This week I'm on a break between contracts and have been working from home on my own projects. Some of that has been goofing off, some of it has been housekeeping, and some of it has been creative. Today has been a particularly bandwidth intensive day.
I started the morning catching up on some Red vs. Blue. I don't follow it regularly, but the recent debut of "Halo 3" got me thinking about it and how the episodes I had seen were pretty funny. That probably blew through 300 megs in bandwidth.
It got me curious to see if there was a trailer for the Halo movie, so I hopped over to Apple's Quicktime movie trailer site (sure, a movie site I spent 6.5 years working for might have more trailers, but Apple's got nice 1080p High Def trailers). They didn't have a movie trailer for Halo, but they did have them for Iron Man, Beowulf, The Golden Compass and others. That blew through around another gig of bandwidth, maybe more.
Right now, as I type this, I'm downloading around 2.7 gigs of files from my web sites, doing backups of databases, user generated content, and site files. I've got an automated backup operation that saves some of it to an offsite NAS provided by the hosting service, but I wanted to grab a local copy and archive it to a backup drive and to a DVD-ROM I'll store offsite, especially after my comment on Francis Ford Coppola's data loss.
But a few minutes ago, I started thinking about the recent brouhaha about Comcast's Bandwidth Limits. Comcast is refusing to say they'll terminate your account for using over 90 gigs of bandwidth in a month, but stories abound that they will. And with the bandwidth usage yet to come this evening, the total bandwidth usage for my household today could be as high as 5 gigs, well over their average daily limit.
What puzzles me is how they figure that 90 gigs is fair. I lease a dedicated server. For $278 a month, I get a quad-core Xeon, 2 gigs of RAM, a terabyte of disk space, 20 gigs of offsite NAS, a 1 gigabit port speed, some other goodies, and 2 Terabytes of bandwidth. If I exceed the 2 Terabytes, I pay a low per-gigabyte overage.
For around $55 a month, Comcast gives me an 8 megabit download speed. If I used the full 8 megabits 24/7 for 30 days, I'd download around 2414 gigabytes in 30 days. We must also count the 768k in upload speed which is apparently factored into the bandwidth usage numbers as they say that the excessive usage can be indicative of having a zombified PC that's spewing spam. So that's another 235 gigabytes of bandwidth. So if you're getting full speed out of your line, which not everyone does, it's capable of burning through 2645 gigabytes of bandwidth in a month.
So, if Comcast is setting a 90 gigabyte limit, that means you're paying $55 a month for an internet connection that will be terminated if you exceed... get this... 3.4 percent of its capacity in a month. Essentially, if your monthly use is slightly more than 1 day's use at full capacity, Comcast reserves the right to shut you down.
What ticks me off, though, is not just the 3.4% cap on my usage of this line, but that it's 4.5% of the bandwidth I get in my leased server package, for 20% of the price. Given, Comcast does include some free web space and e-mail services as part of that $55, but I don't have the ability to run a high-volume commercial web site in that space. And I understand that providing that "last mile" connection to my home is more expensive than providing connectivity to a rack in a datacenter.
But when you factor out the server services I'm not getting, Comcast is adding a 400-500% premium to each bit that comes into or goes out of my home, and that's only if I max out the 90 gig cap. If I don't reach the cap, I'm paying even more.
Comcast has plenty of bandwidth available for digital pay per view, digital subscription packages like NFL Net, WWE, and Howard Stern. They have plenty of bandwidth available to bundle over a hundred channels in with the 20 or 30 I actually watch (and bill me for the whole freakin' bundle), but if I average more than 3.4% saturation of the bandwidth they've allocated for my Internet usage, I'm a candidate for termination.
I really need to see why Verizon hasn't called to set up my FIOS installation yet.
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