2009-02-01

Bandwidth for January

It's a new month, and a new set of data for my ongoing bandwidth analysis.

There's a big spike around the 9th and 10th. Tech-savvy users may recognize this date as the day the Windows 7 beta was released. I downloaded both the 32-bit and 64-bit releases for testing. (My laptop has a 64-bit CPU, but it came pre-installed with a 32-bit version of Vista. I wanted to test how it would do upgrading to the next 32-bit OS, and how it would compare running in its native 64-bit mode.) If the downloads could've completed within the one day, it would've been the single largest day since I started tracking. As it stands, however, the 9th is only my second-largest day of consumption; the record still maintained by one day in October watching streaming video of my church's general conference.

The total for the month comes to 24.64GB down, 5.44GB up, 30.08GB total. This puts it second behind October, at 37.77GB total. My total data consumption for five months, up and down, is 148.71GB, still under the 250GB cap for a single month.

What's kind of interesting, though, is that there is news that Comcast is about to launch an online backup service. They'll have a tiered pricing plan, where you can purchase up to 200GB of online storage at a monthly rate. But, according to a Comcast representative in the linked article, transfer to and from this service is not exempt from the bandwidth cap. So, they'll be offering a service whereby you pay to use it (a lot more than you could find from other providers, too), but if you use what you pay for, you'll come close to having them cut you off of the internet. <sarcasm>Oh yeah, sign me up for that…</sarcasm>

1 comment:

Sal Cartusciello said...

What is funny, or actually not so funny, is that there are many Comcast customers not as tech savvy as you, and they will sign up for the backup (photos, illegally DL'd music, etc.), and will go over the cap, and have no idea why.