Will you go over Comcast's 250GB bandwidth cap?

We use Comcast's business cable internet service at our office and I quite enjoy the cable service at home.  It really is fast.  Beyond the bandwidth, the ~20ms ping time over VPN to the office is quite nice. 

The high bandwidth made it very quick and easy to download updates, ISO images of popular Linux distributions, stream video content and keep all of my home computers up to date. 

When Ars Tecnica first published an article about this cap I got to thinking about my bandwidth usage.  I know I use a lot of bandwidth but realized I wouldn't be able to know if I was coming near that cap without a proper solution.  After spending a few hours researching and finding some interesting solutions for monitoring bandwidth I came up with an obvious question: Shouldn't Comcast be telling me how much I'm using?

Starting October 1st, Comcast will begin warning their customers who exceed 250GB in a calendar month and on the second instance of exceeded usage disallow them from the service for one year.  Without historical data or even current bandwidth monitoring there will be a number of surprised customers at the end of October. 

If you're lucky enough to be using Comcast this October, take a look at these monitoring tools:

• For monitoring a single Windows computer, Free Meter is good enough.
• For monitoring an entire network, do this at the gateway/firewall level.  A Linux box or pfSense running bandwidthd will do very nicely.

Happy downloading.