David J. Smith's Program

The commoditization of throughput (not bandwidth). How much is throughput (not bandwidth) worth to you? (Comcast customers)

This is an examination of how much Comcast throughput (not bandwidth) is worth to you. 

How much does it cost?

You pay $43 - $58 / month for you Comcast connection, $43 if you have cable TV too, and $58 if you don't have cable TV. 

What do you get?

It's important to note that Comcast will cut off your internet if you go over 400-600 GB downloaded / month, or ~60 GB uploaded / month. They won't tell you this, but it's a common fact.  They term it "abuse".

From Comcast Terms of Use (Abuse): (link)

Bandwidth, Data Storage and Other limitations Use of the Comcast network infrastructure in a manner that (i) exceeds the then current bandwidth, data storage or other limitations on the Comcast High-Speed Internet service or (ii) puts an excessive burden on the limitations of the network. Examples include: Using the Comcast network to run a Web-hosting server or any other commercial enterprise.

What's the unit cost per GB?

Comcast offers 6 Mbit / s down and 0.38 Mbit / s up.

For simplicity, we're really only interested in the "symmetric" properties of your bandwidth connection.  So, we'll use the bottle-neck, which is upload capacity.

Upload capacity = 0.38 Megabits / s

So: 0.38Mbit / s  * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 30 days = 984960 Megabits / month

984960 Megabits / month = 984,960,000,000 bits / month

984,960,000,000 bits / month * (1 byte / 8 bits) = 123120000000 bytes / month
123120000000 bytes / month * (1 Kibibyte / 1024 bytes) = 120234375 Kibibytes /  month
120234375 Kibibytes /  month * (1 Mebibyte / 1024 Kibibytes) = 117416.3818359375 Mebibytes / month
117416.3818359375 Mebibytes / month * (1 Gibibyte / 1024 Mebibytes) = 114.66443538665771484375 Gibibytes /  month

Thus, the max upload capacity of 1 High-Speed Internet connection to the residential is: 114.66 Gibibytes /  month.

But wait, if you upload this much, Comcast will cut you off for "abuse" (I called them and asked).  So we have to assume that they won't cut you off at is 60 GB uploaded - which is still probably way too high.

If you watch cable TV, that comes out to  4300 cents / 60 GB 
71.66 cents / GB.  ( $0.716 / GB )

If you don't watch cable TV, you're paying 5800 cents / 60 GB
96.66 cents / GB ($ 0.966 / GB)

We'll explore the commoditization of bandwidth (not throughput) in a future entry.