Olympic games may mean trouble for comcast subscribers

Gizmodo explains the recent disadvantage of having Comcast or Time Warner as your internet service provider. As Dave had mentioned in a prior post, Comcast has a monthly bandwidth quota of about 250GB but now, Time Warner wants to start using 40GB as their high end bandwidth quota. What does that mean for you the consumer? Hit the bump for more!

Giz brings up a great point about the world of the internet and how much data we actually use every day. They use this year’s Olympics as an example, as NBC has promised to stream events over the internet for those of us who can’t watch it at all hours of the day.

It’s broadcasting over 3,600 hours of the world’s greatest athletes performing feats that reveal how shapeless and amoebic the rest of humanity is—that’s 1,000 more hours than the last 12 Summer Olympics combined. The internet is a huge component of their nearly omniscient coverage. You can even download and watch full-length events. But NBC has a fat red warning on the page: If you’ve got metered or capped broadband, you might want to think twice before downloading.

How? Videos are huge files that eat up at your monthly quota:

A 90-minute movie running at a constant bitrate of 2.5 megabits per second (you’re talking HD here) will swallow 1.69 GB. If you’ve got a 40GB cap, eight movies will eat over a quarter of it.

That is a lot of data! And you unknowingly eat up about 1GB/day with just normal surfing of the web without downloading any files! And what if you play video games online (like some of us)? What if you upload pictures for friends and family to look at?

Matt may have it right when he says video may be cut back as we move forwards in this internet era, however, I think that it is an infringement of our rights to cap our bandwidth where other countries have no such rules. Verizon, please don’t do this to us!