For years our users received warnings from Comcast informing them that they were consuming too much bandwidth. When asked how much bandwidth was too much, Comcast was never able to adequately answer. A few years ago Comcast finally imposed a flat 250 GB cap on all users, which while out of the range of most users and unaccompanied by overages, still wasn't particularly popular. Comcast does offer a consumption tool at least, and unlike some carriers, appears to be fairly accurate.

Still, users who cross the cap repeatedly can face account termination, and navigating Comcast support at this point can be an adventure. This post at Ozymandias is a case in point; the user found their connection terminated, then had to wander through an odd Comcast support hell in an effort to get any information on the disconnection:

quote:

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I called up Comcast and went through customer service hell – a Comcast special, I might note. First their regular customer service agent couldn’t help me, and sent me to their “Customer Security” group again. The Customer Security agent was polite, and after the standard identification questions notified me I was cut off for a year due to exceeding Comcast’s Acceptable Use Policy limits on their bandwidth cap. I asked for details on what had been using bandwidth, and again, Comcast would not share.... I asked to be reinstated and he said it was final – no appeal. I asked to escalate to a manager so I could explain my situation, and he stated there was no escalation, and repeated there was no appeal. I then asked for customer service email or other contact information so I could CC the company on a blog post (which you are reading now)..

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The rather absurd adventure concludes with the user being transferred to the company's retention department, where there's some additional tap dancing before nothing apparently gets resolved. The user (who uploads a lot of high quality audio and photos) never really gets his questions answered and lacks any competitive alternative to Comcast's capped service, but oddly still has service for the moment. While it was refreshing to see Comcast get a little more clear with a solid cap, there's nothing particularly clear about what this customer went through in trying to get answers, and getting transferred to the retention department is particularly absurd.

To be fair to Comcast, at least their meters are accurate, they've been pretty clear about what limits they've imposed after years of murky nonsense, and the company hasn't yet decided to follow the lead of companies like AT&T and impose overages. However bad users think caps are -- per byte overages are an entirely different and more anti-competitive affair in the age of Internet video. As cloud storage, streaming video, streaming gaming and other services continue to evolve, Comcast's going to find more and more people bumping into their previously reasonable ceiling. The question then becomes: will Comcast raise the cap in a reasonable time frame -- and are they still considering someday migrating to metered billing?