DescentBB

Got this from them today...


\"Dear Comcast High-Speed Internet Customer,

We appreciate your business and strive to provide you with the best online experience possible. One of the ways we do this is through our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). The AUP outlines acceptable use of our service as well as steps we take to protect our customers from things that can negatively impact their experience online. This policy has been in place for many years and we update it periodically to keep it current with our customers' use of our service.

On October 1, 2008, we will post an updated AUP that will go into effect at that time.

In the updated AUP, we clarify that monthly data (or bandwidth) usage of more than 250 Gigabytes (GB) is the specific threshold that defines excessive use of our service. We have an excessive use policy because a fraction of one percent of our customers use such a disproportionate amount of bandwidth every month that they may degrade the online experience of other customers.

250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of bandwidth and it's very likely that your monthly data usage doesn't even come close to that amount. In fact, the threshold is approximately 100 times greater than the typical or median residential customer usage, which is 2 to 3 GB/month. To put it in perspective, to reach 250 GB of data usage in one month a customer would have to do any one of the following:

* Send more than 50 million plain text emails (at 5 KB/email);
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song); or
* Download 125 standard definition movies (at 2 GB/movie).

And online gamers should know that even the heaviest multi- or single-player gaming activity would not typically come close to this threshold over the course of a month.

In addition to modifying the excessive use policy, the updated AUP contains other clarifications of terms concerning reporting violations, newsgroups, and network management. To read some helpful FAQs, please visit http://help.comcast.net/content/faq/Fre ... essive-Use.

Thank you again for choosing Comcast as your high-speed Internet provider.\"

Ain't life grand.

Simply put: if you don't use 250GB per month, you're even better off now. If you do use over 250GB per month, then get a new internet provider, because Comcast don't even want you as a customer when you use that much.

250 GB should be enough for everyone. I only get 50 GB for my server network each month and don't usually come close to going over.

I'm glad they finally clarified \"excessive use\".

I don't have a problem with that threshold either. 250 GB is a whole lot of bandwidth for a home user. I doubt I was close to that even during the basketball season when I was streaming full games (legally, via league pass.)

TIGERassault wrote:Simply put: if you don't use 250GB per month, you're even better off now. If you do use over 250GB per month, then get a new internet provider, because Comcast don't even want you as a customer when you use that much.

Tiger, if you are using that or more, then you should get a commercial account and not a home account. The point is that there isn't a reason that a standard home user would need that much bandwidth. Fair call and nice "CYA" by Comcast.

Agreed.

I've been completely satisfied with my Comcast service ever since I got it when I moved out to Denver a couple of years ago.

They have been steadily increasing my bandwidth, too. It was 6Mbit down / 512Kbit up when I first signed up, now I'm getting 8Mbit down / 3-4Mbit up the last time I checked.

As for the 250Gb limit, it's way more than enough for non-commercial use. Even when my wife and I streamed the first two seasons of Heroes and the first three seasons of Battlestar Galactica from Netflix a few months ago, we didn't come close.

There's been a lot of furor over this decision by Comcast, but I personally appreciate it. They've essentially increased the quality of my service by getting rid of the abusers.

got the same thing last week


im actually hitting 30-33 Mbps after TCP tweaking