Acronym Update 09/24/2008

For those of you who are are Comcast Internet customers, be aware that your provider is now introducing CAPS or limits on its service. This is no reason for alarm or cause for you to change providers. Basically you just need to understand that the verbiage ‘unlimited Internet access’ has come to an end.

Basically, your Internet service will include up to 250 GB of bandwidth (uploads + downloads) per month. This is a massive threshold. Comcast expects it to affect only 14,000 of their 14 million Internet customers. Don’t be surprised if other large Internet Service Providers follow suit.

Here is an idea of how big 250 gigabytes in really is…..
250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 – 3 GB. To put 250 GB of monthly usage in perspective, a customer would have to do any one of the following:

* Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
* Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
* Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)