Comcast to introduce 50 Mbps Internet connections in Washington

Will Comcast increase the transfer cap for high bandwidth customers?

yep, that's the question. There's a real tension between saying "Here, come to us for all of the insane bandwidth we offer!" and then following it with a 250g per month cap. If you want to encourage a future that has people downloading an HD movie while they eat dinner, then you can't complain about the fact that they're stressing your network. Pick one.

Thanks for the questions on capping bandwidth. I asked Comcast spokesman Steve Kipp to respond to your questions.

Here's what he said:

"We believe the faster speeds will enable an improved experience for the activities customers enjoy today, but it does not mean our customers will suddenly consume exponentially more bandwidth and become excessive users.

The number of excessive users on our network is extremely small—less than a fraction of 1% — and they often consume more bandwidth than our small business customers. In fact, to reach 250 GB in a month, a customer would have to do 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)

Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

Also, for those that like to participate in online gaming, they could be in multiplayer mode, for example, and play 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 30 days and only reach less than 15 GB of data usage or play in first-person shooter mode the entire time and only use about 35 GB of data."

John, ask them about the High-Def movies in the press release.

"That means Comcast customers could download a 6 GB high-def movie in about 16 minutes."

That's only 41 movies - and that doesn't count if you do anything else on the internet (like just surfing!) Watching 1 movie/day doesn't seem like that much of a stretch - especially in family households where you could be dealing with both kids + parents doing different things over the internet connection.

The bandwidth caps are just 1 problem. Different members of your family will want to download different movies. Then there is VoIP, and podcasts, etc.

Really what I want to know: What's the UPload speed/cap?

In todays age we are publishing so much more than ever before. We aren't passive consumers like TV users are. So, I can download a movie in a minute, but it takes me 15 minutes to upload a clip to the family youtube channel?

They clearly do believe that bandwidth directly correlates to increased consumption (and rightly so) or they would offer the same upload speeds. I mean, before you wouldn't bother to try to download a movie over a dialup modem, but now that you can, you do! increase bandwidth directly results in increased usage