Comcast: Users Who Exceed 250GB Cap Twice Face Service Termination

It's been rumored, but now it's confirmed. Comcast (CMCSA), the nation's largest cable company, is instituting a 250GB bandwidth threshold to begin October 1, the company said yesterday.

"If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,"  the company said in an update on its network management Web page.

As part of the policy, if a user exceeds the 250GB usage cap twice in a six-month period, he or she faces losing service.

"If a customer surpasses 250 GB and is one of the top users of the service for a second time within a six-month timeframe, his or her service will be subject to termination for one year," the company said on its "excessive use" FAQ. "After the one year period expires, the customer may resume service by subscribing to a service plan appropriate to his or her needs."

Comcast says the policy will affect less than one percent of its users, and points out that 250GB of data is way more than the average user will use in a given month. To reach that threshold, the company says a user would have to do one of the following.

• Send 20,000 high-resolution photos
• Send 40 million emails
• Download 50,000 songs
• View 8,000 movie trailers.

Of course, there are some other things that might get a user to the cap, but the company is leaving them to your imagination.

Comments

[neoquest:]

A PS3 HD movie download is about 5GB per movie. So, If a PS3 user downloads 50 HD movies, this is about 9 movies per month, they have exceeded the threshold.

I think that the Service providers do not have the infrastructure capacity to handle the coming wave of usage requirements.

2008 Aug 29 11:13 AM

[neoquest:]

A PS3 HD movie download is about 5GB per movie. So, If a PS3 user downloads 50 HD movies, this is about 9 movies per month, they have exceeded the threshold.

I think that the Service providers do not have the infrastructure capacity to handle the coming wave of usage requirements.

2008 Aug 29 11:14 AM

[neoquest:]

A PS3 HD movie download is about 5GB per movie. So, If a PS3 user downloads 50 HD movies, this is about 9 movies per month, they have exceeded the threshold.

I think that the Service providers do not have the infrastructure capacity to handle the coming wave of usage requirements.

2008 Aug 29 11:14 AM

[Nick Gogerty:]

works out to renting about 200 movies from netflix or amazon or i-tunes.....hmmm...so if you have a few people in house who watch movies, stream music etc. you can see the problem and the agenda.

2008 Aug 29 12:11 PM

[reddog:]

And how exactly does one track how much has been downloaded in a month? This is like enforcing a speed limit without speedometers in cars.

2008 Aug 29 01:56 PM

[User 253282:]

If the cable business was truly competitive, this wouldn't happen.

2008 Aug 30 08:31 AM

[Ray Emery:]

All the Internet Service Providers have all seemed to have suddenly realized that they haven't invested enough in infrastructure to keep up with demand.

So, instead of building capacity to meet and keep up with the demand, they are putting limits on usage.

Without sufficient investment in capacity, saying competition will keep Internet costs down is like saying competition in the oil and gas industry will keep the price of gasoline low.

news.cnet.com/2100-103...

"U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet's current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010.

Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded. "

www.macworld.com/artic...

"A flood of new video and other Web content could overwhelm the Internet by 2010 unless backbone providers invest up to US$137 billion in new capacity, more than double what service providers plan to invest, according to the study, by Nemertes Research Group, an independent analysis firm. In North America alone, backbone investments of $42 billion to $55 billion will be needed in the next three to five years to keep up with demand, Nemertes said."

2008 Sep 04 05:20 AM