Comcast Now Offering 50Mbps For $100 In Some Areas

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DBsantos77

June 09, 2009 at 9:21pm

I stumbled upon this Bandwidth Monitoring software about 2 months ago and I've never dropped it. It's called Bitmeter II by Codebox. I have it installed on my Desktop, and Laptop. For total usage between devices on my home network it's a simple math problem. I obviously can't install it on my 360 or Wii, so I add +500 MB to fit my online gaming needs. Bitmeter sits in your system tray and monitors all the bandwidth up & down used. It has "statistics" that show you how much you've downloaded/uploaded in an hour/day/month. It's a pretty kick ass app that hasn't gotten much attention when it comes to all this ISP throttling. You can download it here.

http://codebox.no-ip.net/controller?page=bitmeter2 

Just in June so far I've downloaded  10.50 GB and uploaded 1.78 GB. Try it!

 

 

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damazeen

June 09, 2009 at 8:46pm

If one ISP places a cap, the rest will follow suit. Out here in Bahrain we used to have one ISP a few years ago, with unlimited internet for about USD 110. The government decided that competition was important and opened the telecom market. Now we have like five players on the scene, with the cheapest offering being USD 30 for 2GB at 256 Kbps (unlimited, meaning that after you blow off your 2GB your speed gets throttled down to 128 for the remainder of the month). Other offerings are like 6GB at 2 Mbps for 50 USD, throttled down to 256, the highest we have is like 8 Mbps for 34 GB at like USD 300 per month. So as you can see, we've come a very long way......progress! You can't stop it! Of course all our ISP's give the same excuse, "we're an island and it costs us a lot to keep the country connected etc..." Oh, yeah, and to maintain your speed after your limit, each extra gigabyte will cost you somewhere between USD 18 and 30, depending on who your provider is. And by all means I personally find these prices very high, and when you compare it to the average salary, they become even more ludicrous. Can anyone spell R-I-P-O-F-F ?

 

Here today, gone tomorrow. Live life.

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statewd

June 09, 2009 at 2:21pm

Oh yeah right and it has 200GB cutoff right?

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I Jedi

June 09, 2009 at 4:59pm

ISPs should be able to reserve the right to be able to place a bandwidth cap on their networks. However, with so many ISPs in the United States having a monopoly, it makes this ideal practice unfair. One reason is because of the price per gigabyte being ridiculous, as shown by Road Runner with their $50 dollar plan for 40GB/monthly. There needs to be more competition in the United States. Unfortunately, though, where there is competition, there is a big ISP trying to screw the smaller ISP. The “Free Ride” so many of us enjoyed for years was eventually going to end because of how massive the Internet is becoming and how much it’s costing the ISPs to keep up in cost. If you’re unhappy with your generous 250GB/monthly limit, then I suggest you use either DSL or dial-up. 250GB/monthly is hard to burn through. That’s like major, major usage of the Internet. I know this for fact because I continually use the Internet for up to 8 hours a day playing games, watching movies (streaming), and surfing the web. Not even I can manage to break over 100GB, unless I try hard.

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compro01

June 15, 2009 at 8:15am

Yes, YOU can go through 100GB per month.  Now consider a family of 4 and that cap get very restrictive very quickly.

Consider 720p video at a common bitrate (4Mbps).   According to Nielsen, people average about 4.2 hours of TV per day.

 Assuming our hypothetical average family of 4 are all watching the same shows at the same time, that comes to 216GB/month, without considering any other type of internet usage.

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barfly711

June 10, 2009 at 6:55am

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/05/isps-costs-revenues-dont-support-data-cap-argument.ars

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980405.html

 

Basically, the amount of data ISPs can cram through a line grows by 50% every year according to Neilsen's law. However, the cost to ISPs has continually fallen. They're moving more data for less money and charging their customers more. It's important for ISPs to keep up this, "we're running out of bandwidth" charade with caps because it's the only way they can justify astronomical monthly fees. 

There was so much dark fiber laid during the dotcom boom that still hasn't been lit up. This is why I think bandwidth should be commoditized and traded on the futures market. It would help bring down costs for customers in the long run and make it easier for ISPs to alleviate stress on their networks during peak usage times.

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Erris

June 09, 2009 at 7:23pm

Internet doesn't cost anything close to what the ISP s charge for it in the USA. Even in eastern Europe the ISPs have plans like 50 mbps down/ 25mbps up (in the country) and 12.5mbps up (for outside the country) for $21 /mo. You also get a bonus - when you sign a contract for 12 months, you pay for only 8 and get the other 4 mo free, so you basically pay  $112/year for those speeds. No caps on usage.

Here Comcast charges this for a month and limits your use to 250GB/month we think it is great.

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lataesippinyuppie

June 09, 2009 at 5:32pm

I am curious to see how much I use in a month. I too stream alot of movies, and download alot of linux distros, how do you monitor you total up and down?

Also, Time Warner road runner is the ridiculous cap, Bright House road runner, what I am on, is not implementing any of this. Just saying its Time Warner, not road runner. The plan for cable tops out at 15Mbps, speedtest is showing im getting 30, pretty pleased. $57 a month, standalone.

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