Girl Geekette

As a local Comcast user (who is about to switch to AT&T DSL for this and various other reasons to be discussed later) I recieved the following email regarding Bandwith Caps soon going into effect:

Dear Comcast High-Speed Internet Customer, 

We appreciate your business and strive to provide you with the best online experience possible. One of the ways we do this is through our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). The AUP outlines acceptable use of our service as well as steps we take to protect our customers from things that can negatively impact their experience online. This policy has been in place for many years and we update it periodically to keep it current with our customers’ use of our service.

On October 1, 2008, we will post an updated AUP that will go into effect at that time.

In the updated AUP, we clarify that monthly data (or bandwidth) usage of more than 250 Gigabytes (GB) is the specific threshold that defines excessive use of our service. We have an excessive use policy because a fraction of one percent of our customers use such a disproportionate amount of bandwidth every month that they may degrade the online experience of other customers.

250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of bandwidth and it’s very likely that your monthly data usage doesn’t even come close to that amount. In fact, the threshold is approximately 100 times greater than the typical or median residential customer usage, which is 2 to 3 GB/month. To put it in perspective, to reach 250 GB of data usage in one month a customer would have to do any one of the following:

• Send more than 50 million plain text emails (at 5 KB/email);
• Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song); or
• Download 125 standard definition movies (at 2 GB/movie).

And online gamers should know that even the heaviest multi- or single-player gaming activity would not typically come close to this threshold over the course of a month.

In addition to modifying the excessive use policy, the updated AUP contains other clarifications of terms concerning reporting violations, newsgroups, and network management. To read some helpful FAQs, please visit http://help.comcast.net/content/faq/Frequently-Asked-Questions-about-Excessive-Use. 

Thank you again for choosing Comcast as your high-speed Internet provider.

Also, I just noticed they put a tracking code in the url so they could track when I was that went from the email to the FAQ site. If I had not copied and pasted that into this post, I would not have noticed. Sickening is all I can think right now.

As someone who is not a “Power Downloader” I am very offended. Although this does not affect me personally, this will effect technology in general from this day on and into the future. Sure, if we lived in an era where everyone still had dial-up modems and the internet was not content rich, graphic intense, and media driven, it would not be a problem -at that time. But what is normal for people to download today will be minimal in the future.

Just like 10 years ago, it was unheard of to download at 1MB in a minute for most all home users. Even 5 years ago, most websites did not even have a whole MB per page. Times change. But this bandwidth cap is the beginning of the end for users and what we know today as a world of improvements in technology.

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