If you're a comcast cable internet subscriber like me, you may want to take note of the following article. Starting Oct 1 Comcast will limit each subscriber to 250GB of bandwidth a month. Though the average user only uses about 2-5 GB, this seems very genreous, but if you are a frequent users of Peer to Peer (P2P) sites like torrents or i'm assuming even paid downloads as itunes and other music or movie sites, you're gonna want to keep track of your bandwidth useage, cause it could add up.

I read in a DVD magazine i get that 250GB is equal to about
125 Standard Def Movies (High def movies have a much larger file size)
or 62,000 songs
0r 50 million emails (i assume with attachments you send or receive).

I'm not really sure how they calculate your bandwidth, but i assume it included not only your downloads but uploads.
This should not effect people who stream video or music.

Comcast claims they are doing this to limit the piating of P2P users and such, but it seems to me that they are trying to reduce the content their subscribers can access or download online so that subscribers will turn to comcasts in demand services.

According to the article i read, subscribers who go over their limit and recieve 2 warnings over the span of 6 months may lose their internet for a period of one year.

Quote:

Comcast, the largest provider of cable-based broadband service in the U.S., will limit residential customers to 250 gigabytes of bandwidth a month beginning Oct. 1, the company announced late Thursday. Comcast will contact customers who go above the 250G byte limit and ask them to curtail their use, Comcast said. If a customer goes over the monthly limit again during the following six months, Comcast will suspend service for a year. Currently, Comcast contacts high-bandwidth customers and will suspend their accounts if they don't curb their use, but it has not set a firm bandwidth limit until now. Most customers contacted about their bandwidth usage agree to limit their activity, according to Charlie Douglas, Comcast's director of communications. Earlier this month, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission struck down Comcast's past network management practice of slowing BitTorrent peer-to-peer traffic in an effort to reduce congestion. The FCC ruled that Comcast was violating so-called net neutrality principles by targeting a certain kind of Internet traffic. The new bandwidth cap will affect less than 1 percent of Comcast customers, Douglas said. Those customers "are using so much bandwidth that they are degrading the experience of other users," he added. "Two-hundred-and-fifty gigabytes is an extremely large amount of data." Some high-bandwidth users have asked Comcast to identify a specific cap so they know where the line is, Douglas added. Some other broadband providers also warn customers about excessive bandwidth use. An average Comcast customer uses two to three gigabytes of bandwidth a month, Comcast said. To reach the 250G-byte limit, a customer would have to do one of the following: send 50 million e-mails, download 62,500 songs or download 125 standard-definition movies, the company said in its announcement. Comcast has also looked at charging high-bandwidth users additional fees, and it still has not ruled out doing so in the future, Douglas said. Comcast is also looking at "de-prioritizing" heavy users' traffic during times of network congestion. The plan Comcast is considering would slow heavy users' traffic for up to 20 minutes during times of the most congestion. Comcast will notify customers of the new bandwidth limits using several methods, including banner ads at Comcast.net and notices sent with monthly bills, the company said. Some net neutrality advocates criticized Comcast for not telling customers of its previous network management plan to slow P-to-P traffic at times. Some net neutrality advocates have said Comcast's new network management plans of targeting individual users is preferable to blocking Web applications. But others have suggested that those efforts may be equal to penalizing their best customers.

Other articles on the subject:

http://www.videobusiness.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6593165&industryid=47214

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2111373,00.asp

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080507-comcast-mulling-metered-access-250gb-monthly-bandwidth-caps.html