Comcast to cap monthly consumer broadband
Starting October 1 customers of Comcast's residential data services will have an invisible barrier on their monthly data usage. Under the new guidelines of Comcast's Acceptable Use Policy announced Thursday, that cap will be set at 250 gigabytes per month, per account.
Users who go over the limit will get a courtesy call from Comcast's customer service for the first instance. However, under the new policy a second-time offense means the service is immediately suspended for an entire calendar year.
Surprisingly the company is not providing any tools to help users monitor their current usage. An FAQ on Comcast's support site simply suggests that customers do a "Web search" for bandwidth metering software that will track this amount for them. Going forward there may be plans to set up alerts over certain thresholds, or bundle some official tool as part of the company's starter software.
Comcast notes that the median usage for most residential customers falls somewhere between 2GB and 3GB, a number that is regularly broken within a matter of hours and sometimes minutes by customers taking advantage of streaming HD video and online backup services. The company breaks down basic usage numbers similar to what's seen on the marketing materials on a consumer hard drive:
* Send 50 million e-mails (at 0.05KB/e-mail)
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4MB/song)
* Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2GB/movie)
* Upload 25,000 high-resolution digital photos (at 10MB/photo)
A far greater problem may be the slighting of cloud storage services that offer file transfer and backup. Services like Carbonite and Mozy let you back up and transfer the entirety of your computer's storage several times per month, which on many standard consumer machines can be in the hundreds of gigabytes.
Apple, too, is just at the beginning stages of MobileMe, a service that offers sync and file backup to multiple devices. Additionally, the rumored all-you-can-eat iTunes could drastically change how much downloading users are doing on a monthly basis.
So what do you think about this new limit? Let us know in the comments and the poll below.
Josh Lowensohn is an associate editor for Webware.com, CNET's blog about cool and otherwise useful Web applications and services. If you've found a site you'd like profiled, shoot him an e-mail. E-mail Josh.
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Commerce
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bandwidth,
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net neutrality,
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First off, i bet they wont do a good job of notifying all their customers of the limit. Second, 250gb is unreasonably low. A family of 5 can easily surpass that in no time by streaming and downloading music, videos, and games, online gaming and game downloads, VOIP, and other web usage. Comcast can go to hell!
First off, i bet they wont do a good job of notifying all their customers of the limit. Second, 250gb is unreasonably low. A family of 5 can easily surpass that in no time by streaming and downloading music, videos, and games, online gaming and game downloads, VOIP, and other web usage. Screw comcast.
It is completely naive, for anyone to believe that these large corporations would remain ethical without regulations.
Might as well stick with slow DSL at least it would seem like my moneys worth.
I actually liked Comcast, but I LOVE FIOS
Also, what's the point in cancelling the service? Why not just suspend service for the rest of the current month?
My guess as to what's going on: They set this limit, but they don't really have any accurate way to measure it themselves. But they will target people who have obviously used at least this much bandwidth in a legally provable manner.
???? Where is the surprise? This is Comcast we are talking about......
A way to change the way they charge, like a running meter.
But obviously we all know where this is going... Any bandwidth taken from existing customers will probably be resold to new customers or existing customers as "upgrade" packages... lame!
I signed up for comcast internet at my new apartment literally yesterday, and now they pull this. Not only did their 'analysts' try to convince me in an unavoidable (and terribly low-quality) java chat room that my monthly rate should be $15 higher than it was advertised on their site (while I was in the checkout process, even), but now they're going to cap my bandwidth even though e-mail and online communications are now (and have been for several years) the official method of communication for my university?
This is ludicrous; This has to be illegal somehow. This news is going to scare away enough customers to where they'll have to begin repealing it, or at least raising the cap. I'm already considering cancelling the installation and switching to AT&T DSL.
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by ptrhansen
August 28, 2008 4:45 PM PDT
- 250 gb is a whole lot for a month - Rogers in Canada only gives 60 GB a month and my family rarely goes over 20 gb (upstream and down). At least Rogers gives us a bandwith monitor on their website.
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by Lerianis
August 29, 2008 1:25 AM PDT
- That is for you and YOUR family. Most other people with 4 or 5 people in the home use a good bit of bandwidth. Heck, even just WEB SURFING each month, I use 100GB's. Add in my Bittorrenting, and it goes up to 350 easily.
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by k2dave
August 29, 2008 3:18 AM PDT
- Isn't Rogers a cellular company? Verizon wireless has a cap of 5 GB/month, after which the service either slows down to about 144kb/s, or for later signups charge $0.10/Mb. Cellular internet is a bit different then hard wired in capacity.
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by sinsio
August 29, 2008 2:43 PM PDT
- I think it's very smart on Comcast's part. Very few people complain about the initial cap of 250 GB. Once people get used to the idea, they'll steadily decrease the cap to maximize profits. While they are within their rights to do so, I fear this is a step backwards in terms of the development of the internet. This will significantly hamper web 2.0 applications in the future. Who's going to want to use Netflix and iTunes HD movie downloads, remote desktops, and higher quality video calls with caps in place?
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by BobBrins
August 31, 2008 9:27 AM PDT
- The article stated that Comcast's median family usage is between 200 and 300 gb a month. So the average family can look forward to being cutoff for a year.
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by sportbikerr1
September 4, 2008 6:43 AM PDT
- LOL 20 Gb is a joke. Come on man I use that in a 2 days. Which yes pushes me over they're limit and I would switch if FIOS would start wiring appartments. I have numberous internet services going. One of them of coarse being HP upline backup service. A raw 1 hour of mini dv footage can be 20gb. Of coarse I have xbox live and play that considerably at night which is a bandwidth hog. I do alot of remote work to and from the office with transfering large files etc. I have Vonage which of coarse i'm sure counts towards comcast caps. Of coarse all the other small services I use like online radio etc eats away at this. All in all this cap is way to low, and can be very easily exceeded. I'm not surprised that it would be a way to weed out the higher usage customers since this number is artificially low you can very easily exceed it. Expecially those users of usenet.
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See all 217 Comments >>The thing thats gonna suck is that I'll have to go around to every program and configure it to drop its bandwidth because the automatic network usage throttling won't work since it will no longer be representative of what you're real bandwidth is. Over all this sucks from a software design and usage in a modern day and age.