What does the new Comcast bandwidth cap mean for HD downloads?

Posted by Michael Gaines
September 26, 2008

On October 1, 2008, Comcast will implement their new 250GB/month bandwidth cap. They say that this won’t affect most users. This is true….today. However, there are so many things chaninging online that people may not realize their 250GB have been eaten up as fast as they think.

One aspect in particular is the online rental of streaming HD movies. Many services offer this now such as Netflix and Xbox Live, but what does that mean for the bandwidth cap?

Comcast has this to say about their cap:

250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 - 3 GB. To put 250 GB of monthly usage in perspective, a customer would have to do any one of the following:

* Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
* Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
* Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

Note that they don’t mention HD movies at all. If you were to stream an HD movie at 720p, it would take up approximately 4-6GB. That means you could watch roughly 40 movies a month (taking into account other miscellaneous items that would add to your bandwidth). That’s acceptable for most people.

If you want to go for a 1080p download or stream, it’s going to be roughly 16-20GB for each movie if it’s packaged the same way it is on a Blu-Ray disc, minus the extras. Doing the math, that’s only going to allow you to watch 10-14 movies a month! If you’re a movie nut like I am, 10-14 movies a month isn’t very many (again, adjusted for other items you may use your bandwidth for). Also, streaming movies isn’t practical if you have favorites like I do and you want to watch them again. Most streaming services only allow you to watch the movies for a certain period of time before they expire.

While I believe that in fact most people will never reach that cap, I think more people will than Comcast believes. Currently, I haven’t been able to find any tools on Comcast’s site that monitors your bandwidth, and even if there were any, how do we know how accurate they are?

The next few months will be interesting. Will we see avid movie watchers start getting “shame on you” letters from Comcast? Will there be a jump to other services like Verizon FIOS? Time will tell.

If anyone would like to see a direct comparison between DVD and HD on “Fellowship Of The Ring”, click here.

Comcast, Movies and Video

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  • tibbon
    Comcast (and most people) aren't considering a few very important facts.

    1) In metropolitan cities and college centric areas its not uncommon for 3-6 people to share a connection in a house.

    This is HUGE. If each of these are "connected" people, and watch Netflix or download HD movies (always legally of course) then all of a sudden all of these numbers go down considerably. This quickly becomes each person being able to watch 2-3 movies a month instead if you have 6 people in a house/apartment.

    Also (unsure of what differences they are allowing for business plans) many offices (I used to work for Time Warner's Road Runner in their business division) use Comcast cable for their business purposes. It's become the "Cheap T3" basically. Your office of 20 people now needs super strict caps on usage to make sure that you're not causing massive overages. 10gb/work day isn't much at all for 20 people to go through. That's 500MB/person.

    2) EVEN IF this amount was ok and acceptable today, it won't be acceptable in 2009. Think about your internet usage in 2007 vs today. Thing about your internet in 2007 vs 2006. In 2006 most people were just finding out about Youtube and using it lightly. In 2007 people were starting to use Hulu and other higher quality streaming programs. This year youtube added higher quality streaming and Hulu went "higher-def" (not really HD yet). Every year you roughly double your bandwidth consumption.

    In two years, this "250 cap" will be as if it is a 62.5GB cap. That's simply not acceptable.

    The speed overall online is increasing. Comcast isn't keeping up. The rest of the world is. Keep in mind the money that we allocated (gave) to the cable companies in the 90's to get us all on SUPER high speed stuff by now. Guess what? They took the money and ran. They can't account for it.

    The cable companies are trying to screw us. Bandwidth is getting cheaper and cheaper, and yet they want to gouge us more.

    I feel that this is going to simply hand Verizon and instant win wherever FiOS is available. I know if I could get FiOS that I'd get it instantly.
  • Bloodwin
    I'm sure they will review it if enough people complain, but I don't think it is as simple as people make out. I guess it's like the water rates. Water is everywhere right? It should be free? I have metered water costs. If I use loads I pay more. The internet should be done in a similar way. Unfortunately for some it began as a free for all and people have got used to downloading massive amounts of data. It's like when phonelines used to go down during a phone-in on TV. Too much signal brings down the system. The internet companies are trying to be sensible and avoid that happening but that means people need to think about their usage.

    I think part of the problem is the US structure for providing internet access, one of the advantages of living somewhere small like the UK is that one company runs out the phone access everywhere and every company uses that network, so we don't have regional suppliers unless yo want cable. Over here we also have price plans that mean if you pay more you can get more. I currently get 'unlimited' broadband although that will get shaped for torrents certain downloads and if I abuse it by downloading movies 24/7 then I'd expect to have my usage questioned.

    I expect they will get pressure from companies like Apple (iTunes TV and Video) and the film industry as those companies would view a cap on the consumer as limiting the amount of goods they can sell. As part of my Broad band package I get an extra TV box that has some basic channels and allows me to rent movies and TV shows, so they can't limit it that much or they wouldn't be able to supply those products. I think once internet companies get on that band wagon they will ease limits.
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