Comcast puts limits on Internet use

<p>Heavy Internet users who get access from the cable company take heed: Comcast might slow down your connection or cut off access completely if you don’t curb your usage.</p><p>In an effort to reduce network congestion, Comcast is implementing new policies to stop its heaviest users from hogging bandwidth and slowing down access for others.</p><p>Starting Wednesday, the company will warn customers to ratchet down their Internet usage if they send and receive more than 250 gigabytes of data during a one-month period.</p><p>For users who exceed the cap twice in a six-month period, the company threatens to cut off the customer’s service for one year.</p><p>While the cap will not impact the vast majority of Internet users — it would take 50million plain text e-mails to reach 250GB — people who watch video online might feel the squeeze.</p><p>“It’s ridiculous,” said Max Humphrey, a Comcast subscriber in Santa Rosa.</p><p>Humphrey, 20, watches about four hours of TV programming a day on his computer, plus surfs the Internet and plays video games online. He worries he’ll surpass 250GB a month.</p><p>Comcast currently doesn’t provide a meter for customers to track usage, but it is developing one.</p><p>The biggest users of bandwidth are people who share files using peer-to-peer networks such as Mininova.org and the old Napster, and also people who watch video online.</p><p>Watching four hours of TV shows online, such as four episodes of the NBC drama “Heroes,” is equivalent to about 1.5GB if the episodes are standard definition. If the shows are in high-definition, it takes 4.5GB to deliver four hours of programming.</p><p>YouTube videos are low-resolution and require far less bandwidth. But people who use a Slingbox to stream their TV shows across the Internet could burn through far more bandwidth, consuming 14.4GB to watch a four-hour block of programming.</p><p>The problem for Comcast is that more people are watching videos online — and that eats up a lot of bandwidth. The number of people watching videos online grew 45percent since last year, according to comScore, which tracks Internet usage.</p><p>The trend is especially popular with younger generations. First they abandoned land-line telephones for cell phones, now they are abandoning TV service for Internet connections.</p><p>Kyle Franco, 18, doesn’t have TV service at his home in Sebastopol. Instead, he watches shows on NBC.com and Hulu.com with his Comcast Internet connection.</p><p>“I could see myself going through 250 gigabytes pretty fast,” he said. “I’m a pretty heavy user.”</p><p>The average American watches four hours of TV programs a day. Two teen siblings separately downloading four hours of HD programming a day each would burn through 252GB of bandwidth a month — slightly above Comcast’s cap.</p><p>Computer monitors typically have higher resolutions than even high-definition TVs, making HD content particularly appealing to people who watch shows on a computer.</p><p>For now, less than 1percent of Comcast’s subscribers in the Bay Area use more than 250GB a month, according to the company. But the new policies are still necessary to deal with network congestion, which makes Web sites load slower and downloads take longer for average users, according to the company.</p><p>Extremely high-data users can negatively impact the experience for other customers, a Comcast spokesman said.</p><p>Besides the cap, Comcast is testing a plan to slow the connection speeds of those using the most bandwidth. A customer downloading at a top speed for more than 15 minutes will be subject to having their connection slowed, according to a Comcast plan filed with the Federal Communications Commission. Comcast, which has been testing the policy in various markets outside of California for months, says it will only do this when it needs to relieve congestion.</p><p>It is not clear if Comcast plans to tell customers when their speed is being throttled down.</p><p>What is clear, is that some customers don’t like the idea of being sold a speed of 15 megabytes per second to 20 Mbps only to find Comcast is throttling them down.</p><p>“I won’t pay for Comcast if they are intentionally slowing me down,” Humphrey said. “I’ll switch to another service.”</p>