Are you an "excessive" Internet user at risk of exceeding Comcast's monthly 250GB threshold on residential data usage? The company today started rolling out a new online "Data Meter" feature in Washington state that's designed to give its high-speed Internet customers a glimpse of how much they're consuming.

Ours is the second region, after Portland, to get the Data Meter tool. The idea of the company limiting residential data usage has sparked howls of protest in the past, but Comcast maintains that only a small fraction of its users, about 1 percent, are ever at risk of going over the monthly allowance.

"I should stress that nearly 99 percent of our customers should not be concerned about their monthly data usage or ever crossing our 250 GB per month excessive usage threshold," said Comcast's Steve Kipp in an email explaining the new Data Meter feature. "The median customer consumes approximately 2 to 4 GB of data in a month. For the fraction of less than 1 percent of our customers who are concerned about exceeding our excessive use threshold, we believe this meter will help them monitor and calibrate their usage. It may also help them identify potential problems such as the presence of a bot or virus or excessive use of their bandwidth via an unsecured wireless router."

The Data Meter tool was rolled out to 40 percent of Comcast high-speed Internet customers in Washington state today, and the rest are expected to get it tomorrow. [Correction: The remainder will get access to the tool on Thursday.] To access, log in to your account at Comcast Customer Central, go to the "Users and Settings" tab, and then look for a link to "view details" in the "My Devices" of that section.

Comcast's 250GB "threshold" was instituted explicitly in October 2008, after complaints about vague limits on high data consumption. To show what it would take to the limit, the company says a user would need to do any one of the following: send 50 million plain text emails (at 5 KB/email); Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song); download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie); download more than 40 HD movies (at 6 GB/movie); or upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos.

The Data Meter feature hasn't yet been activated in my account, but my household is heavy user of Internet video and Netflix on the television, primarily via our game consoles, which is one of the ways that we've cut back on our Comcast cable TV bill. So I'll be very curious to see how close I am to the limit. If the feature has been activated in your account, feel free to share your data usage below.