SubscribeComcast, 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.
Other stories of interest:
- “Internet Evangelist” Opposes Volume Caps, Limits; “They’re Not Very Useful”
- NBC Olympics: On the Go… Somewhere Else
- Blocking or Metering: “A False Choice,” Concludes Advocacy Group
- NBC Plans to Stream NFL Football This Fall: A False Start Called for Capped Customers
- Frontier: Now With Prices Up To $10.80 Per Gigabyte, Limit Five GB
This is bogus. Comcast is punishing average joe because they can’t ask for more money from the hands that fed them in the first place. I don’t know anyone who just uses their service to check email and cruise the internet anymore. Most download now a days. They are going to raise prices again, and say that consumers are using up all of the bandwith and must upgrade to newer equipment. They should first acctually fix it instead of getting rich off average joe. To put a cap is dumb in the first place. The average person will see that gone by the middle of the month. We pay too much to begin with and don’t even get the acctual speed we pay for. I read on their website that the Blast service is only given spurts in the first 5-10 mb.
I don’t understand why the FCC won’t regulate this company already. I filed a complaint and nothing is being done, its like the FCC doesn’t care.