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Comcast hints that new data cap may not be set in stone

by Sue Walsh on Sep 25, 2008 at 09:03 AM

Comcast: To cap or not to cap?  That is the question.
Gigaom is reporting that the new 250GB cap Comcast announced recently may not be set in stone.  In a chat with the site, Comcast spokeperson Charlie Douglas said the cap, which is roughly 100 times more than the average Comcast customer uses in a month, will likely rise as average consumption rises.

Comcast announced the cap on the heels of two controversies. The first, where they admitted they had been throttling the BitTorrent P2P network, resulted in an FCC investigation and a proposal to punish them for it, and the second, a lawsuit resulting in their practice of terminating customers for excessive bandwidth usage without actually telling any of them what constitutes excessive bandwidth, resulted in a lawsuit by the Florida Attorney General’s office and a $150,000 fine. The 250GB cap announcement was another result of that lawsuit.

Data caps are becoming more and more common as bandwidth consumption and demand increase. Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T all have 5GB caps on their mobile broadband cards and PAM (Phone as Modem) plans. It’s safe to assume such caps are here to stay and may even get more restrictive as the strain on the ‘net’s infrastructure, which was never designed for the high bandwidth audio and video streaming and peer to peer networking demand, is reinforced and improved, something experts agree must happen soon.

Read[Gigaom]

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