Comcast announces Bandwidth Cap
Recently Comcast posted an announcement on their website that confirms a 250GB bandwidth usage cap for all residential customers. The announcement states that starting October 1st, 2008, anyone that goes over the limit may be contacted by Comcast and asked to lighten the usage. Excessive violation of the bandwidth cap may lead to account suspension.
With all of the online services out there today that offer video/audio streaming, and downloading of HD quality movies, among other various tasks internet users engage in — a 250GB limit seems pretty low, even if you only count the amount of free (or cheap) legal content of this quality and size.
I personally believe this cap be extremely ridiculous. I’m not sure exactly what my usage is per month, but I know it has to be up there. I regularly download games, watch streaming video (Hulu/Youtube), and am constantly on dozens of websites at a time throughout the day (pretty much every day). Let’s not count the 6 to 7 or so devices that routinely require regular downloadable upgrades.
Even if it is only 0.01% of the current customer base that go over this limit, that is still a lot of customers. I definitely forsee some bad publicity for Comcast.