Comcast makes 250gig monthly cap official. Is it really that bad?
Now I’m not one to praise Comcast. In many a survey they are considered one of the worst, most evil companies on the planet. In fact, I’m incredibly glad that my area is supported by both Cablevision AND Verizon FIOS for cable and internet access, so I never have to deal with them.
So with the news coming out that Comcast is in fact instituting a 250 gigabyte monthly cap on all of it’s home internet customers, I’m sure that many of the reactions will be extremely negative. But to be honest? Is 250 gigabytes a month is a LOT of usage. If you’re really using 250 gigabytes in your home on a monthly basis, and you AREN’T indulging in the download of a SERIOUS amount of high definition content, there’s something wrong.
Comcast’s cap is in fact EXTREMELY generous in light of many other ISPs giving a cap of 5 gigabytes that could be run through in a week or so. Also, the overages on Comcast’s plan aren’t terrible either. They charge $15 for every 10 gigabytes over the cap. Not horrible in the least. In fact, that should hopefully stem some of the real bandwidth hogs, leaving the rest of us plenty of bandwidth to work on.
Here’s a quote from the Comcast site:
250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 – 3 GB. To put 250 GB of monthly usage in perspective, a customer would have to do any one of the following:
* Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
* Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
* Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)
I hate to say it, but I really agree with them. The cap is totally reasonable, and totally workable. The only people who should come even close to hitting it should be business customers dealing with podcasts and video workflows. Considering business accounts aren’t subject to this cap, I can’t see a scenario where it would cause anyone except serious SERIOUS content hogs a problem.
Way to go Comcast, you weren’t evil!… For once.