Comcast to Limit Customers' Broadband Usage to 250GB

Sanya · Aug 29, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Comcast Corp, the largest U.S. cable operator, said on Thursday it will cap customers' Internet usage starting October 1, in a bid to ensure the best service for the vast majority of its subscribers.

Comcast said it was setting a monthly data usage threshold of 250 gigabytes per account for all residential high-speed Internet customers, or the equivalent of 50 million e-mails or 124 standard-definition movies.

"If a customer exceeds more than 250 GB and is one of the heaviest data users who consume the most data on our high-speed Internet service, he or she may receive a call from Comcast's Customer Security Assurance (CSA) group to notify them of excessive use," according to the company's updated Frequently Asked Questions on Excessive Use.

Customers who top 250 GB in a month twice in a six-month timeframe could have service terminated for a year.

Comcast said up to 99 percent of its 14 million Internet subscribers would not be affected by the new threshold, which it said would help ensure the quality of Internet delivery is not degraded by a minority of heavy users.

U.S. Internet subscribers are typically not aware of any limit on their Internet usage once they sign up to pay a flat monthly fee to their service provider.

As Web usage has rocketed, driven by the popularity of watching online video, photo-sharing and music downloading services, cable and phone companies have been considering various techniques to limit or manage heavy usage.

But Comcast has come under fire from a variety of sources for its network management techniques.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission investigated complaints by consumer groups that it was blocking peer-to-peer applications like BitTorrent, and earlier this month ordered Comcast to modify its network management.

Comcast has said that by the end of the year it will change its network management practices to ensure all Web traffic is treated essentially the same, but has also been exploring other ways to prevent degradation of its Internet service delivery.

One consumer group said while Comcast's new 250 GB limit was "relatively high," it could eventually ensnare customers as technology progresses.

"If Comcast has oversold their network to the point of creating congestion problems, then well-disclosed caps for Internet use are a better short-term solution than Comcast's current practice of illegally blocking Internet traffic," said S Derek Turner of Free Press, a Washington, D.C.-based consumer advocacy group that filed a complaint about Comcast's network management practices earlier this year.

The Philadelphia-based company is not alone in trying to come up with ways to limit heavy Internet usage.

Time Warner Cable Inc, the second-largest U.S. cable operator, said in January it would run a trial of billing Internet subscribers based on usage rather than a flat fee.

Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas said Comcast was also considering so-called consumption-based billing, but no decisions had been made.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080829/wr_nm/comcast_internet_dc
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Another reason to leave Comcast.

Patsy Stone · Aug 29, 2008

Internet throttling is commonplace in the UK. It does make some form of sense tbh. As it says, why should a majority of people suffer shortages in their relatively minimal usage when a small percentage (in the quote 1% but that could be 1000's of people lol) consistently clog up the bandwidth?

Really what they should be doing is charging those who use more higher rates. If they still want to use more then they can either agree to pay them or move, and leave the average users in peace.

EvilMan_89 · Aug 31, 2008

yea, i saw this on the news a few days ago (yes, Fox news ZOMG). anyways, i dont' see how it could really affect that many people except if they work for a company or something. i don't understand how anyone can reach that limit in that short amount of time. the only people that i can really see that actually reaches that limit are bootleggers. also, that amount is equivalent to about 50,000 emails, which is very rare. i dont' have comcast but i heard their Internet was to die for :)

Hakurei Reimu · Aug 31, 2008

well...it's not gona effect the other 13.87 million customers so I guess it's not TOO bad.

Either way, if everything is correct, everyone'll probably ditch comcast and lots of other providers by 2012. =/

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