I got this in my inbox today (I’ve been waiting for it too, still not happy):
Dear Comcast High-Speed Internet Customer,
We are pleased to announce the pilot launch of the Comcast Usage Meter in your area. This new feature is available to Comcast High-Speed Internet customers and provides an easy way to check total monthly household high-speed Internet data usage at any time. Monthly data usage is the amount of data, such as images, movies, photos, videos, and other files that customers send, receive, download or upload each month. Comcast measures total data usage and does not monitor specific customer activities to determine data usage.
The current data usage allowance for the Comcast High-Speed Internet service is 250GB per month. This means that the vast majority of our customers – around 99% currently – will not come close to using 250GB of data in a month, and do not need to check the usage meter.
Sorry, but being pleased to announce the active monitoring of my traffic isn’t a pleasure to me. It doesn’t sound good in any way, shape, or form. Here is why.
Comcast says that 99% of users won’t hit that 250GB data usage limit, but in a time when more and more users and services are heading towards massive convergence with TV, Radio, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Massively Multiplayer Online games [MMO's] and many other social media networks are inviting everyone to go online; this bodes poorly for the FCC’s call for 100 meg connections and online-all-the-time scenarios.
I could understand it if I wasn’t paying what I pay, and at no time have I ever been told that I had a limit to my bandwidth, but since becoming a Comcast subscriber [which I'm thanked for choosing, but I have no choice in real broadband connectivity unless I want a poorer connection because of the monopoly power that cable companies have], I’ve had rates increased, speed caps put in place, redirection of bad URL requests to a monetized proxy server of which I don’t get any value from [yes, I know I can turn it off... now, after much negative press], and now usage monitoring.
Pay-per-byte is on the way I think, just in time for us to consume more and at a faster pace. Like ATMs switching to transaction fees after the cash cow proved itself reliable.