250GB, or "125 standard definition movies," will be Internet service provider Comcast's new cap on monthly bandwidth usage for downloads, according to a release from the company — which confirms some rumors and shoots down others. Which is 200GB short of what cranky customer Dave Winer has been reported to use. Better send some cupcakes to your friendly Comcast support representatives on Twitter for overage indulgences. [DSL Reports]
Well, I guess this pretty much ends that whole plan to stream HD movies (Netflix, Hulu etc)to the mainstream's TV sets. Even with a high limit, people will subconsciously scale back on viewing things over the internet because they know there is a cap. The entertainment companies want people to INCREASE views (i.e. at Hulu.com), but this will decrease that. Should be fun to watch the Viacom giants duke it out with Comcast.
P2P is interesting; it shifts the distribution costs from the content provider to the content consumer. The problem is that it's cheaper to send out data from data centers near backbone, or with cooperative ISPs, then with P2P.
@jeffjenn: Which brings us to ISP cooperating with content providers and caching popular movies, but that's still 1 HD movie per day.
There is a huge positive here that isn't obvious on the surface and that's for net neutrality.
The main reason ISPs want to abolish net neutrality is they feel they should be getting money when P2P content distribution networks use P2P tech to get around paying for their bandwidth. (For example P2P TV network Joost has users install a TV viewer app that also distributes the company's TV content through the user's "unlimited" personal internet connection. Thus, Joost doesn't have to pay their ISP diddly squat for the majority of their content distribution)
With bandwidth caps for end users this argument against network neutrality goes out the window (and P2P CDN "business models" with it).
This is a very generous amount of bandwidth. They must have seen the error in their ways after they got slapped by the FCC.
One interesting thing is that these caps are the beginning of the ISPs collecting the money for the content. The other ISPs are basically selling you downloadable HD/SD movies, music etc at a cost/Gb.
Guess I'm not a heavy P2P user, since those 250 gigs are enough for me.
P2P content providers could solve this by giving shares (and dividends) to ISPs, so those can offset some of the extra cost of operating with an unlimited bandwidth system.
