Williamo’s Blog.

Well, at least Comcast is finally putting a solid number on their previously arbitrary “excessive download” limit, but this still sucks.

From dslreports.com:

Back in May I broke the news that in addition to throttling back high-consumption users to “DSL like speeds,” Comcast was considering implementing a 250GB monthly cap as part of their shift toward “protocol agnostic” network management. Despite consumer grumbling, that plan is in fact now moving forward. Sources tell me that Comcast will officially announce that they’re implementing this new system starting October first.

…

“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,” says an insider familiar with the project, who prefers to remain anonymous. “As far as I am aware, uploads are not affected, at least not initially.” According to this source, the new system should only impact some 14,000 customers out of Comcast’s 14.1 million users (i.e. the top 0.1%).

While we won’t be sure this is still the case until we see Comcast’s plan, the original source indicated that Comcast was considering giving customers one “freebie” every twelve months in regards to the cap. In other words, you’d be able to consume more than 250GB once a year, but consecutive months with violations would result in you getting a wrist slap. Obviously there’s lots of questions here, not least of which are whether Comcast’s own content counts against the cap, or whether customers will be provided with a usage meter.

(Comcast 250GB Cap Goes Live October 1)

Since this article was originally posted on August 28, Comcast’s own site has confirmed this hard limit:

We’ve listened to feedback from our customers who asked that we provide a specific threshold for data usage and this would help them understand the amount of usage that would qualify as excessive. Today, we’re announcing that beginning on October 1, 2008, we will amend our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) available at http://www.comcast.net/terms/use/ and establish a specific monthly data usage threshold of 250 GB/month per account for all residential customers.

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)

(http://www.comcast.net/terms/network/amendment/)

This new policy takes effect on October 1st, so watch that ‘torrent traffic. On the (relatively) bright side, Comcast says they will contact you in case of over-usage and tell you exactly how much data per month you’ve used.