It's official: Comcast starts 250GB bandwidth caps October 1

[Chris]

It's official: Comcast starts 250GB bandwidth caps October 1

Comcast has announced that it will in fact be introducing bandwidth caps to all residential customers. The cap, which will go into effect as of October 1, will be 250GB per month. Comcast justifies the decision by saying that it's "an extremely large amount of data," and that a very large majority of customers will never cross it.

In fact, according to Comcast, this is actually the same policy that is already in place, except with more explicit numbers as to what is allowed and what isn't. "As part of our preexisting policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage," the company said in a statement sent to Ars. "If a customer uses more than 250GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use."

[rich_t]

It's official: Comcast starts 250GB bandwidth caps October 1

Comcast has announced that it will in fact be introducing bandwidth caps to all residential customers. The cap, which will go into effect as of October 1, will be 250GB per month. Comcast justifies the decision by saying that it's "an extremely large amount of data," and that a very large majority of customers will never cross it.

In fact, according to Comcast, this is actually the same policy that is already in place, except with more explicit numbers as to what is allowed and what isn't. "As part of our preexisting policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage," the company said in a statement sent to Ars. "If a customer uses more than 250GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use."

Actually 250GB is a lot for most clients I suspect.

250GB is a lot of bandwidth.

[Chris]

I suppose.  Even running BitTorrent, I usually don't do more than 10-20 Gb a month.

I'm not sure what my use actually is.  I have no way to find out.

[thundley4]

I have Comcast and do a lot of downloading, and the wife plays online games, then there is just watching online videos, all these add up .   Comcast does offer McAfee Security as a free download and it has a bandwidth monitor available. However, I'd need a program that would monitor traffic through the router since there are 4 computers connected.

This program should work for individual computers , though.

[LC EFA]

*shrug*

I have a measly 12gig cap on my broadband. Easy to monitor through the ISP website and they even send you cute little emails telling you when you've used 1/2 and 3/4 of the quota.

Only once have I over ran this 12gig and that was a month where I used uTorrent more than usual.

[rich_t]

Time Warner is considering BW caps as well.  They haven't mentioned what their cap might end up being, but IIRC they stated that their average user uses less than 10 GB per month.