By now, it's common knowledge that the ISP megalomaniac, Comcast, has finally disclosed exactly where its bandwidth cap is. While I had often thought that Comcast's cap was low enough to trap anybody that's ever used YouTube, it turns out that the cap has actually been placed at 250GB.
Let me begin by saying that, if my last two months of router logs are any indicator, I don't use 250GB of bandwidth in a full year's time.
Of course, Comcast's own explanation of their quota is still somewhat ambiguous - a certain number of photos or songs, without actually mentioning the size or bitrate of the media being downloaded. Are we talking the 64kbps-sort-of-music that can be streamed from band websites, or can I actually assume that I can download some ridiculously large number of songs at 256kbps from the Amazon music store? Is that millions of photos taken with camera phones, or millions of high-res pictures from NASA? I did a bit of math to try and figure it out while at the same time being slightly more descriptive. Not considering traffic overhead, 250GB will give you:
- 40 hours of ATSC 1080i-quality audio and video, assuming a 17.82Mbps ATSC channel
- 2840 hours of music from the Amazon MP3 store (assuming songs average five minutes, that's roughly 34000 songs)
- Just over four million photos from an average 0.3-megapixel cameraphone, with shots averaging 65k
- Just under 375,000 photos shot at the 1600x1200 "High-Quality" mode on a 3.3-megapixel Olympus C-3000Z, with shots averaging 700k
- 8500 standard-quality, ten-minute YouTube videos; even I don't know anyone with a YouTube addiction that's this bad
- And for those that frequently download Linux on DVDs: 67 copies of Ubuntu 8.10, 58 copies of openSuSE 11 or Mandriva 2008 Spring, or about thirteen copies of the entire Debian "main" repository
That's more than ample breathing room, I'd say, regardless of whether or not Comcast is being deceptive with their numbers. I normally transfer about 20GB a month, and as of late had tried to refrain from using streaming audio and video services just in case Comcast's barrier was something considerably lower; say, 50GB. Now that I know the real figure... Well, my bandwidth for today is already 2GB, since I've spent the day streaming the news feeds from both Fox and CNN while following Hurricane Gustav, downloading a 600mb ISO image, and then uploading that same image back to someone else (it's legal). In other words, I increased my bandwidth usage, which probably isn't exactly what Comcast had in mind...