Comcast May Cap Unlimited Internet

After Rogers, Canada’s top Cable/Internet broadband provider announced it’ll end its unlimited Internet access, America’s number two Internet provider considers the same measure.

An insider tells DLSReports.com that Comcast is discussing monthly caps on Internet use. In the new system subscribers to the previously unlimited plans will have 250GB limit. An additional charge of $15 would be applied for every additional 10GB.

Comcast estimates this would only affect about 14,000 of its 14.1 million subscribers. In Canada Rogers is implementing a cap starting this summer of 60GB with stiffer penalties for going over. It may be a lot of data but it’s conceivable that Rogers and Comcast’s limits could be reached if users downloaded all of their content from TV shows to movies in high definition.

The new caps are obviously an effort to deter heavy downloading and possibly to police illegal downloads. The rumor of broadband caps comes soon after Comcast’s beating at the hands of the FCC for throttling its customer’s P2P traffic.

But is the long term goal of Comcast and Rogers to prepare for a time when consumers have the option to legally download all of its high definition content?

Cable TV has always required users to subscribe to entire networks. All day long you’re paying for programming you don’t even care about. Digital downloads of individual episodes and movies only require users to pay for programming they actually watch.

Comcast would likely resist providing bold new billing options to compete with cheap bandwidth and legal download services. This could be the first tremors of that resistance.