Comcast has made it official with a new policy posted on its Web site early Friday: Starting Oct. 1, home Web service customers will be limited to 250GB of documents transfer per month. According to the company, the move is in response to heavy usage by some customers that can cause network congestion.

Charlie Douglas, director of corporate communications for Comcast’s online services, said, “The amount of input measured is aggregate monthly usage of uploads and downloads.”

Comcast has added some teeth to the usage limit as well: The first moment the limit is exceeded, the offending customer will receive a phone shout from a Comcast representative. The second violation will conclusion in a shutdown of Net service for one year.

No Secret Here

Comcast’s amended service policy states in part: “It’s no secret we’ve been evaluating a specific monthly input usage or bandwidth threshold for our Comcast High-Speed Web residential customers for some duration.”

Comcast says the 250GB threshold is quite high for the majority of its home users, given that the median monthly usage for its residential customers is 2GB to 3GB per month. According to examples cited in the ammendment, that amount of goods transfer could allow for sending 50 million e-mails, downloading 62,500 songs, 125 standard-definition movies, or uploading 25,000 high-resolution digital photos.

Douglas emphasized that the new policy does not affect Comcast’s commercial customers. Comcast has been aggressively moving into unified details services for commercial accounts, and some, particularly those involved in backup and catastrophe recovery, could go by the 250GB limit, but that service is separate from residential accounts, said Douglas.

“We need to remember that the amount of usage we are talking about, more than 250GB a month, does not apply to more than 99 percent of our customers. So the less than 1 percent who…

Original post by dhiram