Comcast, the nation’s largest cable broadband provider, has announced it will begin limiting customers to 250GB of usage per month on their cable modem service.   Company officials claim less than 1% of their customers consume “excessive bandwidth,” and a 250GB cap explicitly defines what constitutes excessive use.

Comcast Implements 250GB Usage Cap Effective October 1, 2008.

250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 – 3 GB. To put 250 GB of monthly usage in perspective, a customer would have to do any one of the following:

* Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
* Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
* Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

Users who exceed the cap will first receive a warning, followed by account suspension for six months to a year  if they rate among the heaviest users of their Internet service.   At this time, no  extra bandwidth will be sold by Comcast.   The company has traditionally asked  very heavy users to upgrade to a business account, available at a substantially  higher cost.

The company has suggested the implementation of usage caps will provide better and more consistent speeds to their customers, blaming a small minority of customers for consuming a huge amount of bandwidth.