October 1 marks the start of Comcast’s implementation of a 250 GB monthly cap. Sources indicate that Comcast was thinking of charging $15/10GB overage. A press release should be released shortly confirming if this is true.
Comcast also was considering a system that would potentially suspend customers who received more than 4 DMCA letters in a 12 month period. This is unlikely, I think.
An insider, speaking confidentially, said this:
The intent appears to be to go after the people who consistently download far more than the typical user without hurting those who may have a really big month infrequently. As far as I am aware, uploads are not affected, at least not initially.
Only the top .01% of Comcast’s customers will be affected, supposedly.
Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas directs attention to Comcast’s Network Management Policy.
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)
- Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
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.
250GB is a fairly generous cap. Time-Warner Cable and Frontier cap at 5-40GB. Comcast will print notification in their bills soon, which is good. Customers will know what the limits are, and for now, won’t have to pay the overage fees.
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