Reader Michael forwarded Comcast’s official warning about the new 250 GB download cap that they’ve added (or rather, that they’ve now admitted to) in their Acceptable Use Policy. The cap has been in place for some time, but Comcast is just now getting around to telling everyone about it.
Here’s the email:
Dear Comcast High-Speed Internet Customer,
We appreciate your business and strive to provide you with the best online experience possible. One of the ways we do this is through our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). The AUP outlines acceptable use of our service as well as steps we take to protect our customers from things that can negatively impact their experience online. This policy has been in place for many years and we update it periodically to keep it current with our customers’ use of our service.
On October 1, 2008, we will post an updated AUP that will go into effect at that time.
In the updated AUP, we clarify that monthly data (or bandwidth) usage of more than 250 Gigabytes (GB) is the specific threshold that defines excessive use of our service. We have an excessive use policy because a fraction of one percent of our 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 and 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).And 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 read some helpful FAQs, please visit http://help.comcast.net/content/faq/Frequently-Asked-Questions-about-Excessive-Use.
Thank you again for choosing Comcast as your high-speed Internet provider.
(Photo: honeylamb )
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I sometimes go home for lunch
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So….. nobody is asking questions frequently?
I don’t understand WHY they would do that and sell their “fast 50 MBps” service as well. The reason why people want faster service is because they’re going to do a shit ton of downloading or whatever they wanna do with it.
I’m one of those nerdy folks who must be completely out of touch with the average Comcast internet user, because I bet I could exceed their average 2-3gb/mo with email and IM alone. Hell, I use a gig and a half a month (on average) on my *phone,* and at home I’m on WiFi for that too.
Still, our cable service here in the boonies is so throttled to hell and back I’d pay an extra ten bucks a month to get a guaranteed, uncapped 250GB/mo. But I doubt anyone from CableOne is reading this, because I’m pretty sure nobody from CableOne actually uses the Internet.
08/28/2007 09/28/2007 409.39
09/28/2007 10/28/2007 371.59
10/28/2007 11/28/2007 543.36
11/28/2007 12/28/2007 351.28
12/28/2007 01/28/2008 301.13
01/28/2008 02/28/2008 226.48
02/28/2008 03/28/2008 277.79
03/28/2008 04/28/2008 383.39
04/28/2008 05/28/2008 154.78
05/28/2008 06/28/2008 198.32
06/28/2008 07/28/2008 225.67
07/28/2008 08/28/2008 189.31
i moved mid-august 2007 and had to get comcast [no more fios
] and these are solely my giganews stats since then, and this has been LIGHT usage. i routinely went over 500gb/mo when i had fios (sweet sweet 1.8MB/s gloriousness)
I’ve got a 60GB limit and rarely come close to it, what the heck do you do to download 500GB per month? of course i don’t stram TV so that keeps stuff down but people using 500GB, just… wow
Too bad for you if you have more than 1 person in household downloading games, movies, etc. 250 Gig would be pretty easy to hit if you had roomates.