Comcast internet limit...thing.

Hey guys, during last week's bombcast, Brad (or was it Ryan) brought up the whole Comcast internet limit thing and was clueless as to what he was talking about. After listening to the bombcast again (a few hours ago) I decided to check my Comcast online account and see what my usage was like. Turns out that I was close to the limit on 2 months and 27 gigs above the limit (250 gigs) last month. Not sure what I was doing that month, but whatever it was I used up a lot of...bandwidth?

My question is, to all of you who have Comcast internet, what happens if you go past the 250 gig limit they give you? Do they charge you more or do they throttle your speed down until the next month begins? The reason I'm asking is because I've been playing MMOs a lot over the past year and I had absolutely NO clue about these limits. Granted, if I had any common sense I would know about it or have the mental capacity to check. Like I said, last month I was 27 gigs past the limit but this month I'm 101 gigs below the limit so I'm not worried about it for this month. I heard Ryan say that he had gone over his limit plenty of times (paraphrasing A.K.A Misremembering) and nothing really happened to his service.

So yeah, does anyone know what happens when you go past that 250 gig limit?

As of right now, nothing.

I have gone over it pretty much every month since it was instated and they haven't even contacted me about it yet. It was just like 20GB over either, it was like twice the "cap."

Last I heard comcast has temporarily disabled the limit (link)

Well, I can tell you that playing games online is extremely low on bandwidth usage. So uhh, don't worry about those MMOs.

Yeah, it's entirely disabled now. I downloaded the cap with just my Steam loot alone. I'm about 80GB over and they haven't called me yet.

Although, it does say on their website that they'll contact excessive users in case they've an unsecured network, so if you do get a call, it's not necessarily bad news.

Cool, thanks for the reply guys. I can get pretty paranoid on a lot of things.

Yeah right now the limit is disabled. It used to be that if you went over 250 GB a couple of months in a row or some other arcane thing. They would just suspend your service. I don't know what this was supposed to prove, but that's what I've heard. I've never done it myself and I've had Comcast for around 5 months now. But Apparently people were doing it quite regularly. I'll be interested to see how this whole Comcast/Verizon thing works out. I think it will either be the best thing ever or the worst. But I guess that is how it usually is in business. LOL.

Well, now that this thread is useless, I'll high jack it for my own question.

So, how do you guys end up using that much internets? I have a twenty gig limit and almost never even come close to breaking it. The fact that people can go well over 250 is kinda crazy in my mind.

@Chop said:

Well, now that this thread is useless, I'll high jack it for my own question.

So, how do you guys end up using that much internets? I have a twenty gig limit and almost never even come close to breaking it. The fact that people can go well over 250 is kinda crazy in my mind.

Porn torrents.

@Chop said:

Well, now that this thread is useless, I'll high jack it for my own question.

So, how do you guys end up using that much internets? I have a twenty gig limit and almost never even come close to breaking it. The fact that people can go well over 250 is kinda crazy in my mind.

Steam games, project sharing, Netflix and other various video streaming services (porn (just kidding (not kidding))).

@Chop said:

Well, now that this thread is useless, I'll high jack it for my own question.

So, how do you guys end up using that much internets? I have a twenty gig limit and almost never even come close to breaking it. The fact that people can go well over 250 is kinda crazy in my mind.

I watch online streams constantly and that uses up data fast.

@Chop: HD video streaming. That will kill your bandwith pretty fast.

They have suspended the cap limits for a short time while they are reassessing their business plan for internet into a more tiered system. How it was before would be a warning from comcast and then an internet cutoff. If you repeated going over the limit after the first warning they cutoff your internet. Ive seen as bad as 6 months. This became a huge problem as more people use higher bandwidths than they claim (they claim only 1% of users use high enough bandwidths to get to 250 GB limit) This became an issue for them as people started complaining how they got screwed by comcast being their only possible internet provider in their location. This also became an issue for people who shared internet connections with roommates as reality came to be that more than 1% of customers were being effected by the cap. It only hurt their branding that much more. So now they are reassessing their cap so rather than being cutoff its a surcharge of 10 dollars for every 50 GB over, as well a 300 GB cap instead of 250. They still continue to claim only 1% of users are affected, but my speculation says they wouldn't be changing so much if it was.

@Chop: well, if you consider people using steam. You wouldnt be able to download shogun 2 total war in a month as that one game alone is 22GB. The average game being 8 GB of course. Then add in if you skype with people at all thats a constant up and downstream of audio and video which is not friendly to bandwidth. Netflix as well becomes an issue when a single movie is upwards of 1 GB. Then take all that and add room mates if you live in an apartment so you would have to multiply the usage by the people. This as well doesn't include any bandwidth used for work such as a photographer or graphic designer uploading raw and tiff files which can add up in size quick (ive had tiff files upwards of 90 mb per image though its more realistically be more like 25 mb). People as well like to back up files on cloud storage.

This as well doesn't include some of the innacuracies with comcast's bandwidth monitor. There have been months where I used the internet just reading articles, email, and some youtube videos and still came out to over 50 gb for the month.

So when all that adds up in a monthly cycle thats how it becomes an issue for some people. Maybe that helps give a bit of perspective for something that seems like a ridiculous amount of usage for a month.

I wish it was just unlimited. The fact that I only had 250GB, made me go right up to the limit at the end of every month, just so I wouldn't have to waste the next month's bandwidth.

I also kind of noticed that the bandwidth indicator is completely broken, along with being disabled. It would say I was 40GB OVER my "limit" of 250GB even though I hardly, if I even did that month, use the internet.

But, it does annoy me that I don't think I ever received anything from Comcast stating that such a thing existed. I only found out around April when I went to go pay my bill online and it had that bandwidth usage sitting there and they even wrote up a whole FAQ about the consequences of surpassing that bandwidth cap. Saying they will attempt to try and contact you the first month, after the second month they would "advise" you on how to reduce bandwidth, and after that if it continued that would suspend your account or something around those lines.

If only there was another ISP near me that provided good enough internet speeds so I could get rid of Comcast completely.

@Chop said:

So, how do you guys end up using that much internets? I have a twenty gig limit and almost never even come close to breaking it. The fact that people can go well over 250 is kinda crazy in my mind.

Some PC games are 20GB or close, 720P streams, Netflix, HD YouTube, yadayadayada.

and if you are in the middle of 'TV' season where new episodes of shows are coming out every few days you might download those in HD which can be 1-2GB each. True Blood for example is around 2.2GB an episode in 720P. (I know, illegal, but whatever, I can't even watch them legitimately here)

@Chop said:

Well, I can tell you that playing games online is extremely low on bandwidth usage. So uhh, don't worry about those MMOs.

The Evo 2012 stream in 720P+ would probably have eaten your 20GB up within a few hours.

Wait... your isp doesn't automatically charge you insane amounts of money after you pass your cap? Weird.

@Skytylz said:

@Chop said:

Well, now that this thread is useless, I'll high jack it for my own question.

So, how do you guys end up using that much internets? I have a twenty gig limit and almost never even come close to breaking it. The fact that people can go well over 250 is kinda crazy in my mind.

Porn torrents.

I don't know about you, but I download Dinosaur Train seasons everyday.