The Comcast experiment
The Interwebs are alight with this story about how Comcast is going to start capping monthly usage at 250 gigabytes of traffic per month. While I don’t consider myself a power user or anything, I do download a fair amount of podcasts and occassional videos.
Curious to find out how much I consume, I went looking for a bandwidth meter so I could know where I stood and whether I should be concerned. I pretty quickly found a program called BitMeter which does exactly what I want. It gives me up-to-the-second stats on my usage and even gives cool looking graphs to show uploads and downloads. The feature I really like, though, is it tells me how much I use each day, week, and month. Like I said, perfect.
I’m only a few days in, but I can tell already that I’ll come in way under the 250 gig limit. I downloaded three complete Wilco concerts yesterday and watched a bunch of YouTube stuff and still managed to only use about 1.5 gigs. You have to get up around 8 gigs to start getting worried. So a heavy download day (for me, at least) used less than 1% of my monthly allowance. I think I’ll be fine…for now.
I did the same thing…except I only did mine overnight while I downloaded HD movies, and when I woke up in the morning to check it, it told me I had used 37gb in that session.
37Gb in one night.
108Gb in a week.
Try downloading some high definition content and you will see your bandwidth usage increase significantly.
I don’t download HD content, though. That’s not to say I won’t in the future. There was a time I didn’t use my computer for mp3s, for example. As for HD content, I have no place to store it and no time to watch it.