Comcast: Users Who Exceed 250GB Cap Twice Face Service "Termination"

Sam Gustin says: It's been rumored, but now it's confirmed. Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, is instituting a 250GB bandwidth threshold to begin October 1, the company said today.

"If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,"  the company said in an update on its network management Web page.

As part of the policy, if a user exceeds the 250GB usage cap twice in a six-month period, they face losing their service.

"If a customer surpasses 250 GB and is one of the top users of the service for a second time within a six-month timeframe, his or her service will be subject to termination for one year," the company said on its "excessive use" FAQ. "After the one year period expires, the customer may resume service by subscribing to a service plan appropriate to his or her needs."

Comcast says the policy will affect less than one percent of its users, and points out that 250GB of data is way more than the average user will use in a given month. To reach that threshold, the company says a user would have to do one of the following.

- Send 20,000 high-resolution photos
- Send 40 million emails
- Download 50,000 songs
- View 8,000 movie trailers.

Of course, there are some other things that might get a user to the cap, but the company is leaving them to your imagination.