It’s official. DSL Reports has confirmed that Comcast will officially implement a 250 GB cap on bandwidth for broadband subscribers beginning October 1.

This has been a long time coming, after the spotlight was shone on Comcast for their unorthadox network practices, and the FCC ruled against their policy of throttling P2P applications on their network, Comcast has finally taken steps toward challenging those who use their network to transfer massive levels of data.

This is a smart policy, in the vein of what was previously advocated by Google’s Vint Cerf, that will allow Comcast to manage the traffic on their network more efficiently.

UPDATE: Thanks to Vint for the clarification, this policy isn’t as smart as his idea:

“I advocated limiting RATES not limiting total bytes transferred. The aggregate transfer cap deals with averages while, as Tony Lauck has pointed out, the issue is instantaneous data rate congestion - too much being transferred at the same time. Different metrics and methods are needed to limit the maximum rate at which a user can accept or emit data.”

No word on the penalty when users go above the 250 GB threshold, though this type of tiered pricing seems preferable to the metered pricing proposed by companies like Time Warner.

Tags: Add new tag, Bandwidth Cap, comcast, Net Neutrality

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 10:56 pm and is filed under Legal, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.