Aug 28, 2008

Ars Technica reports that Comcast has confirmed its plans to place bandwidth caps on all of its residential high-speed broadband customers, a proposal that has been in the works for some time.

According to Comcast's site, starting October 1st, the company will curtail excessive use by notifying customers if they exceed 250GB of data usage and are among one of the heaviest data users. Doing so for a second time within a six-month window could result in Comcast terminating your broadband service for one year.

Comcast states that less than 1 percent of its broadband customers fall into the "excessive use" category that it's trying to address with the cap. To explain how high the cap is, the company offered some examples of what a customer would have to do in a month in order to exceed 250GB of data usage.

Ironically, the company's FAQ offered two different sets of examples:

The first said a customer would have to do any of the following to exceed 250GB in a month:

• Send 20,000 high-resolution photos
• Send 40 million emails
• Download 50,000 songs

The company then offered a more detailed explanation that described the threshold as follows:

• Upload 25,000 high-resolution photos (at 10MB/photo)
• Send send 50 million emails (at 0.05KB/email)
• Download 62,500 songs (at 4MB/song)

Even those opposed to the cap have conceded that 250GB is high enough that a vast majority of people will never even know it exists. And it's clearly splitting hairs to compare the differences in the usage examples above because they're all extreme cases...and when you're downloading over 50,000 songs a month, chances are you already know that you're a heavy Net user.

My point in pointing out the examples is that it raises a question that I've wondered about before: how can consumers who are becoming more and more reliant on electronic data for work and pleasure be expected to know how many gigabytes of bandwidth they're using on a monthly basis?

Personally, I wouldn't have a clue if I had to estimate how much bandwidth I use. I still remember some of my first cellphone bills in the '90s when I woefully miscalculated how much time I spent on the phone. And those were minutes. Not gigabytes. 

Which is why I opt for unlimited usage, and always will. 

Tags: Bandwidth, broadband, broadband usage, Comcast