Comcast policy limits bandwith usage

Historic City News has learned that Comcast High-Speed Internet Customers will soon have bandwidth restrictions placed on certain of their accounts,

Projected for October 1, 2008, Comcast will post an updated Acceptable Use Policy that will go into effect at that time.

In the updated AUP, Comcast intends to clarify that monthly data (or bandwidth) usage of more than 250 Gigabytes (GB) is the specific threshold that defines excessive use of our service.

Comcast is telling customers that the reason they must enforce the excessive use policy is because a fraction of one percent of their 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”, says a Comcast representative. The cable company has stated “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).

Comcast believes that 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 link directly to Comcast helpful frequently asked questions, visit their website.