.

Do your research before you switch, because you may be in for a rude surprise if you don't know where your house sits relative to the phone company office.

I did a quick check on my bandwidth usage using bitmeter during a "typical" hour of SL. Based on that preliminary check, it looks like I could run SL 24/7 for a month and not come anywhere near the 250GB limit. I'll know more after I've monitored my use for a longer period, but for now I am not worried.

meh 250GB ya'll should feel blessed!!! here in canada our monopolistic ISP's only give 60GB then charge for every 1GB over.

60 gig!
feel lucky.
i get less than 20gb/mo, 3/4 of which much be spent 'off peak' between midnight and noon.
and if i exceed my 20 gb, or exceed my 6gb peak usage i dont even have an option to buy additional bandwidth. instead i get throttled to 28k.
its strange hearing ppl complain about 250 gig

Try another angle - they aren't concerned at all with the Internet as such, but as a direct competitor to their real money maker - movies and sports packages. They already have seen special events where people have used the Internet to download and use HD content. So they reply with a completely spurious response which excludes the real issue - one NFL or basketball fan watching an Internet package HD can run up that 250 GBs on the weekend easy (my son watches HD sports packages for most of the day on his weekends off). Better for Comcast to force customers to use THEIR packages for sports or buy THEIR HD pay-for-view or buy THEIR movie tiers than let all those potential HD competitors do it on Comcast's backbone. They don't want you to rent a HD movie for $ 3.99 from an Internet source over their line - they want you to pay them 6.99 direct.

They are also in a vise. The top-of-the-line sports packages often come at a fixed cost per customer for Comcast - if the percentage of purchasers drops, they hurt. If the New York market puts their content on the Internet for less than Comcast's offerings, as an example, they get hit hard, and more so as everyone heads toward HD.

They will get kicked for it eventually. Comcast seems to be a slow learner. Too much competition. It only takes one to make Comcast eventually change back.

Should be weekends, not weekend. 250 GB is probably a bit much for just one...

Hah - 20 gig ??
Bloody luxury !!
I'm on Hughesnet satellite and only allowed 375mb a day at speeds "up to" 1 mbps - so that's a little over 11 gig per month.
Oh, and, every night my father thrashes us to sleep with his leather belt as we lay curled up in the ditch *grin*

As other have pointed out in this and previous threads, the amount of bandwidth used varies immensely with your preference settings, where you hang out, and how often you TP around. The quietest place I've found in SL consumes about 16 kbps down / 10 kbps up, which is where I hang out if all I'm doin' is IM'g

The best thing that could come from Comcrap and their miserable service is for Verizon to push FiOS faster to the market. The bandwidth is virtually unlimited.

FiOS baby, total awesome, totally worth it!