A quick chat yesterday with Charlie Douglas, a spokesman for Comcast, elicited some heartening information about the ISP’s stated 250GB-per-month cap on bandwidth. Om’s not a huge fan of caps because he believes they stifle innovation in the long run, but Douglas says that the cap isn’t set in stone. Right now it’s set at about hundred times more than the average Comcast user’s monthly data consumption.
Douglas said it’s safe to say that as average consumption rises, then so will the cap. That’s a hopeful sign, but Comcast has never been entirely truthful about these things in the past, and only they know how much data their subscribers consume — making it hard to hold the company accountable.
The other way to get the cap increased — or perhaps eliminated altogether — is to get enough Comcast users to complain. Douglas says the cap was disclosed in the first place because Comcast was calling some users out for excessive usage, and those caught wanted to know how Comcast defined the term. So keep your complaints flowing, play our 250GB challenge and get grandma an HD video conferencing service so average users start boosting their data consumption.
