the Upside

Comcast Sets Monthly Bandwidth Cap For Residential Customers

Comcast said Thursday it plans to limit the amount of data residential customers can download and upload to 250 GB per month, starting October 1.

The move follows action by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission earlier this month in which the FCC criticized and banned Comcast’s practice of throttling back BitTorrent peer-to-peer traffic in an effort to manage and reduce network congestion. The FCC’s decision was seen as an attempt to prevent violations of so-called net neutrality principles that ensure uninterrupted Internet traffic.

Comcast, however, said its new policy has been in the making for many months. “It’s no secret we’ve been evaluating a specific monthly data usage or bandwidth threshold for our Comcast High-Speed Internet residential customers for some time,” Comcast said Thursday in a statement on its Website about its new guidelines of Comcast’s Acceptable Use Policy. “We’ve listened to feedback from our customers who asked that we provide a specific threshold for data usage and this would help them understand the amount of usage that would qualify as excessive.”

Tags: InternetLegislation, Save the net