It was great to speak with you on the phone this morning and, as you suggested, I wanted to correct a few of your statements in this post.

Regarding our excessive use program, the reality is that less than 1% of our entire high-speed Internet customer base even comes close to reaching the monthly threshold. It’s important to remember that 250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. Currently, the average monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 – 3 GB.

To put 250 GB of monthly usage in perspective, a customer would have to do any one of the following:

- Send 50 million plain text emails (at 5 KB/email)
- Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
- Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
- Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

It’s also important to remember that, if a residential customer uses more than 250 GB, he or she will be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use. They would NOT be arbitrarily cut off from their service. At that time, we’ll tell them how much data per month they had used. We know from experience the vast majority of customers we ask to curb usage do so voluntarily. In fact, the majority are not aware of the activity that caused the excessive use (i.e. their computer was compromised by a virus / spyware, their wireless router was not secure, or someone else in the household abusing the service).

It’s also not true that there is no Comcast internet service available for power users who need more than 250 GB per month. We offer Business Class internet service which has NO usage cap of any kind for anyone who needs this amount of data service.

Regarding your comments on upload speeds, it simply isn’t true that customers are stifled as to what they can upload with Comcast’s High-Speed Internet service. In fact, we have hundreds of thousands of residential customers and thousands of Business Class customers in this market who are using Comcast services in a myriad of ways, both uploading AND downloading. And, we have a number of speed tiers available for customers to choose from to help meet their specific needs. As we discussed, Comcast is working on rolling out even higher speed services using DOCSIS 3.0 technology which will continue to increase both upload and download speeds to ensure we meet the growing needs of our customers – enabling our communities and businesses to utilize new technology for innovation in how we live, work, and communicate within a global society.

We appreciate your business and the opportunity to respond here in the comments. If you have any additional questions or concerns, feel free to call me or anyone on the Comcast Twin Cities team.

David Diers
Vice President, Business Services
Comcast Twin Cities Region