Comcast 250gb/m limit

[ChaoticMonk]

Looks like comcast is going to be setting a 250gig monthly limit come Oct 1st. http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/Comcast-250GB-Monthly-Cap-Goes-Live-October-1-97294

[Crayonbox]

im on time warner and theyre testing a 40gig cap... yea.. that amoutn wont last me a week.

[Crayonbox]

I would like a monitor as well. Would like to see how close I get to that cap before this change of policy goes in. Will have to see if I need to look for a new isp provider.

[Anozireth]

All the more hilarious when you consider that the growth rate has actually slowed in the past year.

Internet traffic grows 53 percent from mid-2007 ('http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080903/ap_on_hi_te/tec_techbit_internet_capacity') (this article is from today!)

They should be required to provide a way to monitor your usage, or this is incredibly unfair.

Edit: I'm going to make sure my next place can get FiOS.

[-silencer-]

Maybe if these capital-rapist companies would actually put their income toward upgrading network infrastructure instead of paying CEOs $20million+ bonuses, bandwidth wouldn't be an issue at all. But what do I know.. communication networks is one thing Europe is WAY ahead of North America.

[Skuggomann]

250GB is moar then enough a month. btwi got endless lololollolol

[merujo]

Most 5-boxers would hit something like 150 - 200gb a month playing 24/7.

huh?
lol

[ChaoticMonk]

The digital movie era is here - Netflix has a ton of them you can watch "online". You could burn through 250gb QUICK.I believe thats why they are doing this. With IPTV around the corner and sites like netflix and fancast I can see alot of people dumping their cable TV packages and keeping their internet (or maybe even upgrading) so comcast would lose out big time. Limit everyone so they cant take full advantage of those services and force them to keep thier TV packages.

I think I'll stick with comcast alittle longer and see how it goes, might even give them a call come Oct 1st and ask to discontinue and I'm sure they'll offer me a 6month discount of some sort.

Do routers have a traffic monitor by anychance?

[ChaoticMonk]

/sigh
http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/08/29/on-wows-bandwidth-consumption/
Read."In short, you won't have to cut back on WoW to stay under a 750 GB per month cap." The '2' and '7' keys are not even near eachother, major typo lol

I wonder how those numbers will change when WOTLK hits with its new fancy gfx. Not to mention the constant traffic from everyone hitting the new areas at once, may very well be running at 30KBps down for the majority of your play time.

[Eteocles]

wtb copy/paste of article ;p

[ChaoticMonk]

Article from link above:
Some of you may have heard about the ISP Comcast's new 250 GB per month bandwidth caps. We've even gotten a few emails asking how this is going to affect WoW players. You can set your minds at ease: this will not affect us in any significant way.

The highest bandwidth I've ever heard of WoW using at a time is 30 KBps; this is in situations like raid fights or zoning into a city when there's a lot of data flying around. So if WoW was always running at peak bandwidth, 24x7, you'd be looking at around 70 GB per month, a sizable chunk of your cap. However, I rarely if ever see it go as high as 30 KBps; typical usage is more like 5 or below, often even in the sub-1 KBps range. And nobody plays WoW 24x7 all month, I hope.

Let's say your average WoW bandwidth is 2 KBps, which I believe to be a reasonable estimate. That comes out to about 7 MB per hour. So to estimate your monthly usage from WoW, multiply that 7 MB by how many hours you play a day (on average), then by 30. The average WoW player is on for something like 20 hours a week, which comes out to 600 MB per month - about 0.2% of 250 GB. Even if you were on 24x7 all month, you'd still only be looking at 4.8 GB, less than 2% of the cap. [Edited to fix numerical mistakes]

In short, you won't have to cut back on WoW to stay under a 750 GB per month cap.

[Eteocles]

This still worries me...I 5box wow but I also play tf2 and fps's tend to be big hogs, let alone normal surfing + podcast downloads + constant youtube abuse and a few other hoggish non-torrent things...I hope 750 is the nontypo, if it's 250 and that's not enough for me I'm gonna have to move ISPs quick-like...

[bugilt]

I don't like the idea of a cap, but I haven't even come near a 250gb cap in 2 months. I pay $75 for 15mbps/4mbps FTTH connection with no cap.

July 14- Sept 3
Total Traffic
Incoming (MBytes)
113980
Outgoing (MBytes)
30824

[merujo]

Dunno what ur guys are used to in the states but i guess its unlimited, like in some countries in europe.
on mine, unfortunnetly there was always this trafic max per month.

until recently, i changed from 30gb/month to 60gb/month, because it was free. i only laughed because, i didnt even noticed what my wow consuming was before i changed, never had any problems with trafic. i play 4/5 hours a day and... everyone seem in panic because of this :|

[ChaoticMonk]

To be honest, I'm not too panicky at the moment. I simply dont know how much traffic we use right now so I dont know if I have anything to worry about.

Me and my wife both play wow and both of us use the web extensively (downloading/streaming episodes of TV shows and anime usually). That and, if she was to pick up multiboxing (which she probably will) it could be a problem.

[Zaelar]

Unless you start 100+ boxing 24/7 you can estimate wow's bandwidth usage at 0 for the purpose of this cap. The only way I can see anyone getting close to the cap that isn't on purpose(as in downloading things that you'll never use 24/7), is by streaming a lot of HD video. Even then I'm not sure if you'll reach it. I'm assuming anyone planning to set up a 20+ box is smart enough to not download wow + bc + patches 20+ times regardless of their bandwidth caps...

[Crayonbox]

I pretty much have a stream of HD Video going all the time. I am usually watching either american tv shows or asian dramas. and they are running nearly all the time when I am home, whether i am working or playing wow at the time. So this I am slightly worried about how much bandwidth I am using atm with a cap being placed in sight.

I am not used to this bandwidth cap thing :(