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Broadband Access
Comcast caps broadband download limit at 250 Gigabytes
Leading MSO ends all-you-can-eat broadband service
by Doug Allen
It seems Comcast is taking the FCC’s slap on the wrist for its bandwidth-throttling ways seriously. After a 3-2 verdict found the countries largest MSO guilty of blocking or raising specific applications’ (mainly P2P apps like BitTorrent) download time, the FCC charged Comcast with implementing a new, transparent network management scheme by the end of the year (see FCC to telcos via Comcast: “No more rate-throttling” ).
Comcast has only 30 days from the decision date to complete other specific parts of the FCC requirements. Perhaps in anticipation of the decision, Comcast had already begun to reevaluate its traffic policies and their underlying platforms in search of the government-mandated of “bandwidth access management” that “operates in a transparent fashion.”
Now, Comcast has announced the first of what’s likely to be a string of new policies that will impact end-users and the overall consumption patterns of bandwidth. While network management and excessive usage are two separate issues, they are inter-related, and this is the first indication of what could turn into Comcast’s broader strategy in policing bandwidth.
“It’s no secret we’ve been evaluating a specific monthly data usage or bandwidth threshold for our Comcast High-Speed Internet residential customers for some time,” the company stated in an online post entitled “Network Management Policy.” “Rumors circulated online last year and they popped up again in May… 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.”
That limit is now set at 250 Gigabytes a month (upload and download included), per residential customer account, as of October 1, 2008, under the companies new Acceptable Use Policy.
“250 Gigabytes/month is an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis,” Comcast continued. “Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2-3 Gbps.” Comcast went on to detail just what 250 Gigabytes entails in terms of raw usage: 50 million emails, 62,500 songs (at 4 Megabytes/songs), or a 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 Gigabytes a movie).
Comcast claims this move is not radical. In fact, the change seems to be largely administrative. “This is the same system we have in place today. The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted. As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage. If a customer uses more than 250 Gigabytes and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use. At that time, we’ll tell them exactly how much data per month they had used. We know from experience the vast majority of customers we ask to curb usage do so voluntarily.”
Those customers exceeding the new bandwidth ceiling may be asked to move to a commercial account (at a much higher premium) if they won’t lower their usage. For those that overstep the limit again within a six-month time, Comcast will suspend service for one year.
Comcast is also reportedly considering a number of different billing models, including “consumption-based billing,” or metered billing, such as trialed by Rogers Communications and TWC. But the MSO does not appear to have any plans to charge a premium for extra use above the cap at this point.
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