Although Comcast said the recently-announced and soon-to-be introduced 250gigabytes cap for all its subscribers is far above the average bandwidth usage, the change still means one thing and one thing only: Web surfers can kiss good bye unlimited Internet usage.

Comcast, the nation’s second largest Internet services provider, will introduce the new bandwidth-management method starting October 1st and will limit the internet usage of all its residential customers to 250GB. Comcast said it already notified bandwidth hogs, but now went further and imposed the specific limit.

In a statement, the Internet provider said the limit it plans to impose starting next month is actually quite generous and only about 1% of its customers will be affected by it. Comcast has 14.4 million customers (you do the math).

Those most likely to be included in the 1% are heavy gamers and heavy video creators and uploaders.

However, what is worrying about the 250GB cap is that it may very well set a new trend among most Internet service providers and this is not just speculation, it’s a fact said by industry watchers.

Other Internet providers such as Frontier Communications and Time Warner Cable have already done it a month, respectively two months ago, but Comcast is a giant of the industry and thus, a trend establisher.

However, despite the fact that Comcast’s usage cap is quite generous (and it really is compared to the limits of 5 GB to 40 GB per month imposed by the above mentioned Internet providers), its decision has drawn heavy criticism because it didn’t provide any data to support the reasonableness of the change and because it won’t provide its subscribers with a tool that would help them monitor their own Internet usage.

According to a statement posted on Comcast’s Web site, one subscriber will be able to send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email), download 62,500 songs (at 4MB/song), download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2GB/movie) or upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo) within the 250GB usage cap. Of course, the numbers seem more than enough for the average Internet user. Comcast said most Web surfers have a median monthly data usage of about 2-3 GB. But, also on average, the standards of average users change.