Charter bandwidth cap
Feb. 13th, 2009 11:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
johnridleyThere were some news rumblings a week or so ago that Charter was going to be implementing a bandwidth cap. I started watching their TOS page and sure enough, yesterday they changed it to indicate a 100 GB/month cap for low end services, 250 GB/month for high end services. As far as I can tell, I can't even BUY the high end services here. We're currently at the 5Mbps rate, and we can only go up to 10Mbps. The 250G cap starts with a 15Mbps service.
At first I figured "100 GB/month, that's not so bad." Then I set up my bandwidth monitoring on the router, and in 12 hours last night I burned 6.2 GB (and I'm not fooling myself, I'm the only one in the house using significant bandwidth). 100 GB/month is just a bit over 3GB/day max. So I think I probably DO burn more than 100 GB/month. Especially on months when I discover some new wonder like QI and download all episodes ever. But that happens most months, really.
The TOS just indicates that if you go over it and they notice, they'll contact you and ask you to either restrict your usage or buy more service. If the latter is an option, that's fine with me since my company foots my bandwidth bill anyway.
Charter is also about to file for bankruptcy. Who knows if this means that in the short term they'll get more or less aggressive towards heavy data users? In the long run either they'll recover or we'll be Comcast users; it's not like a pre-built few million subscribers with infrastructure in place will not be bought up by someone who can make it work.
I've checked, and if Charter dies and isn't picked up, our only other options are dial-up or satellite. No DSL, no fiber, and probably won't be for many years here. And for satellite, apparently it's a lock-in service with DirecTV; we'd be required to buy DirecTV TV service too, instead of the Dish network we currently use. Besides, satellite has even worse bandwidth caps in place and the latency is horrendous. So I really, really hope I'm right that Comcast will just buy them up, as little as I want to be a Comcast user, it's gotta be better than satellite.
The county was talking about county-wide broadband, but that's never really going to happen, at least not until we climb out of this hole we're in.
At first I figured "100 GB/month, that's not so bad." Then I set up my bandwidth monitoring on the router, and in 12 hours last night I burned 6.2 GB (and I'm not fooling myself, I'm the only one in the house using significant bandwidth). 100 GB/month is just a bit over 3GB/day max. So I think I probably DO burn more than 100 GB/month. Especially on months when I discover some new wonder like QI and download all episodes ever. But that happens most months, really.
The TOS just indicates that if you go over it and they notice, they'll contact you and ask you to either restrict your usage or buy more service. If the latter is an option, that's fine with me since my company foots my bandwidth bill anyway.
Charter is also about to file for bankruptcy. Who knows if this means that in the short term they'll get more or less aggressive towards heavy data users? In the long run either they'll recover or we'll be Comcast users; it's not like a pre-built few million subscribers with infrastructure in place will not be bought up by someone who can make it work.
I've checked, and if Charter dies and isn't picked up, our only other options are dial-up or satellite. No DSL, no fiber, and probably won't be for many years here. And for satellite, apparently it's a lock-in service with DirecTV; we'd be required to buy DirecTV TV service too, instead of the Dish network we currently use. Besides, satellite has even worse bandwidth caps in place and the latency is horrendous. So I really, really hope I'm right that Comcast will just buy them up, as little as I want to be a Comcast user, it's gotta be better than satellite.
The county was talking about county-wide broadband, but that's never really going to happen, at least not until we climb out of this hole we're in.
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no subject
Date: 2009-02-14 04:18 am (UTC)Never knew you were such a bandwidth hog, John. Hee, hee. You don't happen to have the UK version of the IT Crowd, do you?
no subject
Date: 2009-02-14 01:16 pm (UTC)