The Vig

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.