Comcast -- Here's How Crazy The Data Cap Really Is (buyers, living in)

[godofthunder9010]

Okay, so I switched to Comcast recently and I'm already having buyers remorse and I'm feeling a bit ranty as a result.

They sell their almighty 75Mbps hard, but they never to bother to mention something pretty huge: The data cap. For most folks, that's 300GB per month, but Comcast in their benevolence has set my area's cap to 250GB. Granted, I'm exempted from the cap for three months, but after that? How easy is it to go over that data cap?

Okay so you've been told, "You can have 75Mbps internet!" So what do the numbers look like if you were to fully utilize the entire 75MBPS ever second of ever day of the month? There are actually a ton of ways that you could do so. Nevermind that "most people don't use it" I was sold on the speed and I fully intend to use as much of it as I can. So what would that look like? How far past the data cap would that get you?

75Mbps / 8 bits in a byte = 9.375 Megabytes. (Yep, that's why they sell you megabits per second rather than megabytes. 75 sounds way cooler than 9.375.)

9.375 X 60 seconds in a minute = 562.5 Megabytes per minute

562.5 x 60 minutes in an hour = 33,750 Megabytes per hour

33,750 X 24 hours in a day = 810,000 Megabytes per day

Okay let's turn those Megabytes into Gigabytes since it's Gigabytes that Comcast is measuring their cap in.
810,000 / 1000 = 810GB. (Oh look, that's triple my data cap in just one day!!)

So what does a weeks worth of that look like?
810GB X 7 = 5670GB per week.

And at long last, how about an entire month?
810GB X 30 = 24,300GB per month

Granted I got lazy and my bit/byte math may be off -- but it's still very close to right. So that's 97.2 times the data cap. So Comcast might be selling you a fast connection, but heaven help you if you use more than 1/100th of what they've handed you. Why sell such a fast connection at all? It's like handing a toddler a loaded revolver, telling him to not shoot himself or anyone else and then just walking away.

Past experience: I'll threaten to cancel services the instant the data cap goes into effect and they'll swing some deal to avoid me cancelling. That's how all past relationship with Comcast works: Threaten to cancel and they actually stop acting crazy.

It's really all about Comcast living in denial. TV is moving away from cable and onto the internet. The vast, vast, vast, vast majority of all web traffic is Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, etc. The data cap punishes folks who actually utilize streaming video services heavily, which in their crazy mind should force people to stop streaming and get back to watching everything on cable TV. The genie's already out of the bottle and there's no stopping it, but Comcast has decided to use it's government granted monopolistic power to cram the genie back in there. It's crazy. They are already the biggest ISP player in this brave new world -- by far. By offering the fastest speeds without limits, they would expand their market share ... but instead they just keep pissing off their customers at every turn. It's almost like a reality show for, "Can the biggest ISP in the USA figure out a way to completely self-destruct." But it's also supposed to be illegal to target your competition (Netflix, Hulu, etc) utilizing your government granted monopoly. How on earth is Comcast getting away with it?