Comcast to cap monthly consumer broadband starting Oct. 1
Starting October 1st customers of Comcast’s residential data services will have an invisible barrier on their monthly data usage. Under the new guidelines of Comcast’s Acceptable Use Policy that cap is now set at 250 GB per month, per account.
Users who go over the limit will get a courtesy call from Comcast’s customer service for the first instance. However, under the new policy a second time offense means their service is immediately terminated and suspended for an entire calendar year.
Surprisingly the company is not providing any tools to help users monitor their current usage. An FAQ on Comcast’s support site simply suggests that customers do a “Web search” for bandwidth metering software that will track this amount for them. Going forward there may be plans to set up alerts over certain thresholds, or bundle some official tool as part of the company’s starter software.
Comcast notes that the median usage for most residential customers falls somewhere between 2-3 GB, a number that is regularly broken within a matter of hours and sometimes minutes by customers taking advantage of streaming HD video and online backup services. The company breaks down basic usage numbers similar to what’s seen on the marketing materials on a consumer hard drive:
* 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)
A far greater problem may be the slighting of cloud storage services that offer file transfer and back-up. Services like Carbonite and Mozy let you back up and transfer the entirety of your computer’s storage several times per month, which on many standard consumer machines can be in the hundreds of gigabytes.
Apple too is just at the beginning stages of MobileMe, a service that offers sync and file back-up to multiple devices. Additionally, the rumored all-you-can eat iTunes could drastically change how much downloading users are doing on a monthly basis.
So what do you think about this new limit? Let us know in the comments and the poll below.
What do you think of the new 250GB/month Comcast cap? See original here:
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Comcast to cap monthly consumer broadband starting Oct. 1
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