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Always since ISPs and cellular service providers began introducing data caps, they've offered a familiar set of reasons to justify them. The biggest i is they're supposedly necessary to bring a high quality of service (QoS) for anybody using the network at the same time. The other point that ISPs like to hammer is that caps are typically set well above the median use-point. Figures vary between providers, but information technology's normal for a company to say that betwixt 98% and 99% of its users never encounter a information cap.

Comcast may have inadvertently diddled its own cover on these practices cheers to a tweet from the company's VP of Internet services, Jason Livingood.

CromcastData

Livingood is but confirming what well-nigh of us take known for years, especially equally it pertains to cellular services — enforcing information caps is a terrible way to manage traffic, to the betoken that few networks would seriously advise using it. Information caps can simply solve one problem: A tiny minority of users who soak up absolutely disproportional amounts of bandwidth. To be fair, Comcast may take had this usage in mind when it created a 250GB information cap in 2007 (it later updated this to 300GB). Dorsum when boilerplate Cyberspace utilize probably accounted for 10-15GB of data per month at almost, a 250GB cap was enormous. Fifty-fifty gamers downloading a few dozen Steam games in 2007 might not take hitting that level, and Comcast besides says it allows a customer to hit 300GB 4x per year before information technology takes action against the account. The tiny number of people exceeding it were likely engaged in massive amounts of piracy, or running business organization servers off habitation connections.

Currently, Comcast doesn't enforce its 300GB cap beyond most of the country — in the areas where the cap is enforced, customers are allowed to pay an additional fee ($10 per 50GB of information) rather than face up a service shutdown. While nosotros're not fond of information caps as methods of network command, there are certainly far more draconian schemes out there.

The biggest problem with Comcast'southward data caps these days is that the company hasn't recalibrated them for the age of digital video. In fact, given the way Comcast now operates its own video-on-demand service, it has a perverse incentive not to conform its information caps. Comcast's Xfinity service, after all, doesn't count against a client'southward data cap, whereas Netflix usage definitely does. In 2007, when Comcast didn't ain NBC/Universal and hadn't branched out into Goggle box, cable, and delivered services in the same fashion, this was less of a problem. Equally far as nosotros're enlightened, for example, the PS4 is even so incapable of accessing HBO Get when using Comcast's Net service.

In the k scheme of things, Livingood'southward explanations aren't going to change your opinion of Comcast or its services. But it's squeamish to encounter someone in corporate reveal, however inadvertently, that the policies the company promotes equally necessary for the health of the network are mostly almost lining its own pockets. If Comcast wants to prove that it actually puts customers first, it should raise that limit to 600GB or more. This would still cut downwards on people using its services inappropriately, since the corporeality of network bandwidth required to distribute 4K content is much larger than the absolute increment required to stream it from legitimate services — but information technology would help prevent customers binge-watching Netflix from chewing through their bandwidth over the course of a few days.

One final point: When Comcast deployed its 250GB cap, it claimed less than ane one-thousandth of its users actually exceeded that data usage. Today, co-ordinate to BGR, the 300GB data cap is sufficient that 98% of Comcast users don't exceed it. While ii% of one'due south userbase is still a small fraction, the number of customers exceeding Comcast's stated limits has increased by several orders of magnitude in just eight years. That has significant implications for long-term bandwidth consumption trends.