>It also sounds like a cool caching technique : since people already have the resource cached on their local system, why not allow them to distribute it?
Sounds like a cool way to deter people from using it if you ask me.
I'm not from USA, am I correct to think Comcast is a mobile ISP? If so, this is a non issue : mobile apps can already decide not to do big update when not on wifi, browsers can do the same.
That is incorrect. Comcast is the (second?[0]) largest cable ISP in the USA. About 10 years ago, they were calling people saying that they were using too much data, but that was always nebulous and varied greatly. Then they defined a 250 GB cap in 2008, and later, 300 GB. They only recently expanded it to 1TB. Go over it for three months, and Comcast will get very angry.
I'm not sure if the cap is in effect for places with fiber internet (like Verizon FIOS). It wouldn't surprise me, since they've admitted caps are unnecessary.[1]
[0] Charter + Time Warner Cable (after merge) is larger, I think.
I see, thanks. This sounds quite terrible actually : if internet has any historical impact, the last thing you want is for people to think about "not using too much data". I hope this won't last.
Many big American ISPs are too greedy. Even worse is that most people have no clue how much a gigabyte of data is.
About the time Chairman Wheeler was aiming for net neutrality, he was also looking at data caps and if they were bad. Within a month, Comcast increased theirs to 1 TB. Coincidence?
There's going to be a lot about how 'competitive' ISPs are in the next few years in America now that everything's Republican. But most people have two options: expensive cable ISP that's fast when it wants to be, and slow DSL that's also expensive and not getting better.
Unfortunately Comcast is one of the two companies (along with Verizon) that have monopolized the ISP market in the US. Together they own most of the market, and have agreements to stay out of each others' territories. This affects something like 40% of home Internet customers in the US :(.
Even when I download non stop torrent movies I don't reach this in one month. I doubt it would be a problem, especially since the load would be balanced across all users.
Try a different quality? Best quality on amazon video is 7GB per hour, works out to about 150 hours a month. Sure this is a lot of video, but spread across a household with say 4 people with their own screens and viewing habits is under 1.5 hours per day per person
Streaming Netflix alone can cap your bandwidth quickly given the statistics from the Netflix page [1]. I have recently experienced this actually (I do not run torrents from home and during the month of December I did not transfer anything from the remote box). Month of December I used 1022 GB out of 1024 GB over 900 GB was from NetFlix.
Using: 1 terabyte = 8,388,608 megabits
Ultra HD: 25 mbps ~= 93.2 hours
HD: 5 mbps ~= 19.5 days
SD: Would be good but hey I bought an HD TV for a reason so that would not be fair to skimp out on quality just because they don't want to introduce cheaper bandwidth caps.
side note It is $10 per 50 GB once you go over the cap with Comcast which is pretty huge for overhead if a user wasn't even aware of the cap. Thankfully they cap it at $200 over your bill.
side note2 this number will only increase - so really that 1 TB cap already needs to see a lift to 2 TB just to start to fulfill the requirements of the newer age web.
Back when I was on cheap and cheerful, capped internet - if you went over the (paltry 100GB, although this was the best part of a decade ago now...) cap, I'd pay an extra £6 on my bill and that was it, regardless of how much I went over by.
Ironically, the price to remove the data cap as part of your package was more expensive than the over-cap charge.
For me the choice is cable or dsl... and dsl is pretty painfully slow, and the carrier is much less responsive to issues. Fortunately my cable provider doesn't charge much more for a business connection ($140 vs $90, compared to comcast charging 3x as much). Cox tends to respond to technical issues within hours (onsite) and not days, and I don't have any cap issues. Anything gray (tv torrents) I now use a seedbox or vpn for.
Sounds like a cool way to deter people from using it if you ask me.