Reader Acererak points that it would take some pretty heavy usage (by current standards) to hit the cap described.
It's easy to say that if you're not one of the outliers. It's within Comcast's right to introduce this cap. And I'm sure they'll let it sit there as Netflix streams and iPod video become more and more popular. Or they'll even lower it by pure logic of it being only a need of 3% of the populace so who cares if we piss them off? If it helps the other 97% maybe it isn't such a bad idea.
It kind of confuses me though. We're already capped on our upload/download rates and since we pay them like a service we should pay them based on the rate of that service. Garbage, Cable TV and Water are rates I pay monthly that never change. Power is different but Cable TV is pretty much equivalent to cable internet
... are they going to limit the total amount of TV I can air in my home?
Comcast lies anyway. I don't trust them any further than I can throw their entire infrastructure. We paid a premium on bandwidth for 3 months and were supposed to be getting 15 Mbps download speed (as opposed to the standard which is 5 Mbps). After several problems with lag between me and my three other roommates, we started doing periodic tests. Averaged around 1.2 Mbps download daily. So we called them and they told us our signal strength sucked. So fix it. Oh, they couldn't. Not only could they not fix it, they couldn't refund us the premium we paid. But they
could offer us the 5 Mbps download rate
.... after which we change to that it remained at 1.2 Mbps download. What else could we do? There's no competition in cable internet.
Liars that don't give a damn about the end consumer. You'll be lucky if the 250 GB doesn't include your digital TV as download or even if they agree to their contractual terms.
The same thing more or less happened to me. When I began to investigate, I saw that I was getting 9-15% packet loss at any given time. When I called them to report this, I was informed that 10% packet loss is acceptable to Comcast. That of course begs the question, would it be acceptable if I didn't pay 10% of my bill each month? This bandwidth cap only compounds the insult. Not only are they actively not even trying to push the technological envelope, they want to reduce what technology that is available and accept failure to deliver said technology at full capacity, such as it is. What happens when the internet is no longer a cunsumer's market?
