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Comcast’s new use limit a headache for business and leisure travelers

by Ned Levi

Comcast’s new Internet use limit may seem generous, but for many business travelers — especially home-office based — and even leisure travelers, it will severely hamper them once the limit goes into effect Oct. 1.

According its their new Acceptable Use Policy, Comcast Internet residential customers whose use exceeds 250 GB a month, would be considered excessive users. That could result in the immediate suspension or termination of Comcast’s Internet service for those customers.

Today, there are many Internet services used extensively by travelers. While the two most essential Internet services for road warriors are online backup, and peer-to-peer (P2P) services, there are others used by both leisure and business travelers alike.

For example, I use an iPod for entertainment during long flights. Each movie downloaded to my iPod would be a gigabyte against Comcast’s monthly limit. Many leisure travelers use services like Flickr and Smugmug to not just show off their photos to friends and family, but also to store vacation photos online to back up the storage in their own computers. The files from some digital cameras, especially digital single lens reflex cameras (DSLR) can be large — 10 MB or more. Just 100 of those photos equal a gigabyte of photos.

Recently, with the revelations about Customs and Border Protection searching and seizing laptops from US citizens reentering the country, Internet services are becoming essential for business travelers, and vacationers to protect their confidential business information, and even prevent family and travel photos from permanent loss due confiscation at the border.

Businesses regularly backup their documents and data to tape, removable hard drives, or off site storage, in case of data corruption, loss, or disasters such as floods or fire. On the road, however, business travelers, until recently, usually just hoped their new or edited data and documents stored on their laptops would stay safe, until they could be backed up at the office.

With the advent of affordable P2P services and online data backup, road warriors now both connect to their office via the Internet and routinely back up their office data to online remote storage while traveling. As a photographer, I regularly backup my important photos on my home office computer, via the Internet, from wherever I’m located, from Europe to South America and beyond.

Using the P2P service, GoToMyPc.com I regularly, safely and securely connect to my office via the Internet, to conduct business, do research, retrieve email, create and edit documents, and do anything normally done on my office computer, all without any data being stored on my laptop. In this way, confidential and private information is never stored on my laptop, and is therefore not at risk if my laptop is lost or stolen, or perhaps seized and examined by Customs and Border Protection. Moreover, since the data is on my office computer, it’s backed up, even when I’m away.

The problem with Comcast’s monthly use limit is that Internet services used by travelers chew up gigabytes of use in a hurry. Even for vacationers, uploading precious photographs directly to their home computer, or retrieving them from online storage once home, 250 GB can go quickly when added to regular usage. For business travelers using Internet services, 250 GB can be gone long before their trip is over, and their Comcast Internet service canceled.

Home-office based road warriors who upgrade to a business account can eliminate this restriction, but their Comcast monthly fee will essentially double, plus business accounts are not available everywhere on Comcast’s network.

It seems to me that while Comcast’s use limit is far more generous than most other cable Internet providers, with the growth of available Internet services and Web 2.0, Comcast will soon be facing a huge customer loss if they don’t begin a substantial upgrade of the available bandwidth of their network for their established customer base, and eliminate the use limit. Residential and business Internet users are not going to permit Comcast, or any cable provider, to limit their Internet use for long.

Published on September 3, 2008 ·
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Comments

3 Responses to “Comcast’s new use limit a headache for business and leisure travelers”

  1. On September 3rd, 2008 at 5:49 am SirWired said

    I dunno… 250GB seems pretty generous to me. “Average” internet use (meaning normal web-surfing, YouTube, etc.) is only a couple of gigs a month. If we start tacking on-line backup, photo sharing, etc., it still would take an awful lot of usage to hit those limits.

    At 100 photos per gig, you still have enough room for thousands upon thousands of photos.

    Except for first-time backups, even on-line backup services do not use that much bandwidth. If you exclude temporary files (most on-line services do), most users simply do not actually change that much data every month on their computers.

    1GB per movie is a problem? How many movies do you watch?

    Yes, I know everything adds up, but I just don’t see somebody uploading 10,000 photos, 100GB of on-line backup, and pulling down 50 movies on a routine basis. (I don’t think Comcast is going to kill you if you do this just once or twice a year.)

    Now, the fact that they are providing no way for users to monitor all this IS certainly quite annoying.

    SirWired

  2. On September 3rd, 2008 at 1:18 pm Joe Farrell said

    well, if you have a mac, you can automatically set up a bot to tell you your usage for the day, for the uptime, for whatever period of time you want.

    Just cause Comcast does not tell you does not mean you cannot find it out yourself.

  3. On September 30th, 2008 at 10:34 pm BOB said

    Comcast business internet is not effected by the 250 cap.

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