Comcast starts enforcing bandwidth cap

Com­cast Help & Sup­port — Fre­quently Asked Ques­tions about Exces­sive Use

Com­cast has estab­lished a 250GB monthly data usage thresh­old for all res­i­den­tial Com­cast High-Speed Inter­net accounts. This thresh­old will be in place to pro­vide a clear def­i­n­i­tion of exces­sive use of the service.

The new monthly data usage thresh­old will go into effect start­ing Octo­ber 1, 2008.

Start­ing tomor­row, Com­cast will be enforc­ing a 250GB/month band­width cap on their res­i­den­tial inter­net customers.

There has been some clamor in the past about Com­cast throt­tling their cus­tomers’ speeds, but of course there’s no men­tion here of that. Last I heard, they were going to con­tinue that course of action as long as possible.

I do think 250GB/month seems pretty rea­son­able, and while I may sug­gest that those who oppose it on prin­ci­ple shop around for other inter­net providers, I don’t think I care that much at the end of the day.

The only thing that does con­cern me is how they plan on enforc­ing those that reach the limit:

[The exces­sive cus­tomer] may receive a call from Comcast’s Cus­tomer Secu­rity Assur­ance (“CSA”) group to notify them of exces­sive use.

If a cus­tomer who has been con­tacted by Comcast’s CSA team is con­tacted again for exces­sive use within six months of the first con­tact that customer’s ser­vice will be sub­ject to ter­mi­na­tion for one year. […] If a customer’s account is ter­mi­nated, after the one year period expires the cus­tomer may resume ser­vice by sub­scrib­ing to a ser­vice plan appro­pri­ate to his or her needs.

Two strikes, you’re out? I can’t see myself even get­ting into this sit­u­a­tion in the first place, but I can imag­ine sce­nar­ios in which this could hap­pen inad­ver­tantly. I don’t know, I guess I see noth­ing with a three-strike pol­icy; allow­ing one more chance seems nat­ural to me.