Except in locations where the only real choice is cable. In that case you are just hosed. I wish FiOS would be rolled out faster.
Heres another idea; offer tiered plans. I would be happy to pay for what I am using. Like a $200/month business plan w/ up to 500GB/m or whatever. In the article they were talking about "after 250GB, $15 charge for each 10 GB." which is basically saying FU to the power users. Which based upon that notion I can deduce that Comcast is starting to hit the limits on their current protocol. Instead of innovating like Verizon is with fibre, they are just thinking up ways to alleviate the load on their aging cable technology. Maybe docsis 3.0 will put this discussion to rest.
If you find Comcast and their cable broadband to be aging at 16MB per second, then I would hate to think about how you view DSL.
Read an article in the newspaper yesterday ( June 24th ) about how all of the major broadband companies like Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner, etc are metering their networks for the rest of the year and will undoubtedly will be coming up with some sort of "tiered-pricing" plan to reign in the "peer-to-peer" extreme file-sharing users out there. The article stated that Time Warner has noticed that 5% of their customers are using up over HALF of their bandwidth, and AT&T said that 5% of their users were using up 46% of their bandwidth. Hopefully, a change in the future will not hurt us traders who aren't downloading all of these huge files. In the meantime, Comcast is slated to roll-out their new high speed broadband called DOCSSIS sometime before the end of the year in certain geographic locations. DOCSIS 3.0 will have something like an "up to 50mb" download speed and 5mb upload speed. All for $149.95 per month Already rolled-out in Minneapolis! http://www.comcast.com/About/PressRelease/PressReleaseDetail.ashx?PRID=741
Verizon recently announced that they are upgrading their entire footprint so my 15/2Mbps service is being upgraded to 20/5 at no additional charge....they have a 50/20 tier available for those that need it. http://newscenter.verizon.com/press-releases/verizon/2008/verizon-extends.html
Any idea how much data a trader downloads in a particular month? Are we considrered one of the bandwidth 'hogs?" I don't know if we download much data or just stream it or if there's a difference? -Guru
I think this is the third or fourth thread on this topic, but I will post again. If you run one trading platform with very few quotes/charts then you probably use less than 15gb/month. If you are like me and run two platforms with a lot of quotes/charts/option chains etc. then your trading can easily use upwards of 30gb/month. Get BitMeter from download.com and you can see for yourself.
Got a notice from Comcast today that October 1 is the day for the 250gb monthly limit to take effect. I hope this will not be a problem with my IB TWS and QuoteTracker (with 14 tick charts) running 9:30 to 4:00 5 days a week).
The 50/20 connection sounds lovely for me, as I do alot of up and down with media files. About $100 a month, you think?