Bandwidth Caps Are Ridiculous

So I was just sitting here thinking to myself, I wonder how many hours Suddenlink allows us to utilize given our speed and extreme data download (not including any upload usage)?I pulled up the ol’ trusy Windows Calculator [side: easily available by using the Windows Key + R keys to bring up run prompt and typing calc)] and did some calculations.

We get 12Mbps (or Megabits per second) here at home.  This is 12 Megabits, not to be confused with it’s equal measurement of 1.5 Mega Bytes.  So let’s work with 1.5 Mega Bytes here and I’ll use MB to be simple.

Suddenlink allows us 250 GB total usage (download + upload) per month.

250 GB (Giga Bytes) = 256,000 MB

So to figure how long 256,000MB will take to download at 1.5 MB / sec, we’ll do some old school math conversions:

256,000 MB            1.5 MB
————-    =      ——–
X sec.                    1 sec.

In case you’re not following my math, we could figure this on a calculator like so:

(256,000 x 1) / 1.5 = 170666.67 sec.

So now to figure out the number of minutes:

(170666.67 sec.) / (60 sec. per min) = 2844.44 min.

And now minutes to hours:

(2844.44 min.) / (60 min. per hr.) = 47.41 hr.

And finally, let’s simplify that down to days:

(47.41 hr.) / (24 hr. per day) = 1.98 days

So Suddenlink is telling me that I get less than 2 straight days of full-speed service that I pay monthly for.

How does this make any sense at all?  Granted most of the time we aren’t pulling 12 Mbps straight through, but still.  Give or take some bandwidth, regular users can easily use up 250 GB in a week without intending to.  It’s just funny to see the numbers broken down to the point of realizing that I have to pay extra for more than 2 days of full use of their service each month.

Who else is getting capped by their cable internet providers?  Thoughts, comments on this topic? Thanks for reading.

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