comcast cap and Netflix streaming

Terminate your internet? They say, "here, we don't want your dirty money?". I think you have to go way over or pass that limit several times in a row. Also, I bet each movie is only 5 - 10 GB.

If you go over the limit twice in 6 months I believe they terminate your service.

The HD netflix I believe is 3.8mbit. You can do the math depending on the length and number of movies you watch to determine your limit. I believe 3.8mbit is roughly 500kbyte/sec = 3600 megs for a 2 hour HD movie.

bald

Supposedly comcast has a bandwidth meter in the works for its customers. This was rumored to come out on Jan 5th - but that didn't happen. Hoepfully it will come soon.

bald

I also have Comcast and they referred me to a McAfee tool that has a bandwidth meter. I was going to install it but it wanted to replace my current virus protection SW so I declined.

250GB (capital B = byte, which is 8 bits) is quite a bit of data. When you DL a movie you do not get previews and other extras, so I would guess you could calculate what one takes.

4 Mbps streaming service for 2 hours = [4e6 * 60 sec * 60 min * 2 hour] / 8 = 3.6 GB
20 Mbps DL to watch later would require 18 GB, 5x of 4 Mbps streaming.

No DL service offers movies @ 20 Mbps sustained bit rate .. but this is for future reference.

@ 3.6GB per movie you can do 69 movies or rather 65 movies and all the e-mails and surfing a teenager can handle.

@ 18GB per movie (future) you can do 12 movies a month and all the e-mails and surfing a teenager can handle.

I ditched Dish Network at the beginning of November and most of my TV Viewing is now through Netflix using the Xbox 360 or my Samsung BD-P1590. In December I Blew through my Comcast cap in a week and had a total usage of 900GB for the month. so I switched to the bottom tier business class plan they have which runs about 59.99 and is not metered for usage. I was paying 52.99 + 6 dollar modem rental when I had residential internet so it basically costs 3 dollars more for truly unlimited internet.

^^^

900 GB a month????

They contacted me once after 750GB of usage but I can tell you it had little to do with netflix streaming. That would be hard to do unless it was running ALL the time.

LOL...geez, I wonder what he was doing

I watch between 4 and 7 movies on Netflix a week (so anywhere from 15-25 movies per month, usually). That would be a mix of HD and SD material. I have never hit the limit as far as I know. At least Comcast has never notified me.

That's on top of online gaming, normal internet usage, streaming Last.fm or Pandora, etc, Hulu through PlayOn, downloading pretty much every demo on PSN or XBOX live that I can, my wife spending about 8 hours a day on Farmville, etc.

I have never found a way to monitor my bandwidth since my internet goes into my router then out to my XBOX/PS3/Wii/DirectTV/Computer. The only stuff I have found monitors it through my PC only, but not my router.

If you can get a firmware that supports netflow or rflow you should be able to get a good idea of how much bandwidth you're using. The router would just be a sensor and you'd need another system on the network to receive the flows and store them. It's a low demand monitoring system that works well. I think most of the after market firmwares people use support rflow such as DD-WRT. Netflow is only available on Cisco routers.

i have a pretty good idea of what he was doing...

i'm guessing it's why the rest of us have to deal with drm...

and bandwidth caps.

^^^

yup, that too...