• Silicon Alley Insider , Friday, August 29, 2008 11:45 AM

So Comcast went and imposed a 250-gigabyte monthly cap on its users. As Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer points out, that's actually a heck of a lot -- certainly a way better deal than Time Warner Cable's 5-40 gigabyte monthly caps.

In its announcement, Comcast noted that the median monthly data usage by residential customers is only about 2-3 GB, so practically nobody is going to be affected by the enormous cap. In fact, Broadband Reports says that just 14,000 of Comcast's 14.1 million broadband subscribers go over that limit in a month. Given SAI's report, we'd love to know what those people are up to.

So, just how much is 250 GB? According to Frommer, it's 2,500-4,000 MP3 albums, or 50,000 3-minute songs, 170-250 movies downloaded on iTunes, and 50-60 high-def movie downloads. Frommer notes that the latter could be a problem some day, but generally speaking, if you download one HD movie, six standard-def movies, 5 albums, and pour lots of hours into World of Warcraft, YouTube and Hulu each week, you're still probably going to max out somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 gigabytes per month. As Frommer says, "We think you'll also struggle to listen to all that music and watch all those movies. Also, you should get out more. It's nice outside! Go for a walk."

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