See, now was that hard?

I hope this means their commercials will stop advertising "unlimited" high speed internet.

Now they need to have a way for the average, read that non-technical, user to monitor their bandwidth usage.

This directly competes with HDTV over the Internet. It's nice how they have a local monopoly on broadband and can lock out companies that may want to offer HDTV or HD movies over the Internet.

This is anti competitive action from a monopoly and should be illegal.

Way to keep killing ways to innovate in the US!

Choosing Comcast? If it were a choice, no one would make it. Monopoly!

How much longer before Time-Warner and Cablevision do this too? Or are they doing it already? I don't know, as I have Verizon DSL here in NYC.

@thinkliberty: You hit the nail on the head. If you watch HDTV online, you can avoid the commercials, and you aren't paying subscription fees.

Bad customer! (for wanting to view programs on any media you want to)

I wonder why people still compare bandwidth to how many songs or emails or pictures you can send. Why not add how many library of congress's will fit in the pipe?

250GB is most likely sufficient for the majority of their users, however, when you get more HD content online, it wont take long to reach that cap. Something that would make more sense to me would be to have usage pricing, where the more you use, the more you pay, but that will never get adopted because then their revenues would most likely plummet.

verizon if you can hear me HELP! fios is like 5 minutes down i95 please hurry!

So consumers that d/l LESS than average will get a rebate every month, right?
I can't wait until the water utilities take the same approach: use their gov''t gifted monopoly to dominate then get all Free Markety, Let's See What The Market Will Bear, By The Way, We're Raising Water To $5.00/gal To Offset Selfish Customers Owning Aquariums.
No? Cablers are doing the same thing.
/rant

So what? It's not like Comcast can reliably deliver over 100 kB/s on streaming content. Considering I'd have to keep that rate up for 24 hours a day over a month... yeah, 250 GB is pretty unlikely.

You're not gonna address your throttling policies, either? Whatever Comcast-opoly.

I'm glad they finally brought this out into the open. I'm all for it. Hopefully this will also aid in some small part to a reduction in spam, or at least identifying whose computers have become zombies in a botnet.

50 million emails in 30 days from a bot is not a far stretch at all.

@Trai_Dep: Actually my sewer bill works this way. Flat rate to X gallons/quarter and then more for every 1000 gallons over.

THANK YOU COMCAST

I don't like limits - but at least they are telling users what the limits are. (since they have always had limits, but would never tell anyone what they were)

It was like driving down a road with a speed limit sign, getting a ticket from a cop for speeding... but never telling you what the speed limit is or how much you were speeding by. Now Comcast is doing the smart thing and putting up those speed limit signs so users will know.

Again, thank you Comcast.

That is Comcastic. So 2-3 GB is the norm? Is this the days and age of dial-up where web sites aren't filled with ads and graphics and you tube doesn't exist?
Is clinton still in office?
I must be from the future where GB of data can be gone through within an hour.

@coan_net: They still need to provide a speedometer though or the speed limit is meaningless. Or in Comcast's case, they need to provide a way to monitor or check usage for the average user.

250 gb is high but how many people are really going over that if they need to institute this?

I updated my home router to Tomato and have been tracking my bandwidth usage.

When I'm home the family uses between 4 and 8 gigs per day. My wife does a bit of browsing and email. My elder son is always watching youtube, hulu, or downloading mods for Halflife 2. My younger son is dowloading and playing things on gametap. I'm usually streaming something from netflix or downloading from usenet to catch up on shows hulu and netflix don't carry. (and playing World of warcraft) Weekday use is a bit lower at 0 to 4 gigs.

We seem to come out a bit higher than their "average user" but still haven't drawn their ire since they say the cap has been silently in place for a while. I think 250gigs per month is ok for now.

@Trai_Dep: Don't jinx yourself: where I live we have a single sewage company who recently doubled their rates to $61 per month. I now pay more for sewage than I do water (~$50/mo).

