I'm in Canada on Rogers and have been stuck at 60 GB a month for years. 250 GB is huge :( - Nick Munson
Yeah, suck it up. I'm an Australian-- not only do I have slow internet (512kb/s) I'm on a 20GB cap. :-) - David Adam
Its been like this in the UK for years as well and as Nick said 250GB is a lot in comparison to what we get - Arthur Guy
Do you feel that if you had unlimited bandwidth, you would use the internet more? And for different reasons? If I had a cap on my bandwidth, I would always be worried about what pages I visit and would probably not use the internet as much. - Andrew Baron
Considering that most people have 250GB drives or less, this is really a pretty large monthly bandwidth for all but the most extreme users. Even streaming music constantly for a month at 128kbps would yield only 44GB download (assuming I did my math right). - Logical Extremes
I have access to a fast unlimited connection at work and I don't download that much more than at home so no I don't think I would use the internet more if it was unlimited. - Arthur Guy
What about all of the musicians and people who use youtube? They will not be able to compete and suddenly it could cost millions of dollars again to distribute your work. - Andrew Baron
250GB is hardly a "cap". That's a LOT of data. If you're a residential customer, you would just about have to be on the internet 16 hours a day to reach that limit. Business customers don't have the cap, I don't think. - Jason Huebel
I fully agree that unlimited bandwidth is best for a lot of reasons, but I think it comes down to whether Internet is a utility or a free market, and the US hasn't really made up its mind. It's certainly not a free market (evil oligopolies at best in each of the phone/cable/satellite markets), but we haven't set it up as a free god-given right like TV was in the '50s and '60s either. - Logical Extremes
I'm completely 100% OK with this. If you want unlimited data, you're going to have to pay for it. - Ben Jackson
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Also, even if you can d/l a lot of mp3's at 2 megs each, will you be happy when your friends are downloading songs that are no longer compressed and may be 100megs each or even a gig each? For people who use software like Miro and iTunes, we are stuck d/l videos with low quality due to technical restrictions but as the bandwisth goes up, the compression will go down and soon we could d/l full quality files that could cost 250G per. - Andrew Baron
@Ben Meanwhile, while most people on FF will pay an extra fee to raise the cap, guess who will not be able to afford a higher cap? Yep, the people who could use the opportunity the most. Thus, it naturally shuts out people from participating. - Andrew Baron
One last thing to consider. Maybe 250G seems like a lot to you now because the internet is the way it is. The US, for instance, is moving quickly towards Fiber speeds as well as TV over IP and in two years from now, many people will use up 250G transfer in each and every sitting. - Andrew Baron
You're assuming that most people who can't pay for this will go over 250GB. 99% of them won't. I think that tiered bandwith plans benefit everyone. Grandma won't be paying for stuff she isn't using and the people that use more then average bandwith have to pay for it. Fair is fair. - Ben Jackson
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Andrew The issue is that most ISP can't afford that amount of bandwidth. So, rather then jack up everyone's prices (unfair) they're jacking up people who take a disproportionate amount. - Ben Jackson
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Just posted a link to my FF regarding bandwidth "neutrality" etc - Ben Jackson
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I think the key is not to be able to discriminate on what kind of traffic it is. In other words, Comcast (and every other provider of bits) should not be allowed to distinguish TV bits from YouTube bits, and set a cap or tiers from there. If that's done, then what is the harm of paying for what you get? - Logical Extremes
If you saturate a T1 12 hours a day for 30 days, you have 250GB. Just sayin. - stretta
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If most people wont use that much bandwidth, then why the need to cap it? - Andrew Baron
It's not for most people, it's for the people that go over it. - Ben Jackson
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A T1 is 1.5MB. Cable companiers are offering 3MB or more these days. With an always on connection and a desire to have your own digital version of the library of congress a person could do it theoretically. I agree, though, that most will not go over the 250GB unless you do download a lot of movies or MP3's every month. - Jason Shultz
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You guys are clearly Comcast business supporters. Who would outright "support" this? Im not buying it. Om Malik is not buying it either: http://gigaom.com/2008/08/28/m... - Andrew Baron
I'm with you Andrew, metering is not the way to go. Sure 250GB seems like a lot now (to some, myself not included), but capping and metering place arbitrary limits on future innovations that may take up larger amounts of bandwidth. As we move ever closer to the browser being the OS this is a huge step in the wrong direction. - Aaron Krug
Here in the uk, our ISP's are selling connections at below cost. The rise of video is making them face bankruptcy. Sadly, they seem to have painted themselves into a corner where it comes to price. Never forget that the net was originally metered by the minute, every other comms system is metered. Personally, I view DPI is a *far* bigger threat to the net than metering ever will be! The ability to analyse packets in real time and censor or replace that data? Now that TRULY sends shivers down my spine. - alphaxion
the last mile is *our* mile - that is where the accounting should be just like a utility meter - use double-entry accounting for the bandwidth to prevent double payment (send & receive is billed now) and treat the bandwidth as you would any "currency" - bandwidth is currency ("medium of exchange") - the access providers would prefer to think of it as a commodity (but they ignore that it is not a limited or finite resource in a commodity sense - we can all buy more computation/memory/storage/processing/etc.) - Scott Moskowitz
