Starting Oct. 1, Comcast will place limits on how much bandwidth its customers can use each month.
In late August, the country's largest Internet provider announced that it would place a bandwidth cap of 250 gigabytes per month on residential users. According to Comcast, the move will affect about 14,000 users, less than 1 percent of its customers.
The announcement comes weeks after the Federal Communications Commission reprimanded Comcast for slowing down its service for customers using BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol. The FCC said Comcast had to treat all Internet functions equally.
While Comcast is not the first Internet provider to place a cap on its customers, it is the largest company to do so. In June, Time Warner Cable tested metering its services - meaning charging customers who exceed a specific amount of use - in Beaumont, Texas. AT&T has said it has considered this method for its DSL service as well. Phone company Frontier Communications Corp. will enforce a 5-gigabyte-per-month limit starting in 2009.
However, unlike Time Warner and Frontier, Comcast has indicated that it does not intend to charge users who exceed the cap. According to the company's Web site, "If a customer surpasses 250 GB and is one of the top users of the service for a second time within a six-month time frame, his or her service will be subject to termination for one year. After the one year period expires, the customer may resume service by subscribing to a service plan appropriate to his or her needs."
Internet gurus, such as Om Malik, editor of technology Web site GigaOm, calls Comcast's move, "the end of the Internet as we know it."
According to Comcast, 250 gigabytes means a customer would have to send 50 million e-mails at .05 kilobytes per e-mail; download 62,500 songs at 4 megabytes per song; download 125 standard-definition movies at 2 gigabytes per movie; or upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos at 10 megabytes per photo; to hit the cap each month.
"The only typical usage pattern for high-speed download would be medium quality streaming video," said Paul Buis, chairman and associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Ball State University, in an e-mail response. "Since Comcast is also in the business of providing cable TV, this protects them from folks who might not pay them for cable TV, but do pay them for Internet services. Internet-based 'TV' viewing is certainly a threat to Comcast's business model."
Phillip "Spencer" Davis, Beowulf Cluster Administrator for the Department of Computer Science, watches between six and 11 hours of television shows a week on Hulu.com, a free online video service that offers viewers TV shows, movies and clips.
"I'm less opposed to bandwidth restrictions if they are stated up front as opposed to slipped into an (end-user license agreement)," he said in an e-mail response. "However with the amount of public funding that has been squandered on the [telecommunications companies] for infrastructure development, they do not have my sympathy. Perhaps things would be different if we had real competition in this market, but that simply isn't possible considering the high barrier to entry."
Buis said the limit also affects people who use a residential plan to run business-like services by using their connection to run a server rather than just a client.
"Comcast wants such folks to pay for business-class [more expensive] connections instead of residential connections," he wrote. "Peer-to-Peer systems turn your computer into both a client and a server and can generate a lot of network traffic when other people are downloading data from your computer."
No representative from Comcast in Philadelphia returned phone calls for this report.
For the gaming community, the caps could be a hindrance on constant play. Buis said a player would not be inhibited, but a person who hosts a multiplayer game server for more than 100 hours would hit the limit.
Anthony Coplen, president of the Electronic Gaming League student group at Ball State, plays up to 15 hours of online games such as Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty 4 and Counter Strike Source, each week.
"In regards to gaming, the 250 gig cap will not have a major impact," Coplen said. "A daily gamer uses less than 5 percent of their cap a month. Downloading games from online game vendors, such as Steam, increases bandwidth usage significantly more. I would recommend a switch to DSL or [fiber optics] if they think they may reach the cap."
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