Comcast's decision to put a 250-gigabyte cap on monthly bandwidth use for its residential customers may look like a generous number, but some critics suggested the cap may cause problems for users in the future.
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Critics Question Comcast Broadband Caps
READER FEEDBACK
Walt W. Fri, 2008-08-29 16:52
Elsewhere I read that high bandwidth users will experience "delays" for up to about 20 minutes. I never saw any explanation of this so I guess that the bandwidth hog will be disconnected for that amount of time. I believe the solution would be to slow that customer for a period of time.
I agree with comments that it isn't clear if Comcast will count material streamed from them to count against the cap or not.
In this day and age it may be unusual for somebody to use VOIP and not have a cell phone, but what if that is the case and they get cut off for some reason and need emergency help? Somewhere, sometime that might just happen....
As to software to measure bandwidth; unless you had a router that kept track, it would be impossible to keep up with. Even if a certain computer kept contact with the router for this purpose, many people, including myself, turn their computers off when not in use for extended times to save energy. Comcast's answer to that is no solution. It would be best to annotate on the monthly bills what the bandwidth usage is, and maybe have it available on the users' Comcast account page (cellular companies do this so there is no reason Comcast can't).
I think the reporting on this is as thorough as it can be with the information issued, but Comcast still leaves - or raises - more questions than answers.
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