Broadband in the US is pretty much a joke when compared to Europe. IPTV et al will never take off if companies continue to pull shenanigans like this.

I'm with the previous posters. How can an individual monitor their bandwidth useage?

I'd be calling Comcast every week to find out how close I am to my limit.

@milqtost: Oh yes, I agree. I have 3 computers in my house (and a Wii & DS) that use the internet, so I need some better way to keep track of what is used. I checked out the Tomato thing, but my router version is not covered.

Notice the humor they made it clear not to include the how much that would be for high definition video. :)

Wow, people in the rest of the world are getting higher speeds for cheaper every month, while here in America we are going backwards.

How long till we are paying through the noses for dialup speeds?

I watch a lot of MLB.TV streaming video... at 1200 Mbps it would take me... 15.8 hours a day to hit the cap. Or 15.4 if they're defining "250 GB" as "250,000 MB". Think I'm okay for now.

CURIOUS...

does this have the same impact as lets say a wireless provider upping their text messaging rates? Does this give you a legal way to leave comcast?

@RStewie: Thats the point. Comcast won't be offering up any tools to monitor your bandwidth. They've also failed to provide any means by which the customer can obtain mid-month statistics.

You could go ahead and install a software solution on your computer to monitor these statistics. Unfortunately this is not a solution for multi-computer homes. (Unless it's at your gateway, i.e. router WAN port or Cable modem WAN port) There are solutions that allow you to monitor the WAN router port, DD-WRT, OpenWRT, etc. But these are customer solutions that must be setup/installed by the customer.

As for Comcast, this is a policy that 1.) Forces higher usage customers to go to their "Business" plan (read money grab) 2.) Embrace a policy that lowers bandwidth usage across the board with at no costs to Comcast(read money grab) 3.) Forces off the network those won't pay for a "Business" plan. (read money grab)

@simplegreen: Since Comcast doesn't tie you to any contracts, at least not in my area, I'm sure you'd be free to leave them. But there aren't that many more options. So that leaves us holding our breath for FIOS. Waiting to exhale...

you always have a legal way to leave Comcast the problem is there is no where to go.

Time to go back to leeching off my neighbor's wireless :)

I just hope to god RCN doesn't see this as a go-ahead to implement something similar. Their customer service sucks but I've had very few issues with their internet service. In fact, because of all the customer service/billing issues I've had to deal with, I now only pay $30/mo for their 10mbit connection thanks to some negotiation.

But make no mistake, this is the first nail in the coffin for ever increasing bandwidth. The companies want to lower their expenses (ie. amount of bandwidth they allow for people within a certain plan range) and increase their revenue (new pricing tiers, blocking certain types of content that they can then charge you access for). THAT is the future of the internet if you don't vote with your dollars.

@simplegreen: Did Comcast ever have a "contract" with users? Most use them because there is nothing else available in their area (well that is why I use them.)

@mattplo: You tend to forget this:

COMCAST HAS ALWAYS HAD LIMITS IN PLACE

So now that they are actually admitting the limits so users CAN watch their own usage is a good thing.

Bottom line: If you never received a call from Comcast to talk to you about your internet usage before - you will will most likely not start to receive them now.

I agree it would be nice for them to make available some sort of tool to help user keep track of usage - but again, the limit is not new... it is just newly mad public.

@matuszek:

There are 8 megabits in 1 megabyte, if you get 1200 megabits per second, you are streaming 150 megabytes a second, it will take you 1666 seconds to hit the cap, or 27.76 minutes.

Im in a 2 year contract with Comcast and moving. I may need to pull this out of my back pocket as contract breaker.

- Oh, and what does it take to have posts actually posted around her?

@blackmage439: I don't think they're trying to combat bot nets, dude.

Why do a lot of people here think they should get "unlimited" bandwidth for a song and a dance? Do they think that "bandwidth" is free?

