Comcast Bandwidth Limit Official

[trax1]

I saw Skuzzy post about this a few weeks ago, and I just got this in my email:

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.

Hopefully this will never effect me, but still I don't think it's something they needed to do, I think it's just gonna piss people off more towards Comcast then they already are.

[sluggish]

How dare anyone web host from their home!

[WMLute]

I'm curious.

How much flying AH takes up towards my "montly bandwith" now w/ Comcast?

[eagl]

I don't think AH uses too much bandwidth...  Remember, we used to play this just fine on 14.4 modems

I remember skuzzy posted the ideal bandwidth requirements for AH in the past, but that was a couple of years ago and the forums have been redone a few times since then so I don't know if the answer is still in the forums somewhere.  You could ask him if you're really worried   Or download a network monitoring utility and use it to track how much a day's worth of AH uses up, and figure out what it will use in a month.

[Nwbie]

I'm curious.

How much flying AH takes up towards my "montly bandwith" now w/ Comcast?

10 kills a day

so you get 15 to 20 minutes to play

[Delirium]

Frankly, I would have no problem with this going into effect for new customers, or after the current contract with existing customers have been completed (ie 1 year).

The fact they are adding this immediately and will terminate anyone who goes above that amount twice, in a 6 month period, is wrong.

I'm wondering if this is a violation of certain State's laws, my AG is a real pick (I had to remove the R for the filter) and loves to chew up companies like this.

If Skuzzy reads his, could you/he post how much data AH uses min/max per hour?

[Vulcan]

Frankly, I would have no problem with this going into effect for new customers, or after the current contract with existing customers have been completed (ie 1 year).

The fact they are adding this immediately and will terminate anyone who goes above that amount twice, in a 6 month period, is wrong.

I'm wondering if this is a violation of certain State's laws, my AG is a real pick (I had to remove the R for the filter) and loves to chew up companies like this.

If Skuzzy reads his, could you/he post how much data AH uses min/max per hour?

IIRC AH <64kbps per hour, unless you're background d/ling skins. Which is around 35Mb per hour. So even the current heaviest AH user (400 hours) would only crack about 14Gb of traffic per month.

[-tronski-]

Wow...I wish I was capped at 250GB!

 Tronsky

[SD67]

Yup it must be hard to stay within such constrictive limits...

[avionix]

250GB is a lot of bandwidth.  I can see why they would be instituting something like this.  At least I will never go over that.  Can't imagine the wifey downloading 62,000 songs or sending that many e-mails.

[croduh]

Damn, i haven't used 250 Gb in the last 10 years of my web surfing!