[Infowarrior] - Comcast to cap monthly consumer broadband

[Richard Forno]

August 28, 2008 3:32 PM PDT
Comcast to cap monthly consumer broadband
Posted by Josh Lowensohn

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10028506-2.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Starting October 1 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 announced Thursday,  
that cap will be set at 250 gigabytes 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 the service is immediately 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 2GB and 3GB, 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 e-mails (at 0.05KB/e-mail)
     * Download 62,500 songs (at 4MB/song)
     * Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2GB/movie)
     * Upload 25,000 high-resolution digital photos (at 10MB/photo)

A far greater problem may be the slighting of cloud storage services  
that offer file transfer and backup. 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 backup to multiple devices. Additionally,  
the rumored all-you-can-eat iTunes could drastically change how much  
downloading users are doing on a monthly basis.