So many features that Frontier associates with your DSL account become largely useless with the imposition of a 5GB cap on monthly usage, as many have you have written to share.

Rural, among others reminds us that Frontier’s ESPN360 service provides Frontier customers with live streaming of up to 10 simultaneous game streams.   Partnering ISPs like Frontier offer access with no subscription fee, so their customers can use their broadband connections to watch some great sporting events.

With Frontier’s newly planned 5GB usage cap, ESPN360 becomes ESPN5, because it won’t take long to hit your usage cap with this service, which streams at speeds starting at 768kbps!

The HD Web: Akamai's plan to help meet the demands of HD quality video online are easily threatened by draconian broadband usage caps, such as the one planned by Frontier Communications.

Even more devastating, points out reader Tom, is Frontier’s partnership with Dish Network, which offers customers an HD Digital Video Recorder.

“This HD DVR also allows Dish Online for PPV which is content downloaded through the broadband connection,” Tom writes.

“Ironically though, should you sign up for their phone/internet/dish offer, you would quickly reach the cap if you used the PPV service,” he adds.

It’s not just HD content from Dish that is threatened with a 5GB usage cap.    Akamai, an industry leader in content distribution, has launched a cutting edge demonstration site for the kinds of broadband video content that will be commonplace in the next few years, most of which consume between 7.5mbps for 720p content, 13.5mbps per second for 1080i content.    For an average high definition quality movie, that is the equivalent of consuming  5-9GB for just one film!

Given these encoding rates, a typical half-hour television show encoded for TV quality at 4-6 megabits per second results in a file size of approximately 450 Megabytes, and 2.25 Gigabytes for HD quality. A two-hour feature film encoded for DVD quality would result in a 5.4 Gigabyte file, and for HD quality would result in a file size of approximately 9 Gigabytes. — “Akamai White Paper – Highly Distributed Computing is Key to Quality on The HD Web”

Try visiting the HDWeb website with your Frontier DSL service.   These are precisely the kinds of applications that are coming to broadband homes across America,  but Frontier has made the decision for you – these just are not for you.   So much for wanting to deliver the Internet experience their customers want.   With a 5GB cap, these services are strictly off-limits you bandwidth piggy.

William has discovered another ironically named service from Frontier that becomes effectively useless with a 5GB usage cap: Frontier’s Peace of Mind add-on includes an “unlimited backup” solution that will store your precious files on their servers, so they can be recovered in case your hard drive crashes.   But if you are backing up more than  5GB of files, there will be no peace for you.   And, to frost this cake, they say you can use the service on up to five PC’s in your household!

“How can they offer to back up 5 PC’s with only 5 gigs of bandwidth?” he asks.

“One 200 gigabyte hard drive will take 40 months to back up at that rate and take more than  6 1/2 years if I need to recover [all of my] data,” he said.

Anyway you slice your monthly allotment of 5GB, just using the services Frontier itself markets to its customers  guarantees more and more customers will exceed their cap, potentially by huge amounts.   And for families taking advantage of Frontier’s advice for a shared home network, once you bring the rest of the family to your Internet connection, what happens the day the FedEx delivery guy brings you your Internet bill in a box, just loaded with overage fees.   Are you prepared for Internet Bill Sticker Shock?   If you thought that text message-loaded cell phone bill was bad news to the family budget, wait until you discover the kind of Peace of Mind a 5GB usage cap provides a family of four.

[Update: The company has now suggested it may exempt its own partners from any usage caps or limits, but this has not yet been formalized.]