The Comcast bandwidth meter pilot has reached my house, and for the first time today I got a look at our household data usage. Understand, we still have plenty of room under the Comcast 250-GB cap. However, I had hoped that our usage would barely register on the meter (like Jeff Baumgartner’s :)), and instead we hit a healthy 43 GB in the month of December.
Again, 43 GB is nowhere near our 250-GB monthly allowance. But I’ve considered our bandwidth usage to be pretty low, particularly compared to what it could be if Netflix had a better selection of Watch-Instantly flicks, or if I started using Skype video again. Not to mention, I’d like to get around to spending my end-of-year Mozy bonus from Dave, and there’s no telling what an initial data upload or disaster recovery download could do to my numbers.
In other words, I was hoping to have more room for my data usage to grow. It sounds like quintupling my highest-usage month would be a lot, but I can envision a time in the near future when that wouldn’t be a hard thing to do. Will caps keep up with usage patterns? Will Comcast stay so generous? Here’s hoping.