Comcast has been doing this for years. Basically what they do is they see their top .001% of bandwidth hogs every month, call em up and go "Stop it or we throw you off". Everyone inevitably goes "Ok so how much is too much?" and Comcast has gone "Alot less" .
Then alot of these folks, 2 weeks later, would wake to find No Internet. And they're booted from the system, for a year. With almost no recourse.
Word starts to get around about this...more and more people have this happen to them.....and Comcast gets in the news about it (this is before the Torrent Throttling incident) and they say "In order to make the phone-call list, a user would have to download like...a million songs..or 200 movies " or something like that....so some bright-eyed nerdy Interweb types figured it out to be "Around 100 gigs". Thats speculation.....not fact.
Problem is there have been folks who have been booted for using as little as 60 to 70gigs, or so their stories claim. There are others who claim to have used a terabyte in a month, and not received a call.
But the calls are real, getting kicked off the system is real. And Comcast gets on the news because they wont come out and say "How much is too much". Because they are afraid that if they say "Well, 200 gigs" then everyone will start using 200gigs...and cripple their network.
And this is why you see them talking today, ALL the internet service providers, are talking about TIERED SERVICE. Time Warner wants 5gigs, 20gigs, 40gigs....40 gigs being their maximum tier of service.
Thats irrational becaise if you even download a few movies off LIVE in HD, you're rolling up on half your quota
So I dont think 40gb is gonna fly. 250gb is the proposed max from Comcast, but they haven't come out and said it offically....yet. 250gb is more reasonable, but its also why they are now saying they will throttle bandwidth hogs. If you use torrentz, or you try to rape from some website they're gonna slow you to a crawl during "normal operating hours".
So enjoy your 250gb...if you can get it.
Its the future......basically they wanted everyone on broadband.
Now that everyone is on broadband, they can't handle all the bandwidth requests and $40 a month isn't enough to pay for expanding the service.......and all of the internet-based business models RELY on BANDWIDTH to make money. Whos going to go to YouTube if they are fraid of using up their bandwidth each month by doing so?
Suddenly advertising models fall apart, websites go under......its really a scary proposition.
In other words, they are going to a cell-phone pricing model...use up your minutes and pay through the nose. And the big fear is that is really going to CRIPPLE online businesses who are trying to do more and more High Quality audio and video....
And oh yeah, one MORE little thing......competition: IF you dont have enough bandwith to cover downloading HD Movies from, say, the AppleTV store or the proposed Netflix HD service.....oh well you're shit out of luck, THANK GOD YOU CAN SIMPLY BUY THOSE SAME MOVIES FROM THE CABLE COMPANIES ON-DEMAND SERVICE, EH?
Riiiiight.....monopolization. The cable companies will say "Well you dont hae enough bandwith to stream movies from netflix all month long, so why not pay us $5.95 and watch it via OUR HD service".
