Is Comcast's bandwidth limiting action a sign of things to come?

If you are a subscriber of Comcast's cable broadband services, you might be interested to know that Comcast will impose a monthly limit of 250 gigabytes of bandwidth on residential users starting October 1.

I talked to George Ou, Senior Analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and he noted that "this new 250 G-byte policy is not an actual change in policy, but a move to make Comcast more transparent." Ou, who has written extensively on net neutrality issue, thinks this is a good thing, since this official position simply puts everything out in the clear. Previously, heavy users would occasionally get calls or emails warning them that they were using too much bandwidth, though the cap amount was not disclosed.

Proponents of network throttling argue that heavy users should not be allowed to degrade the experience of other users on the network. The unspoken understanding, of course, is that the comparatively low cost of residential broadband access means that bandwidth has to be oversubscribed to be commercially viable.

Whatever the case, it would be interesting to see whether other ISPs in the U.S. will follow suit. Are the days of uncapped Internet access over? - Paul