Comcast New Usage Fees

[fuzzytomcat]

Hi all,

Well it looks as if the throttling of Comcast downloads with the level of traffic used has now come to a close and new rules will be in effect October 1, 2008

Here is a snippet from the e-mail sent to me -

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.

Of course no indication on what the cost is ........... must be in the mail ??

Fuzzy
 

[surfer]

that doesn't sound so bad my current provider caps me at 60GB ( bills $1.25/GB if i go over) and still shapes my traffic.  there a couple of federal rulings (CRTC) up here in Canada that'll break in the next month against Rogers and Bell (our 2 largest carriers) .  Apparently there is a lot of concern on the US side too since these companies are setting dangerous precedents for "fair use" Google amongst others have spoken out against antiP2P activity by (by our monopolistic) ISPs.
 

[texasboy]

LOL, no limit here from my provider in UK. 20Mb broadband,digital TV,and very cheap phone,as a package.

Capping seems to be just another way of making money. Mind you  I am on fibre optic cable directly connected to PC and not waiting on a phone company to update their systems or tell me I`m too far away from their exchange,
cheers

[death]

Damn Fuzzy got any other Internet providers in your area?

[fuzzytomcat]

Damn Fuzzy got any other Internet providers in your area?

None that are broadband only dsl "crawl speed" ...... but there is "directv satellite" I just don't know about this though for the internet, Its great for TV been with them almost 15 years.

 

[surfer]

From the last time i checked satellite internet still required a modem land line and is pretty slow (at least bell exvu here in canada)  which uses directtv tech.
here is an article http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question606.htm
which i think confirms my suspicions.