Friday, August 29, 2008

Comcast 250GB cap

Well there's a big stink about Comcast's bandwidth cap. I'm not sure what to make of it. I'm pretty sure that I don't have to worry about over running the 250 GB cap. I think I normally I run around 30GB/month. It is my opinion that I'm a bandwidth-lite type of user. My usage is web page updates, email and general web usage. My understanding is that other cable providers have caps less than 50GB/month. Right now 250GB seems generous but new uses occur all the time. I don't know what would happen if I were playing games or downloading (legal) movies. Right now I've written a nice Perl script to gather the statistics for my bandwidth usage (adding both Rx and Tx bytes for a month). Comcast doesn't have a tool to measure bandwidth usage available yet but then again this doesn't take into effect until October 1st. By then I hope to see their tool and I hope to have tested my script for at least a month. Then we'll see how the numbers fall out. I'm going to try to setup some proper bandwidth monitoring but for now I'll settle for general monthly usage.