Pulp Free

As being mentioned a bit more in the news lately… It looks like broadband bandwidth caps are being rolled out for real this time. This tidbit on Comcast looks to start the ball rolling starting October 1st… Charter - you need to look the other way:

Cable Internet provider Comcast said Thursday it will begin limiting how much data subscribers can transfer online each month. The 250-gigabyte monthly cap begins Oct. 1 and is designed to prevent Internet service becoming sluggish from heavy use.

First-time offenders of the bandwidth limit will get a call from Comcast, while future overages result in Internet service suspended for a year, reports said. In May, the second-largest Internet service provided talked of a $15 fee for every 10 gigabytes above the limit.

In announcing the limit, Comcast stressed the 250-gigabyte cap is far above the maximum of the majority of subscribers. The new cap would allow each customer to send 50 million emails or download 62,500 songs per month.

Others Internet providers are experimenting with the idea of limiting their users’ bandwidth. Cox Communication employs limits ranging from 5 gigabytes to 75 gigabytes while Time Warner Cable is mulling a cap between 5 gigabytes and 40 gigabytes.

Seriously - why am I paying some $80 a month for top 16M speeds if that just means I use up my “fair share” quicker. Since the last time I mentioned caps, I’ve broken through my all time monthly usage rate…

Let’s see how much that would cost me… Hmmm… At $15 for every 10 GB over - um… ugh… $545 if you count uploads and downloads… Plus the $80 - for almost $7500 a year? And with no other competitive broadband alternatives… DSL is out because it’s capped at 3M. And I mean - Charter’s home office is just a few miles down the road… Like I said, Charter… Don’t get any crazy ideas from your peers!

So what pushed me over this month, you’re probably asking? Thank you TVTonic and your wonderful HiDef downloads for the Olympics.

That’s right - quite legal TV coverage of the Olympics…

Need your fix of Olympic goodness? Supposedly some 3,500 hours worth are going to be broadcast this year from China and sufficed to say, one person can’t really get 250 hours of coverage in a day just to make average. Thankfully technology has come to the rescue in terms of fulfilling Olympic gold for those of us couch potatoes glued to the TV.

Now that I’ve fulfilled my need for a new HTPC, I’m able to put to good use my Vista Media Center as well. By downloading a cool application from TVTonic, you can down download events and highlights for display right from Media Center. Cool enough is that one of the “channels” available is for HD content. There’s no HD samples to view yet - so I’m going to take a guess that it’ll be 720 instead of 1080… But it’s cool nonetheless. I took a quick spin of the interface this afternoon and I’m pretty impressed. For a free service that’s probably tracking my viewing habits (which is okay for right now) - I’m happy enough to keep it connected for the next few weeks. NBC & Lenovo are both feeding the content and sponsoring the effort, which means embedded commercials… But so far I’m able to fast forward through the commercials and get into the shows pretty quickly.

Next up was the summer release of TiVo’s service update. Probably not really related but it was waiting for me this morning as well. TiVo has a section that will automatically create season passes based on Olympic events… Pretty nice deal as long as I removed the SD channels from the duplicated HD lineups. Being a fan of TiVo since the early days - I’m really looking forward to making room for all of the HD glory of the Olympics by having both HD tuners stuck on Olympic coverage. With the 500 GB extender add-on, I think they’ll be room for some 87 hours of recordings if I let my other shows slide… I know I won’t need that much - but it’s good to be in 1080 this year around… And that it’s on NBC… (Still can’t figure out why Charter and KMOV can’t play nicely for HD rebroadcast rights….) The whole process does wish that everything was in HD… Knowing that in order to get all of that Olympic goodness into our living rooms next week - they’re taking over a few other channels that just happen to only be in SD…

So let the John Williams fanfares begin… 08/08/08 will be here in less than a week!!

The geek in me likes to keep track of numbers, charts, bandwidth, speed, etc. You get the idea (yes - charts too!) So in the past few months I’ve found a few Web sites that let you test your bandwidth speeds as many times as you want. I hit them every once in a while if it seems like my Charter broadband is acting up again… (which - cross my fingers - hasn’t happened since Charter replaced all of our outside cable lines!)

There are two that are pretty easy. Speedtest & Speakeasy.

Just for grins - here is what I’ve been able to do today: