250 Gbyte per Month Caps: Comcast

Comcast will cap Internet usage of its broadband subscribers at 250 Gigabytes per month starting Oct. 1, 2008. Typical users will not be liable for any hard caps, at that level. Comcast says median usage these days for its residential customers is about two to three gigabytes a month. To trigger the cap, a user would have to be watching a fair amountof video. Comcast says the cap would be hit if users watched 125 standard-definition movies.

Assuming a two-hour average movie duration, that works out to about 250 hours of streamed video, equivalent to eight hours a day, 30 days a week. That could get to be an issue at some point, but few human beings have time to watch that much streamed video and do much of anything else related to work, school, exercise or friends.

So far, the only users already "close" to the 250 Gbyte cap are less than one percent of heavy movie downloaders, one suspects. Comcast says less than one percent of its current users are "even close" to 250 Gbytes a month of usage.