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Comcast to cap bandwidth (Updated) - August 28, 2008

Comcast is poised to roll out a plan to cap total monthly bandwidth use by its ISP customers, according to a report up today Wednesday from Karl Bode of Broadband Reports. The move has been widely anticipated in the wake of the FCC's ruling last month that Comcast's throttling of BitTorrent traffic to try to reduce congestion on its network violated the agency's network-neutrality rules. Comcast has said it is working on a "protocol-agnostic" plan for network management that is likely to include a "consumption-based" approach.

Citing "sources" and documentation, Bode reports the cap will be set at 250 Gigabytes per month, beginning in October, which, if true, is actually a whopping lot of bandwidth--far more generous, for instance, than the 5 to 40GB per month caps Time Warner Cable is currently testing in Texas.

Depending on the compression system used, for instance, high-def movies weigh in at anywhere from 5 or 6GB up to about 15GB (depending also on just how "high" the "def" really is). At the low end, that's 50-60 full-length HD movies per month; at the high-end it's about 15 or 16 per month. As for standard-def movies, anywhere from 50 to 150 could fit under the cap (again, depending on the compression and other technical factors). According to an "insider" quoted by Bode, upstream bandwidth will not be affected, at least initially.

So who's downloading that much? According to Bode's sources, the plan would affect only about 14,000 of Comcast's 14 million Internet users, or about 0.1% of users.

So the next question is, will imposing a cap on that very small slice of the user base relieve enough congestion on Comcast's network by itself that the company won't need to actively manage other subscribers' use?

Probably not. On a shared-pipe network such as Comcast's, congestion can be a very localized and time-dependant phenomenon that is not necessarily relieved by capping usage globally. If my neighbor is using Comcast to download Blu-ray rips all day, my Web surfing on the same Comast circuit is still going to be impacted, even if he stays under 250 GB per month.

But as a starting point, it could be a reasonable compromise.

UPDATE: Comcast confirmed the story Thursday through an update posted to the Network Management Policy page of its Terms of Service:

It's no secret we've been evaluating a specific monthly data usage or bandwidth threshold for our Comcast High-Speed Internet residential customers for some time. Rumors circulated online last year and they popped up again in May.
[...]
Today, we're announcing that beginning on October 1, 2008, we will amend our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) available at http://www.comcast.net/terms/use/ and establish a specific monthly data usage threshold of 250 GB/month per account for all residential customers.

250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 - 3 GB. To put 250 GB of monthly usage in perspective, a customer would have to do any one of the following:

* Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
* Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
* Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

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