I'd never use 250GB in one month, but as others have pointed out this is just the first step in getting the cap lower and lower. Personally, I think the cable companies that provide internet are worried about how much internet TV is going to hurt their business.

What if an internet household watches Cable TV on average 8 hours a day 30 days a month (this includes kids, parents, and other household guests across multiple TV's playing at the same time) decides that they can watch all their favorite shows online via legal (or illegal) services such as Hulu, Fox on demand, and numerous other sites popping up that are ad supported and then decide to drop cable? This could cripple the cable industry's model for pay television.

A scenario like this isn't likely to happen in the next couple years but that's the stuff being talked about in board rooms and marketing. It's better to set the bar for bandwidth caps now and slowly lower them so that the scenario above never has chance to happen in the first place and if it does they can charge more for higher bandwidths and recoup the loss to the cable TV devision.

Sorry for late reply... the initial plan was for ADSL2+, at $60/m with 20GB cap. It's with Internode, who recently upped the quota to 25GB - yay :) But on most months I end up using 10-15G anyway.

250gb isn't anything to worry about i manage to get by on 25gb a month.

Im guessing that the cap will be the same us what us Aussies have either have your internet speed drop down to dial-up speed(real dial-up, im talking 56k, where even VGchartz takes 3-5 mins to load..) OR they will charge you per mb you go over (like $0.05 per mb... which can be quite expensive if you exceed the cap by much ).

Anyway i do see this as becoming a major problem for digital distribution and maybe the internet itself needs to undergo a massive infrastructure upgrade. I mean as file sizes and speeds continue to grow ISP's are facing the problem of maintaining enough bandwidth for everybody these caps will only get worse. Where does go from here - 250gb to 200gb? then 150gb? Before you know it the US will be like Australia and have large caps of 50gb for a few consumers while the bulk of users get around on 12gb or less. (hell Bigpond/Telstra even have 400mb caps here. Yep 400mb downloads + Uploads... which is something i feel should be illegal... )

So hey, what qualifies towards this bandwidth cap? Viewing webpages, email games? I was never really sure.

God... that's soo fuckin stupid... Glad I have Verizon FiOS now...

the 250gb cap has been in place for over a year. did you notice?

if not. don't worry about it.

if a person - not using torrents- hits 250gb a month, wtf are you downloading then.

the average household uses maybe 5gb a month.

playing online games is MAYBE 10mb an hr btw if you are worried about that

if you played online for a month-24hrs a day, you would use just over 7gig of bandwidth...

i am a heavy online gamer, my wife is too, so is my son.

we just barely break 20gig a month including my downloading of torrents.

Well for one thing people pointing to AUS there's a huge difference. Getting internet to AUS is expensive since its more or less a gigantic island in the middle of nowhere. It should in no way be capped in the US which is the exact opposite. Most internet traffic comes TO the US so there's no AUS style excuses about how it should be limited because getting bandwidth to US customers is hard.

The reason this is done at all is because the cable companies had two options. The first was building a decent 21st century infastructure, but that would be expensive and cut into obscene revenue. Instead they decide to throttle big internet users by charging insane overage fees and capping downloads. Did you know Comcast pulled in 8.6 billion in just ONE quarter of 2008? The average monthly cable bill is 109.66!!!!!! They want to charge 110 dollars a month AND cap download speeds? That is corporate greed at its worst.

For those who think 250 is a lot it really isn't. I rented at least 10 movies on my apple TV and PS3 this past month in HD, thats about 15GBs per movie so theres 150GBs gone. I routinely back up to an external storage system (my idisk) so thats a lot up and down as I move things to my internet storage (at least another 30 GBs over the month), I watch Hulu a lot since I don't have cable TV, they broadcast in HD as an option so thats at least 2 or 3Gbs per show so 20 shows over a month is another 60GBs and poof, I'm already over.

That is without any bittorent downloading at all, there is just a lot of content available for streaming and for HD. Another thing comcast is doing here is throttling the cable free lifestyle. I only have cable internet because I can get shows from cable channels (FX shows are available for streaming viewing free on Hulu as are shows from USA and many other cable networks) free, I can watch events like the olympics free online with much better selection (you choose what event you want to watch and when)...really there is almost nothing except a few sports you can't watch online easily and free now. For the rare events that are hard to watch free online like football games, there are corner bars where a 3 dollar drink costs loads less then a 110 dollar cable bill.

The big problem is the cable monopoly system. Allowing only one cable and one DSL provider into a market in the US is stupid beyond all belief. I would rather get FIOS in San Diego but can't because ATTs crappy 3mb/s DSL is the only game in town. Time Warner is looking to cap too because they are the only cable game in their markets. Lack of competition is death to consumers pocket books.