When Comcast announced their 250 GB bandwidth cap there were legitimate complaints that Comcast users had no way to tell how much bandwidth they had used. So Comcast promised a bandwidth meter, and they’ve finally begun to deliver (they’re calling it a usage meter). The email I received implies it’s a phased rollout as the usage meter is available “in my area”.
The Comcast usage meter is available from the “Users & Settings” section of what Comcast calls “customerCentral” where I can manage my account. While a bit of a pain to find for someone like me who uses Comcast as an internet connection and nothing more, it is a logical place to put it.
The Comcast usage meter is shown to the left. It gives a quick snapshot of how much bandwidth has been used. There’s no differentiation between uploads and downloads (upstream and downstream), both are lumped together. Since I do backups to the cloud much of my bandwidth usage is upstream usage.
Clicking on the “view details” links add the usage history to the display (click the picture for a full size view):
I’ve been running the Tomato Router router which includes bandwidth usage history. I was pleasantly surprised that the usage between the two was extremely close:
The Tomato router shows a bit higher usage, which will hurt those inevitable conspiracy theories that Comcast is over counting.
It took awhile for Comcast to deliver their meter, but it seems to do the job just fine.
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