Bandwidth is something you consume. The more you consume, the more you should have to pay. It's your choice how much bandwidth you consume, and if you consume 3x more then your neighbor, why should your neighbor subsidize you?

We are starting to come "full circle". When all of this started, you payed for how long you were connected to the internet (think AoL). Then the companies realized that you would spend more, if they went to flat rate pricing and gave you what appeared to be "unlimited" bandwidth.

Now they have to tighten up this policy mainly because people are doing illegal stuff, or they are running a business out of their home, and not paying for "business" class service.

Or, in the rare case, have umpteen people in a house consuming much much more bandwidth then they should be ... which comes back to me (the average user) subsidizing the person with 18 children living at home, all with computers, and all of them surfing youtube.

On one hand, I understand the step, though in principle I don't agree with it. It's just the first step in what will likely be a long march towards internet regulation.

Question though. The letter says that only a fraction of 1 percent are going over the cap... how many customers can that possibly affect? I'm thinking very few, which makes the logic presented in the letter rather flawed.

@BrianDaBrain: If that 1% of people is spread out geographically, it could affect the entire region.

When you dam up the river, all the creeks the tributaries below that point are affected.

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.

Straight to the point...
Bullshit.

I'll also point out that they have failed to define whether or not it's upload and download or just download.

@femaleconsumerist: I thought they stopped advertising unlimited a loooong time ago?

@mbouchard:
The average, non-technical user will never even come close to 250 GB

Isnt this a material change to the contract?

Again, I love how Canada is still way behind.

You protest about a 250 GB limit per month, how about a 20 GB limit for $50??? (which is average and what I pay)

Of course, one could also choose to pay the $75/month fee to get 100 GB.

Nevertheless, us Canucks up here would be in heaven with such draconian limits of 250GB

@xredgambit: Do you even remember dialup? I remember queueing up a 22 MB game demo to download overnight, and I thought it was so cool to be downloading such an absurdly large file.

@mattplo: I don't believe Comcast will let you have a business plan at a residence. Perhaps if you are operating a business out of the residence, but business plans aren't intended for individuals.

If you are using anywhere near the bandwidth cap, then monitoring your bandwidth shouldn't be a problem for you. I started monitoring mine at the beginning of this month, just to see how much I was using. My wife and I both play online games, on both PC and consoles. I download movies/TV occasionally, and do a lot of web/email, since I work from home. My total so far this month? Less than 20GB. I think 250GB will likely cover 99.5% of their users by a wide margin.

@Papa Midnight: Online games really don't transfer a ton of data; they can't, because everything has to happen very quickly. Latency matters a lot more in online games than transfer speed.

For example, Halo 3 saves a replay of every game on your hard drive, and a 10 minute game is only a few MB. All of the data necessary to track every action taken by every user over the course of the entire match is only a few MB. So yeah, online gaming gaming won't make a dent in your 250 GB limit.

250GB/mo ... what does this actually break down to?

Assuming 30 days in a month... and a 100% saturated connection is downloading at 8Mb/s ...

You could saturate your connection for 142 minutes per day, or about 2.25-hours.

Assuming "50% duty cycle", double that time, about 4.5 hours every day.

This may seem impossible for "average" users, but in a household with 3-4 internet users it is entirely possible for the average.

As many others probably suspect, this is not REALLY about prevent bandwidth hogs from causing service disruptions... it's about restricting the development of services that directly compete with Comcast's own services like Video On Demand (Netflix, Amazon Unbox, etc) and Telephone service.

You watch... they'll start playing games with prices for higher caps, etc... none of this will affect your connection to the internet or the usage of other users... it's all designed to maximize their profits because they are a monopoly in many, many areas... DSL, with most places coming in at under 1.5Mb/s as the max available, is no longer REALLY competition for their 8-12Mb/s service... the only true competition is from rival cable companies (my last town had RCN & Comcast) or from Verizon's FIOS service.