Tuesday, 2 September 2008

Comcast Clears Confusion with Bandwidth Availability

Following a slap by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last month, Comcast announced that it would limit the available bandwidth to each of its customers to 250 GB per month.

Users who go over the limit will get a courtesy call from Comcast's customer service for the first instance. However, under the new policy a second-time offense means the service is immediately suspended for an entire calendar year.

Comcast notes that the median usage for most residential customers falls somewhere between 2GB and 3GB, a number that is regularly broken within a matter of hours and sometimes minutes by customers taking advantage of streaming HD video and online backup services.

The company breaks down basic usage numbers similar to what's seen on the marketing materials on a consumer hard drive: Send 50 million e-mails (at 0.05KB/e-mail), download 62,500 songs (at 4MB/song), download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2GB/movie) and upload 25,000 high-resolution digital photos (at 10MB/photo)

As the announcement came out, Comcast explained that it wasn't a change in policy. The company said it is simply clarifying the gigabyte limit after customers who received calls asked for a specific threshold for data usage. The limit will appear in an amended Acceptable Use Policy, which takes effect October 1.