Last week when Faultline waxed lyrical about the problems that Comcast had in setting its own policy for lowering internet traffic at its ISP service, including the setting of a monthly data cap, we had no idea that it was thinking about the limit being 250 GB. This is more than 10 times the types of caps that have been tried in Europe. If this represents a reduction in usage for some users, then there must be some incredible BitTorrent sessions going on, way in excess of most other countries and we can’t see any consumers becoming aggrieved at this, except extreme video pirates.
At 8 Mbps (1 Mbyte per second) it would take 70 hours operating at maximum speed for a that level to be saturated and about 250 hours of standard definition video could be downloaded, around 8 hours for each day of the month. The Comcast ISP user agreement will be updated to this on October 1.
It is going to take a fair stretch of the FFC’s imagination to continue to see Comcast as the bad boy of US ISPs on the basis of this generosity. Even Comcast says that the median usage is around 2 or 3 Gigabytes a month.
“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,” the company said in a statement on its Web site. Customers who go over the limit are contacted by the company and asked to curb their usage.
Other US ISPs are thought to be offering far lower usage caps in the 5 GB to 75 GB bracket.
Comcast says that this is the same existing system that it has in place already, but was accused by the FCC of using deep packet inspection to cut off or slow down BitTorrent or other P2P traffic. Comcast has not referred directly to this practice.