Comcast: We won't reveal download limits

Comcast claims that it will not ban downloaders after they download 90 GB in a month --- but they confirm that they do have bandwidth limits, although refuse to detail exactly what those limits are.

Last week, I blogged about the 90 GB limit. In response, Charlie Douglas, Comcast's Director of Corporate Communications got in touch with me, telling me that there is no 90 GB limit. But in a lengthy phone call, he wouldn't say exactly what the limits are.

Douglas is a good guy, trying to defend a very bad policy -- in fact, an indefensible one. When repeatedly asked what the download limit is for people before Comcast blackballs them, he would only say that Comcast will ban "customers that use an excessive amount of bandwidth," who download more than do 99.99% of other Comcast customers, and who the company considers "outliers" because of their excessive bandwidth use.

The limit, he said, was the equivalent of 30,000 songs a month or 13 million emails a month. But when I asked how they came up with those figures --- did they calculate how large an average music file is, or estimate how much bandwidth is taken up by an average email --- he would not provide any details.

He said that the company looks for "patterns of repeated, excessive use," and that when it finds them, it notifies the offending customer. No one, he said, is kicked off Comcast without first getting a notice so that they can change their download use. He added that customers are often pleased to get the notice, because their machines may have been taken over in a zombie attack, and this alerts them that they have a compromised computer.

Comcast bans big downloaders because they affect the experience of other people on its network by taking away their bandwidth, he said. The company, he explained, wanted to make sure that the 99.99% of people who weren't big downloaders have as much bandwidth as possible.

I believe that Comcast has every right to set download limits, and charge customers who exceed that limit, or ban those who regularly exceed the limits. But in order to do that, the company also have to let people know exactly what those limits are. Without clearly published rules, what Comcast is doing is patently unfair.