Comcast: What can you do with a terabyte?


One of the most hated companies in the world (by some measures, THE most hated) is putting forth maximum effort in this lovely video trying to rational its new bandwidth caps. What was previously unlimited it now limited for many customers and likely soon all Comcast customers. Since, however, it's a big allotment, Comcast argues the data cap is OK.

Comcast had been testing 300 MB/month allotments in some markets and eventually settled on 1 TB. It has since been expanding its deployment of bandwidth limits, which have been widely despised as a cash grab and a way to prop up its cable TV business.

In a promotional video, Comcast explains what a terabyte is and what you can do with it. My favorite part is when it explains that a terabyte is 1 trillion bytes, "which is a number so high it might as well be made up." That really happened and it made me laugh.



I don't come close to 1 TB per month, and Comcast claims it won't charge you until you run three months over. It's hard for me to invest much outrage in something that won't affect me, however, that some day could change. Comcast claims this only affects the top 1% of customers that use about 80% of the bandwidth, so I'd like to assume the limit will increase as the usage curve moves up with 4K and other streaming services. I wouldn't bet on it, however.