Dear Comcast High-Speed Internet Customer,

We appreciate your business and strive to provide you with the best online experience possible. One of the ways we do this is through our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). The AUP outlines acceptable use of our service as well as steps we take to protect our customers from things that can negatively impact their experience online. This policy has been in place for many years and we update it periodically to keep it current with our customers' use of our service.

On October 1, 2008, we will post an updated AUP that will go into effect at that time.

In the updated AUP, we clarify that monthly data (or bandwidth) usage of more than 250 Gigabytes (GB) is the specific threshold that defines excessive use of our service. We have an excessive use policy because a fraction of one percent of our customers use such a disproportionate amount of bandwidth every month that they may degrade the online experience of other customers.

250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of bandwidth and it's very likely that your monthly data usage doesn't even come close to that amount. In fact, the threshold is approximately 100 times greater than the typical or median residential customer usage, which is 2 to 3 GB/month. To put it in perspective, to reach 250 GB of data usage in one month a customer would have to do any one of the following:

* Send more than 50 million plain text emails (at 5 KB/email);
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song); or
* Download 125 standard definition movies (at 2 GB/movie).

And online gamers should know that even the heaviest multi- or single-player gaming activity would not typically come close to this threshold over the course of a month.

In addition to modifying the excessive use policy, the updated AUP contains other clarifications of terms concerning reporting violations, newsgroups, and network management. To read some helpful FAQs, please visit http://help.comcast.net/content/faq/Frequently-Asked-Questions-about-Excessive-Use.

Thank you again for choosing Comcast as your high-speed Internet provider.

What is this?

it's their attempt to stop piracy.

QUIT USING WHAT YOU PAY FOR

WE'RE ALMOST NOT MAKING TOO MUCH MONEY

whenever someone tries to log on to their comcast email at the library I work for, it NEVER works.

Basically they're capping our bandwidth each month. It's intended for the people that abuse it (the people who download movies and apps every 2 minutes).

they were brought under investigation i think because they hadn't disclosed the caps to their customers when they claimed unlimited access so now they're stating at what point they can shut you down

I've heard all the arguments about it being a slippery slope and they'll just lower the cap... but we'll see... 250gb a month is generous, I game, I torrent, I'm on DC++ and I have to try fairly hard to get above 120 gigs or so a month

if I back up rttp, im over it.

I have comcast internet, never seen this.