For the time being, I have a residential cable connection from Comcast as my connection to the Internet. One of the things that Comcast gets a lot of criticism for is their 250GB monthly transfer limit, aka “cap”.

(As an aside, the cap is pretty silly, especially because it’s the same for all the different speeds Comcast sells. That means if you pay more for a faster connection, you can hit the cap even faster. For their cheaper “Performance” plan, at 15mbps, you can transfer 250GB in about 46 hours, or less than 3 days. For their fastest “Ultra” plan, at 50mbps, you can hit the cap in under 14 hours.)

However, one silver lining — they don’t appear to apply the cap to transfers inside Comcast’s network. I use CrashPlan for backup, swapping storage with a friend in another city who also gets his Internet connection from Comcast. (CrashPlan is pretty neat — free automatic backup to any combination of your own computers or computers your friends offer to share storage on, or, for a price, CrashPlan the company will store your backups for you.) In January I managed to backup over 300GB across the Internet to his house, and checking in Comcast’s usage meter, it says I’ve only used about 100GB from my 250GB cap.