Comcast comes clean: 250GB a month, max

After months of speculation and years of cutting off service without notice, Comcast is finally making official its policy on how much bandwidth you'll be allowed to use as a subscriber to its high-speed Internet service. That limit, as was widely rumored, is 250GB per month.

There's good and bad to the announcement. It's great that Comcast is finally acknowledging what its rules are and making them public. (Nobody likes the secret police.) No longer will users be in the dark if Comcast calls them to complain about using too much data. The limits are now in black and white, and 250GB isn't a figure that will curtail many people's web experiences.

On the other hand, the vast majority of people signed up for Comcast with the understanding that "all you can eat" meant all you could eat, not 250 gigs a month. Of course I don't expect Comcast will be lowering the bill for service any time soon...

The new rules (or rather, the official acknowledgment of the already existing rules) go into effect on October 1, 2008. Contrary to earlier rumors, there is no plan for billing users extra if they go over the cap; rather, Comcast will simply ask for compliance. Comcast details this in the above linked post, "As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage. If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use. At that time, we'll tell them exactly how much data per month they had used. We know from experience the vast majority of customers we ask to curb usage do so voluntarily."

Per DSL Reports, one source expects the new policy will impact just 0.1% of Comcast's 14.1 million users. Are you one of them?

LINK: Announcement Regarding An Amendment to Our Acceptable Use Policy

SEE ALSO: How to track your bandwidth usage