Comcast’s Bandwidth Cap Is Likely Only the Beginning

Comcast announced a 250-gigabyte cap on individual consumer broadband usage this week. The company takes care to demonstrate that this is a generous limit–the equivalent of roughly 125 standard-definition movie downloads. The move, however, is probably only the beginning of what promises to be a long struggle to balance growing Internet usage against limited infrastructure–a problem that TR editor Larry Hardesty described in depth earlier this year. As Hardesty’s story makes clear, there’s no easy answer to the problem. I expect to see a lot of change to Internet service as providers, companies, and consumers wrestle with one another.