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Soon, you’ll be able to track your bandwidth use with Comcast

December 1st, 2009 by Ken

If you’re a Comcast broadband customer, you might be aware that the company established a 250gb cap on its users’ expense of bandwidth, in response to the growing demands in this age of digital distribution – multi-media streaming, downloading, etc.  As an complement to that plan, Comcast also announced plans to provide a data usage tracking meter, a tool that users could avail to monitor how much bandwidth they’ve used per month.

While it took nearly a year for them to roll out with the tracker, they’ve followed through on that promise, launching it today on a limited basis.

Beginning in Portland, OR,  the service will begin in a testing stage, with plans to make it available in other markets once the beta has concluded.  The data usage meter tracks three months worth of bandwidth use, with the current month included. Updating every three hours, the meter tracks usage per gigabyte.

Not just restricted to how much bandwidth your computer uses, this tracker will monitor bandwidth use by every device that takes advantage of your network, from your Xbox360 and Ipod Touch to your Roku Player and any other device that depends upon your Comcast broadband service.

If you’re alarmed by this news and wonder if this will adversely impact your service, Comcast assures its customers that only a minority of users will be affected, stressing that this is a measure implemented for that contingent who expends an exorbitant amount of bandwidth each month (i.e. those users who are downloading movies everyday).

Despite what many might consider to be an unfair imposition, Comcast is to be commended for giving its users a way to monitor how close they meet the bandwidth threshold. If you ever have any questions about how best to optimize your network’s use of bandwidth, Geek Choice is here to assist you.

Related posts:

1. Want to know what Google has been keeping track of?
2. The Truth about the “Fast” Connections
3. Top ISP to get tougher on piracy

Tags: bandwidth, broadband, Comcast, internet

2 Responses to “Soon, you’ll be able to track your bandwidth use with Comcast”

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