More on Comcast Bandwidth Limits

A few months back there were some press releases that Comcast was going to start limiting the monthly bandwidth of their users to 250 GB per month. This week Comcast sent out an email to all of their customers informing them that the limits will be implemented on October 1, 2008. The contents of that email is below:

Dear Comcast High-Speed Internet Customer,
We appreciate your business and strive to provide you with the best online experience possible. One of the ways we do this is through our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). The AUP outlines acceptable use of our service as well as steps we take to protect our customers from things that can negatively impact their experience online. This policy has been in place for many years and we update it periodically to keep it current with our customers' use of our service.On October 1, 2008, we will post an updated AUP that will go into effect at that time.In the updated AUP, we clarify that monthly data (or bandwidth) usage of more than 250 Gigabytes (GB) is the specific threshold that defines excessive use of our service. We have an excessive use policy because a fraction of one percent of our customers use such a disproportionate amount of bandwidth every month that they may degrade the online experience of other customers.250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of bandwidth and it's very likely that your monthly data usage doesn't even come close to that amount. In fact, the threshold is approximately 100 times greater than the typical or median residential customer usage, which is 2 to 3 GB/month. To put it in perspective, to reach 250 GB of data usage in one month a customer would have to do any one of the following:* Send more than 50 million plain text emails (at 5 KB/email);* Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song); or* Download 125 standard definition movies (at 2 GB/movie).And online gamers should know that even the heaviest multi- or single-player gaming activity would not typically come close to this threshold over the course of a month.In addition to modifying the excessive use policy, the updated AUP contains other clarifications of terms concerning reporting violations, newsgroups, and network management. To read some helpful FAQs, please visit http://help.comcast.net/content/faq/Frequently-Asked-Questions-about-Excessive-Use.Thank you again for choosing Comcast as your high-speed Internet provider.

Interestingly this week Comcast also sent out an email regarding a new feature called FanCast where you can watch TV shows from most of the major networks as well as movies. In their listing I noticed many of the shows that started recently such as Heros and The Office. Most of the movies they had available were pretty obscure and seem to have commercials every 15 minutes or so so I can't really see myself watching them. It does seem contrary to their new bandwidth limits to offer all of these new TV shows and movies.

I got another email from Comcast this week offering an upgrade in Internet Speed to 16 Mbps for and extra $10 month. I wonder if this service is what they will offer the high bandwidth users when they exceed the 250 GB threshold. The link to the offer is here. It says nothing about bandwidth limits but I would assume if you are paying more they will also raise the limits.