2010-03-12

The meter is here at last

After "only" 18 months from the time Comcast officially instituted the 250GB/month bandwidth cap on residential internet service, I received an email this morning announcing the roll-out of their bandwidth meter to Colorado. So now, I can finally get an official reading of what Comcast thinks my usage per month is (versus what my own measurement says).

In addition to showing you your current month's use, it shows a graph of your previous three months; so I was able to compare my own measurement with the graph. Although the number they show for the current month is just about even with what I'm measuring so far, there's actually quite a difference between the numbers they show per month for the last three than what I came up with:


I'm not sure if I should breathe more easily that they're measuring less than I am. What is the source of this mismatch? Will there be a month when they measure higher than I do, and will that measurement be high enough to cut me off?

Incidentally, I thought it was with no small bit of irony that the email announcing the bandwidth meter came on the same day as an email announcing their "Secure Backup & Share" offering. 2GB of online storage comes free with the internet service, but for $10/month (or $100/year), you can increase that storage to 200GB. Of course, if you attempt to use that 200GB of storage within a single month (e.g., you upload 200GB, your hard drive crashes, and you go to download that 200GB again), you'll exceed your bandwidth cap and get your internet service disconnected.…

2010-03-07

February Bandwidth

In58.53 GB
Out5.08 GB
Total63.61 GB

This should make for an interesting month. What makes February so special is that it's the last month that we had cable TV. We're becoming more used to the idea of streaming Netflix movies whenever we want, and the $60/month for mostly-unwatched TV just wasn't worth it.

I almost regretted cancelling the cable bill when I realized the Duke/UNC game was on ESPN over the weekend (a mere two days after losing cable, of course), but I quickly got over that when I found the game broadcast on ESPN's website.

The question remains, of course, will the complete removal of cable and the complete dependence of the internet (and prepurchased DVDs) for video entertainment have an impact on bandwidth? We'll find out just how big of an impact in next month's exciting episode!