The new bandwidth pricing

[Business Attorney]

Comcast apparently has implemented 250GB bandwidth caps, which it claims is "enough to send some 50 million e-mails, download 62,500 songs, or download 125 standard-definition movies. " There apparently is not a specific usage charge for exceeding the cap but "If a customer uses more than 250GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use."

According to several sources, effective November 1, new users signing up for AT&T’s High Speed Internet in Reno, NV, are subject a bandwidth cap ranging from 20 GB to 150 GB per month, depending on the plan.

If 250GB is enough for 125 standard-definition movies, then 20GB is only enough for 10 movies, or one every three days if you don't use the internet for anything else.

[vangogh]

Sounds similar to what I've been hearing. 250GB sounds like a lot of bandwidth, but depending on how you use the internet it's not that hard to reach that limit. Admittedly I use a lot of bandwidth for my business, but for an example of how easy it is to reach the limits I'll be moving a client's site from one host to another sometime during the next week. I'm not sure exactly how large the site is, but it's at least 500MB. To move the site I'll download everything to my computer and then upload everything to the new host. There's 1GB of bandwidth as part of a day's work.

If the limit is 250GB I probably won't hit that in a month, but when you see companies wanting to set 20GB limits it's easy to see how you'd reach that limit.

Another issue is how many people actually know how much bandwidth they use in a given month. I can probably tell you since it's my business to know, but I'd bet the average person has no idea. ISPs are going to need to set up tools to let you measure your bandwidth use. Naturally they'll be online and will use your bandwidth to check.

Think also of all the websites you visit that load slowly. That slow load time is a lot of bandwidth. Think of all the spam emails you get. Each one eats up a little bit of bandwidth as well.

[billbenson]

Interesting VG. While I might FTP a site with a lot of images or potentially video every once in a while, I really don't do a lot that uses a lot of bandwidth. I wonder if things like online gaming might be a major bandwidth hog depending on how much of the game is resident on the pc and how much on the web site?

[vangogh]

Most people probably won't run into the FTP issue that I might. It'll be more watching, downloading, and uploading videos and the like. A couple of things I just thought of. Imagine you purchase software online. Some software is pretty big. Think of all the Windows updates and how large some of those files are.

I'm not sure about online gaming. You would be interacting with the game the whole time you're playing and something is being transferred to and from the game server. It'll depend on the size of any files that are transferred. Something has to be going back and forth across the network.

You know I bet most people will see metered bandwidth and just think since they don't download movies it'll be no big deal. Most won't realize all the ways they use bandwidth. Most people still aren't going to reach 250Gb in a month, but who knows how long that limit will last. Most ISPs are offering a lower limit. And again as technology improves bandwidth use is only going to increase. ISPs should be working toward making their networks more efficient instead of charging more to some. If I'm not mistaken didn't taxpayers help them set up the infrastructure in the first place. Now they want to charge us more for the networks we already paid to build.

[orion_joel]

The best price i can find currently is about 100GB limit for $130, which they shape to 256k/256k. This is not to say that there may not be an option with a higher limit.

It just seems to be going the complete opposite direction in Australia to the US, the bandwidth limits are increasing gradually, rather then decreasing.

[vangogh]

I don't that it's going in any direction yet here in the U.S. I'm just speculating about the limits getting smaller. Metered bandwidth is only now starting and it's too soon to see any pattern yet. I've seen some companies raise the limits already.

Wow. $130 for an internet connection. That's a lot.

[orion_joel]

I mean they do have connections from as little as $20 however this is only giving you about 250MB yes Megabytes, download. I have Mobile broadband with a 5GB limit which i pay about $39 a month for, when you take into account the exchange rate it looks slightly better better from your point of view i would expect, however internet access i think it rather expensive in Australia.

[vangogh]

Oh that makes sense. Then again maybe that's what's coming out way as more and more companies start imposing the metered bandwidth limits.