Should You Be Worried About Comcast's New Bandwidth Restrictions?

Effective on October 1^st, 2008 Comcast will begin to limit home user's bandwidth to 250 gigs a month. Comcast has been limiting user's bandwidth in secret for quite some time now as evidenced by the recent Bittorrent slowdowns. The Internet Service Provider denied slowing down Bittorrent transfers and uploads for the past year until they were caught redhanded by the media and handed a ruling from the FCC. On August 20^th Comcast was ordered by the FCC to stop throttling upload and download speeds for Bittorent users by the end of 2008.

Comcast has a long history of not telling their customers how much bandwidth is too much. There was no indication of a limit on their websites. When you called their technical support department the phone representatives were unable to give you any information. Comcast decided that to tell us the limit would let spammers and other bandwidth abusers know exactly how much was too much.

If you exceeded the limit you were simply cut off and your only recourse was to contact their abuse team by leaving a message in the abuse team's voicemail and hoping you would get a timely answer back. There was also the option to contact them via email but if your service is blocked then that option is useless.

Recently they added this statement on their Comcast.net site.

Announcement Regarding An Amendment to Our Acceptable Use Policy

"It's no secret we've been evaluating a specific monthly data usage or bandwidth threshold for our Comcast High-Speed Internet residential customers for some time. Rumors circulated online last year and they popped up again in May.

In January, we added new frequently asked questions about what we consider acceptable use of our service to our online Help site

We've listened to feedback from our customers who asked that we provide a specific threshold for data usage and this would help them understand the amount of usage that would qualify as excessive. Today, we're announcing that beginning on October 1, 2008, we will amend our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) available at

250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 - 3 GB. To put 250 GB of monthly usage in perspective, a customer would have to do any one of the following:

Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)

Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)

Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)

Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

This is the same system we have in place today. The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted. As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage. If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use. At that time, we'll tell them exactly how much data per month they had used. We know from experience the vast majority of customers we ask to curb usage do so voluntarily."

While it is good that we finally have a stated limit it feels like a bait and switch for the people who signed up under the promise of unlimited bandwidth.

The following information from their Bandwidth usage FAQ's is a little more unsettling.

"If a customer surpasses 250 GB and is one of the top users of the service for a second time within a six-month timeframe, his or her service will be subject to termination for one year. After the one year period expires, the customer may resume service by subscribing to a service plan appropriate to his or her needs."

Does this mean they are going to open the door to pay for bandwidth charges? The more you use the more you pay?Supposedly the normal user would not be effected. In these days of sharing digital photos, online streaming of music and movies how long will this be an acceptable solution?

In reality this change will effect very few of Comcast's household accounts. The company is just putting into words what they have been doing behind the scenes before the FCC ruling. According to Comcast only approximately 14,000 of their 14 million broadband users go through that much bandwidth a month. The average broadband user consumes only about 2 to 3 Gigs a month.

The average user will see no change to their services. It takes roughly 50,000 mp3 music files, 200 iTunes movie downloads or 50 HD movie downloads to even get close to 250 gigs. This doesn't seem like much for the normal email using, casual game playing user. Not many harddrives even top 250 gigs but they will soon. Remember when we throught that no one could possible use more than a 40 meg harddrive? That wasn't too long ago and we were in the days of 2400 baud transfer rates.

The 250 Gig cap could mean trouble in the future for internet TV users. Cable TV is still the backbone of Comcast's business and they want to hold onto to it as long as possible. With the advent of HD TV and streaming movies available on the internet we may see some big charges to come. I am sure that in the near future Comcast will be addressing internet TV in a way that nets them the largest profit possible.

Has Comcast oversold their product so much that they have to address the bandwidth issue in this way instead of upgrading their networks to handle the loads? Or are they just trying to address the illegal downloads that transfer that much data? The change won't even give you faster internet. If you have slowdowns it is usually a problem with leakage in the cables or drop that leads to your home. Comcast can give you very fast connection speeds but they want you to pay for them. Their bandwidth limit only helps them and is of no use to the home customer.

It's more likely that this action is a response to the popularity of services like Amazon OnDemand, Hulu and Netflix that let you use your broadband connection to view popular movies and TV shows. Comcast wants a piece of that pie and this may be just the beginning.

For most users this means not much as Comcast can basically do what they want because there isn't enough competition to make them truly consider what the public wants. Are we ready for pay for usage fees? We are according to Comcast.