Comcast Puts Cap On Monthly Broadband Use

By Mike Sachoff - Fri, 08/29/2008 - 09:42

250 GB limit

Comcast has announced it will restrict customer's Internet usage starting October 1, in order to provide what it calls the best service to its subscribers.

Comcast will set the monthly data usage threshold of 250 gigabytes per account for all residential high-speed Internet customers, which equals 50 million emails or 125 standard definition movies.

On Comcast's updated network policy page the company states,"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. At that time, we'll tell them exactly how much data per month they had used. We know from experience the vast majority of customers we ask to curb usage do so voluntarily."

Users who go over the 250 GB limit twice in a six month period could have their service terminated for a year. Comcast said the new bandwidth cap will affect less than one percent of its 14 million subscribers.

Comcast said its average customer uses two to three GB of bandwidth per month.

The company said it will notify customers of the new bandwidth limits using banner ads on Comcast.net and notices sent with monthly bills.

The Federal Communications Commission investigated complaints by consumer groups that it was blocking P2P applications like BitTorrent and ordered Comcast to change its network management policy earlier this month.

News Tags: Technology, FCC, Broadband, Comcast

About the author:
Mike is a staff writer for WebProNews.

2 Comments

By Guest (WPN reader) - Tue, 09/09/2008 - 13:28

End to Xbox Demos, Videos and P2P

This will end it for Xbox users who like to down load the demos and play, as I download demos that are a gig to 1.6 gig each time from Xbox live with my comcrap account, that is just crap tastic .

Not to mention the deal that Xbox Live just made with Net Flix that will end this, I wont be using that feature either I will not buy any high def rentals on line. I had plans for this I liked the thought of getting my movies and watching them like this. So far I have purchased quite a few movies and games from Xbox live so far.

I know this is planed to protect Comcrap and prevent customers from getting videos online. This is paid content not stolen content.

Comcrap has damaged the P2P network that online players users use to play online games with each other, such as Gears of War, Battle Field - Bad Company, Call Of Duty 4 and other great games as that.

The player would find them selves disconnect for no reason at times with out explanation, the reason is Comcrap is closing the P2P connection and you have to re-establish it again. This means going back to thhe lobby and finding a new game to join.

Mean time you just got "bad player reputation" as "quitting early" when you did not such thing.

I use to laugh when our neighbor would call Comcast Comcrap, and yell at them in his front yard and tell them their service was craptastic, now we all use the term and it is spreading. We should have listened to him long ago that some thing was up.

He told us this was happening , and he told us how to look for it and we did not listen to him.

By Oleg (WPN reader) - Fri, 08/29/2008 - 11:33

Time to switch to competitor

Maybe the 250 GB is enough for most of us, but still existence of the cap on unlimited accounts forces majority of us, comcast users, to look for Comcast competitor. All of technology advances like video on demand, voice and video conferencing over IP, Netflix project are going to be slashed by monopolists like Comcast.

This cap issue is hot topic today and nobody we spoke to likes to be capped. Verizon should ride this wave of angry comcast customers. Their FIOS service looks more attractive now than ever before.