Skip to Content

Comcast’s Bandwidth Cap Is Likely Only the Beginning

As Internet usage grows, companies will continue to struggle over questions of how to fairly apportion bandwidth.
August 29, 2008

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.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.