Unintended consequence of Comcast's 250 GB transfer limit

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Steve Stroh <steve () stevestroh net>
Date: February 3, 2010 12:58:12 AM EST
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Unintended consequence of Comcast's 250 GB transfer limit

Dave:

For IP if you wish.

When Comcast made their online tool available for monitoring one's
monthly transfers, a friend of mine was appalled at how little of
"his" 250 GB / month he was actually using.

So he set out to find good uses for the 250 GB / month he's paying for.

So far...

Downloading quite a bit of the TED talks - that was a mere 10 GB.

Project Gutenberg's archives were good for 100 GB.

One thing that comes to mind is the various Linux ISOs... ALL of them
that are updated within the month. Why not - he IS paying for it, and
as Comcast makes clear with their tool, it's perfectly OK with them as
long as you don't exceed 250 GB in one month.

I suspect that my friend is merely the tiniest tip of a very, very big
"bandwidth iceberg" for Comcast, and that the unintended consequence
of the 250 GB "cap" and the transfer monitoring tool will end up
"encouraging" _more_ downloads than if they had left well enough alone
and called it "unlimited".

Of course... where to put all this data... that's another interesting
problem... but a 2 TB drive every six months isn't too terrible an
expense :-)


Thanks,

Steve Stroh

-- 
steve () stevestroh net




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