Your guide to residential broadband bandwidth caps

As video consumption shifts from DVD to streaming, music consumption gravitates online, gaming goes on-demand, and a proliferation of cloud computing services ensures an almost constant stream of data flowing to and from our laptops, desktops, tablets, and phones, there's one obvious direction our overall internet consumption is heading: up. Way up. The companies that deliver our precious internet service to us see both a challenge and an opportunity: meet increasing demand, and make increasing revenue.

But are they going too far? Internet Service Providers in the U.S. have been steadily implementing usage-based billing and instituting bandwidth caps, a sort of online ultimatum: either your household uses less overall bandwidth than the cap allows each month, or you'll be slapped with a huge bill — or worse, termination of your internet service. The ISPs claim that as more people use more bandwidth, their infrastructure costs are going sky high — and yet the financial data shows that the cost of bandwidth has been falling for some years.

Comcast opened the door back in 2008 when it imposed a 250 GB bandwidth cap on its broadband users. Other large providers like Charter Communications followed suit with their own monthly limits, and most recently AT&T capped both their DSL and U-verse users earlier this year.

How does your ISP stack up in the bandwidth cap playing field, and what are the consequences if you exceed their imposed limits? Check out our guide below to help you stay on top of your household's internet usage. Are we missing your provider? Let us know in the comments!

Comcast

Date implemented: October 1, 2008

Bandwidth cap: 250 GB/month

Overage charges: There is no "overdraft" price with Comcast; if you exceed 250GB of usage in a month, customer service will notify you and put your account on notice. If you go over 250GB again within 6 months they will terminate your account.

Monitoring tool: Comcast launched a bandwidth monitoring tool in December, 2009. The meter is accessible by heading to customer.comcast.com, clicking the "Users and Settings" tab, then clicking "View details" in the "My devices" section at the upper right. The meter shows your past three month of usage data and is updated every three hours.

The graph below, courtesy of Wikipedia, shows you how much continuous usage time will trigger the 250 GB cap depending on the speed provided by your service tier.

AT&T

Date implemented: May 1, 2011

Bandwidth caps:

• DSL users: 150 GB/month
• U-Verse customers: 250 GB/month

Overage charges: $10 for every 50 GB of additional usage

Monitoring tool: Log in with your account credentials at myusage.att.com to see your current usage stats (please note that this tool does not yet appear to be working to all subscribers in all markets — let us know if it's working for you and what city you're in)

Time Warner Cable

Time Warner Cable currently has no usage-based billing in place for its Road Runner broadband service, after an aborted experiment with bandwidth caps in select markets in 2009. Current CEO Glenn Brett said recently that bandwidth costs aren't very relevant to broadband pricing, which provides some glimmers of hope that TWC will remain one of the few holdouts against bandwidth caps in the U.S.

Verizon

Verizon currently has no broadband caps in place for either its FiOS or DSL internet services, although as recently as July 2011 the company reported they were "continuing to evaluate" the possibility of usage-based billing.

Charter Communications

Date implemented: February, 2009

Bandwidth caps:
Charter has bandwidth caps in place depending on your tier of service:

• Lite and Express service: 100 GB/month
• Plus and Max service: 250 GB/month
• Ultra60 service: 500 GB/month

Overage charges: Like Comcast, Charter has a "hard limit" policy where exceeding bandwidth limits nets you a call from customer service to upsell you on a higher tier of service or, in the case of repeat offenders, terminate your account altogether.

Monitoring tool: No first-party service is currently provided; Charter reports to be "currently evaluating methods for presenting usage data to customers to help them self-monitor their bandwidth usage."

Qwest

While Qwest has no publicly-stated absolute bandwidth cap, the company does state in its customer agreement that it reserves the right to police customers indulging in 'excessive usage' of its internet service. The company doesn't explicitly define what falls under "excessive use" but indicates the average usage falls between 1 and 3 GB per month, and that the following monthly usage thresholdsmight be grounds for contacting a customer for bandwidth-hogging:

• 300,000-500,000 photo downloads
• 40,000-80,000 typically sized MP3 music downloads
• 15+ million unique e-mails
• online TV video streaming of 1,000-3,000 30-minute shows
• 2-5 million web page visits (roughly one per second, 24 hours/day)

Earthlink

As primarily a reseller of other companies' internet services, Earthlink does not impose any single unifying bandwidth cap for all users. However, for subscribers to its "Earthlink Powered by Comcast" service, the Comcast-imposed bandwidth cap of 250 GB applies. For other Earthlink subscribers, you may want to check with your ISP to determine if you may be subject to any monthly upper limits.

Optimum Online (Cablevision)

Serving primarily the tri-state area, this subsidiary of Cablevision has been criticized for non-transparent bandwidth-capping practices. Cablevision claims that technical limitations prevent them from providing absolute bandwidth limits to the consumer, but some customers have reported being "data throttled" — a practice in which the Internet Service Provider still allows data flow both upstream and down but at much slower speeds than usual.

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