It's not a matter of the type of data that's being transferred but the amount. Traffic is not free. ISPs have to pay for the traffic to someone else and even if it stays in house, downloading a terabyte in 1 month is just obscene!

If the cost of this bandwidth were passed onto the consumer, the traffic would drop drastically!

Of course DSL is going to say they don't have any limits. Firstly their upstream is extremely low and the downstream still in some situations doesn't compare to cable and is slower. In Canada, cable is quite often close to a 10mbit connection downstream for residential users. Compare this to the DSL connections that is only 1.5mbit and with an upgrade 3mbit and 5mbit but by this time you're at the business package and paying extra.

When it boils down to it, what're you downloading that's worth 1 terabyte of data? If it's legit then you can probably afford to switch to a business package that'd accomodate your high traffic needs. If however it's illegal, chances are you won't pay the extra $$$ for the extra bandwidth mostly because you're already not shelling out the extra $$$ for the illegal stuff you're downloading.

Granted, Comcast' policy of just disabling users without some prior knowledge at all is not customer friendly however when 1 person is transferring terabytes worth of data, i say kick 'em off the service! Tiered bandwidth for all, pay for what you use!

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