The name is Comcast who recently announced that they will limit the monthly bandwidth usage of their customers to 250 Gigabytes per month starting from October 1. Comcast did contact customers who did go beyond that limit in the past asking them to reduce their bandwidth usage which would be suspended if they did not.

Starting from October 1 customers who go beyond the 250 Gigabyte limit will receive a notification about their monthly bandwidth usage and a clear message that their account will be suspended if they go over the limit again in the next six months.

That leads to the question which is at the same time the title of the article: How much bandwidth do you need? Would you be able to stay under the 250 Gigabyte limit? I honestly have to answer that I won’t be able to stay under the limit. While 250 Gigabytes do seem a lot it becomes less if you divide it by the days of the month. A little bit more than 8 Gigabytes per day are available to the user.

If you watch high definition content on the Internet you will reach that limit easily. If you download videos, DVDs or use P2P you will also reach that limit. A lot of users will reach that limit, not only P2P users which anyone would suggest to be the only affected users.

So, how much bandwidth do you need per day / month?

The amount of tv-shows offered at FanCast is incredible, seems to be more than 100 shows that can be selected. A quick test revealed 11 full episodes of 24, 2 Numb3rs episodes, 7 30-days episodes. The usual amount seems to be between 2-10 for most shows.

Most episodes show advertisements before playing the shows but that is fine I guess, it has to be financed somehow. Resolution is 384 x 288 and the quality of the video is good enough and far superior to those of Youtube. You do get recommendations on the right side of the video and a short description of the video that you are currently viewing.

Update: Fancast has been retired. It is no longer available and will never be available again. Users from the United States can use other – legal – services such as Hulu to watch tv shows online. Users from outside the United States, ex pats for instance, can only watch the shows online when using a virtual private network or another means of using an American IP address.

Why are companies allowed to advertise unlimited plans if those are in fact limited ? I could recount dozens of stories on the Internet where someone got kicked because they had been using ‘an excessive amount of traffic’. I mean, if they say unlimited it should mean that you could download 24/7 with full speed without facing consequences, that’s what the word unlimited means in my opinion.

So, my question would be if it would be possible to sue those companies who advertise unlimited plans but kick you as soon as your traffic exceeds their figure X. From my point of view this is misdirection. Consumers think that unlimited means unmetered, but what do lawyers say about this ?

This means that the old ‘If they block port 6881 I simply use another one” game does not work anymore and even encrypting your bittorrent traffic will not have a positive effect on the amount of connections allowed. This means that your only choice in this matter is to reduce the number of open connections at any given time to a value that lies below Sandvine’s limit.

I think we all agree that this is not the most user friendly behavior considering that it effects all Bittorrent users not only those that download the latest movies, music and games.

There are however a few possibilities that I would like to outline to avoid Sandvine and use Bittorrent as usual.

1. Switch to another ISP

This is not easy. I hate switching Internet Service Providers because it could mean that I would have to be without Internet for some time. It could also mean that I would have to pay more or get less for the same amount of money. I would for instance only go back to ISDN if I would have no other choice.

You should definitely search for the ISP name plus a set of keywords such as Bittorrent, traffic shaping, port blocking to make sure that the new ISP is not using Sandvine or similar applications as well.

2. Use Relakks

VPN or SSH connections should work but do cost a few dollars a month. The good thing about those services is that you are not only able to avoid traffic shaping like that of Sandvine or other applications but remain completely anonymous in most cases.

I can only speak forRelakks which is a Swedish VPN solution that costs about 5 Euro (6 Dollars) a month. Your IP is not visible to the connected computers, only the IP of Relakks is shown to them which is great if you want to remain anonymous (to them).

This is probably the better way than to switch to another ISP immediately. I would suggest to try it out for a month and see if the speed that you get is sufficient and that it is indeed working as intended against Sandvine and other traffic shapers.