Well today is the day.. I start getting limited!

[Ughmahedhurtz]

People complaining about 250gb a month are clueless, just to be blunt.

Please do elaborate, this should be good.

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On my Verizon FiOS, I can almost cap my 15mbit plan at about 13.8mbits/s using a good mirror from FileFront.com. Let's do a little math here to get a feel for the amount involved.

13.8 mbits/sec ~= 1.87mBytes/sec
Which is about 103.5mBytes/minute.
Which is about 6.2gigaBytes/hour.
Which is about 149gigaBytes/day.
Which is about 4.5teraBytes/month.

The average cable modem subscriber can pull a reasonable 5mbits/sec from decent sites, maybe not during prime time but most of the time. We'll just fudge and say 5mbits/sec 24/7 for math purposes.
That's 37megaBytes/minute.
Or 2.2gigaBytes/hour.
Or 54gigaBytes/day.
Or 1.62teraBytes/month.

For DSL guys on the typical 1.5mbit plans, they'll get about 1.3mbits/sec under ideal conditions assuming their local lines aren't complete crap.
Which is about 187k/sec.
Or 11.25mBytes/minute.
Or 675mBytes/hour.
Or 16.2gigaBytes/day.
Or 486gigaBytes/month.

Now that's all assuming you're sitting at your download cap 24/7, which is obviously impractical unless you're backing up entire newsgroup servers once per week. So, with that in mind, let's take a more reasonable case. Let's say your computer spends about 8 hours per day downloading stuff while you're actually home and online. We'll assume for this example that you're downloading what you can queue up in whatever downloader you use and it will cap your bandwidth for about 8 hours. I know it's not very realistic, but bear with me.

For 15mb fiber, that'd be about 1.48teraBytes/month.
For cable, that'd be about 528gigaBytes/month.
For 1.5mb DSL, that'd be about 162gigaBytes/month.

Now, for another example, let's say you actually use your computer about 12 hours per day every day doing interwebz-intensive tasks (nerd). While using that, you actually manage to cap your bandwidth for about 2 hours of that. The rest is spent just doing normal email, websurfing and some gaming and web radio. That would effectively give you something like about 4 hours of bandwidth cap per day of real data transfer.

For fiber, that'd be about 744GB/month.
For cable, that'd be about 264GB/month.
For DSL, that'd be about 81GB/month.

Now, the range we can observe from relatively high-end casual use to max bandwidth/month is 81GB-4500GB/month. Where in that range do YOU fall? I'd be willing to bet that most everyone here could not provide a real answer to how much bandwidth you use per month.