Your analogy is flawed. He's not talking about outbound traffic from his system. He's talking about the Gigs upon Gigs of inbound virus traffic and spams. I can have a near-fully firewalled system (only allow ping) and I'll see a substantial amount of traffic due to attempted port scans, virus probes, etc. All of which counts against this mythical limit that Comcast calculates. If I happen to have an older e-amil address that has made the rounds of the spammers lists, my e-mail server may get more traffic because I'm receiving more spam, or because more people have my e-mail address in their address books and web caches I receive more copies of the mydoom worm. My mail server may filer out these messages before I read them, but they're still sent to my server over my Comcast connection and still count against the limit.

But that's not the point of all of this. The point is that Comcast advertised an unlimited service, and now they're changing the rules of the game without proper notification of a change of the terms of service and without being able to prove their accusations. If you receive one of these letters and call Comcast to find out how much you used, they can't tell you. If you ask how to find out how much you're currently using, they can't tell you. If you ask what the average use is, they can't tell you. And that's the problem. Nobody would have a leg to stand on if the contract said "usage above x GB/month or above Y times the average prior monthly use as published in your monthly bill will result in Z penalty. To check your current usage, visit your Comcast high-speed usage dashboard at http://......" And frankly, nobody would be comlaining if that was the way it was presented in the first case.

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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/articles/7940/24637#24637