Comcast have today made an announcement that surprises many for its honesty.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080828-its-official-comcast-starts-250gb-bandwidth-caps-october-1.htmlComcast has announced that it will in fact be introducing bandwidth caps to all residential customers. The cap, which will go into effect as of October 1, will be 250GB per month. Comcast justifies the decision by saying that it's "an extremely large amount of data," and that a very large majority of customers will never cross it.
In a statement e-mailed to Ars, Free Press called the caps "relatively high," but said they were also an indictment of current US broadband policy. "If the United States had genuine broadband competition, Internet providers would not be able to profit from artificial scarcity‚ they would invest in their networks to keep pace with consumer demand," said Free Press research director S. Derek Turner. "Unfortunately, Americans will continue to face the consequences of this lack of competition until policymakers get serious about policies that deliver the world-class networks consumers deserve."
After putting their house in order with anti-p2p throttling and backing down from a bust-up with the FCC it was just a matter of time till the "service nibbling" began elsewhere, I don't think 250GB is unduly lean, compare this to some UK companies that offer caps of 40GB or worse. As the free press statement makes clear, lack of investment is the real cause of these problems and this will continue to the case while p2p is held up as the "whipping boy" for the consumption of YouTube and the mass of streaming video delivery services that strangely never seem to figure in any studies.
