When does unlimited not mean unlimited?
So Comcast has finally made it official. They’re capping residential broadband customers at 250 GB a month.
What does this mean? It means that if you download more than the cap in a month you’ll get a stern letter from Comcast and a brochure for their small business services. Do it twice and you’ll suddenly find your internet gone.
Now, 250 GB can sound like a lot. Then you (and by you, I mean me) suddenly realize that you just downloaded a 1.1 GB demo of “Too Human” just to discover whether it was really as bad as the press said it was (It is, by the way).
Time to download that demo? About five minutes. That’s 1/250 of your cap gone in less time than it takes to get food delivered. Keep downloading useless things like that and you’ll suddenly find yourself in hot water.
Then there’s things like Hulu. A godsend for students who don’t have DVRs, it’s also a bandwidth sucker. Considering the quality of videos, it’d be really easy to hit that cap if you spend any time there.
Whatever happened to the freedom of broadband? It feels like we’re back in the days of hourly charges for AOL.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the State News.