How quickly will you shoot past Time Warner's 40GB bandwidth cap?

How quickly would you reach Time Warner’s 40GB data cap? I’d be finished in like a week. No lie.

By now you’re probably well aware of Time Warner’s scheme to charge you by the gigabyte. Arrington wrote a piece yesterday on TechCrunch saying how it would destroy innovation—how can YouTube et al. make money if no one has the bandwidth to watch videos, or whatever?—and all that. But I’m not really interested in whether or not YouTube or some band new social network for left-handed people succeeds or fails; I just download a lot of stuff.

For example, yesterday I grabbed the 1080p rip of Cloverfield—horrendous, by the way—in a few hours off Usenet. That’s 9GB right there, or one-fourth of my would-be limit gone in a matter of a few hours. I’m grabbing Semi-Pro right now—that’s another 9GB. And There Will Be Blood should see an internal release in a few days (there’s already a terrible 720p scene rip).

Throw in your occasional album and you can see where this is going.

In well under one week, I would have shot past my monthly bandwidth limit.

I say this just to illustrate how quickly that 40GB cap can be shattered. So to all those who would like to say, “Well, 40GB should be plenty.” Yeah, well, sometimes it isn’t.

And $1 per gigabyte? Here, just take my bank account while you’re at it.

Photo from Flickr