Comcast Corporation, one of the country’s largest Internet Service Provider, has announced that it will be putting a 250 gigabyte-a-month cap on residential users, starting October 1. This broadband limit is, as stated by the company’s spokesperson Jennifer Khoury, 100 times the typical usage, given that an average consumer’s usage is a monthly two to three gigabytes. The percentage of users who exceed the cap is very small (less than one percent), she added.

This measure comes to meet the need for staving off network clogging by a handful of heavy users.

Comcast is not the first company to stifle its subscribers by establishing limits. Cable companies have also been facing difficulties when it comes to providing fair accesss to all users.

Consequently, in June, Time Warner Cable kicked off a metering test consisting of different monthly billing systems and extra charges for consumers who exceeded their bandwidth limit. Moreover, AT&T Incorporated stated that it was taking into a account a similar pricing method.

At the moment, Comcast is not considering charging extra for consumption that goes beyond the limit, but this doesn’t mean that it will not be doing so somewhere along the way.

Nevertheless, the company will be issuing warnings to those who fall into the category of “excessive users”, and if they fail to keep their consumption below the limit during the following six months, Comcast will cut them off from the service for a whole year.

In order to exceed the cap, Comcast stated that a consumer would have to download 62,500 songs or 125 standard-definition movies a month.