Comcast floated the idea of a 250 gigabyte cap in May and mentioned then that it might charge users $15 for every 10 gigabytes they go over, but the fee was missing in Thursday's announcement.



250 is allot... But charging people to go over is messed up.

Can I have your autograph?

I could easily hit that 250GB limit if I subscribe to a rapidshare premium account and then download a bunch of HD movies. I did that once at UW to fill up my brand new 500GB hard drive, and the network admins got pretty pissed. I had over 400GB of traffic in one month.

I've never noticed any sort of network instability resulting from abusing Comcast's connection at my parents' house, so I don't know what their deal is. Probably just another scheme to squeeze extra money out of their customers.

Capping of upload/download is common for ISPs.  We do the same at Cox Communications but if you hit that cap I can tell you one of two things are the reason

1.  You're running some sort of a server which is against the TOS of a residential account

2.  You have no life and sit infront of your computer all day downloading anything you can get your chubby hands on...you should really go outside...hehe

Really though most users will not even come close to a cap.  I think I remember reading somewhere (whether it was an internal email or outside study) that someone could play a game that requires constant connection (e.g. MMO), stream music from a site, and something else (can't remember) 24 hours a day for 30 days and still not hit the cap.

Again, people that do hit the cap are more than likely running some type of server they shouldn't be running anyways on Residential.  Those types of customers should be setup on a Commercial acct (commercial accts aren't necessarily a buisness)