By Jacqui Cheng
August 28, 2008 - 04:16PM CT

Comcast has announced that it will in fact be introducing bandwidth caps to all residential customers. The cap, which will go into effect as of October 1, will be 250GB per month. Comcast justifies the decision by saying that it's "an extremely large amount of data," and that a very large majority of customers will never cross it.

In fact, according to Comcast, this is actually the same policy that is already in place, except with more explicit numbers as to what is allowed and what isn't. "As part of our preexisting policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage," the company said in a statement sent to Ars. "If a customer uses more than 250GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use."

This announcement has been widely expected since at least May of this year, after the whole brouhaha went down with P2P throttling and the FCC fallout. Comcast had originally argued that that the FCC had no authority to block Comcast's process, but ultimately decided on its own to stop interfering with P2P traffic. The company also joined in with other ISPs in trying to devise a P2P user's bill of rights and contemplated the use of P4P software.

Comcast customers that make heavy use of their Internet connections—myself included—are sure to find themselves somewhat alarmed at the prospect of being capped. After all, perfectly legal things like movies from iTunes and Netflix, online music stores, massive software updates, and other media-heavy applications do suck up a lot of bandwidth. Comcast insists that the 250GB cap is enough to send some 50 million e-mails, download 62,500 songs, or download 125 standard-definition movies.