Guess what they gave me when I moved to my new house? A CD after being a loyal customer since 2000 I finally got a CD. I feel so special. I think I might make a special coaster out of it.

Comcast, one of the country’s largest Internet providers, said this week that it would place limits on customers’ broadband usage.

Beginning Oct. 1, Comcast will put a 250 gigabyte-a-month cap on residential users. The limit will not affect most users, at least not in the short-term, but is certain to create tension as some technologies gain traction.

A Comcast spokeswoman, Jennifer Khoury, said 250 gigabytes was about 100 times the typical usage; the average customer uses two to three gigabytes a month. Less than 1 percent of customers exceed the cap, she said.

Many Internet providers reserve the right to cancel the service of the most excessive users. The 250-gigabyte cap is Comcast’s way of specifying a longstanding policy of placing a limit on Internet consumption, and it comes after customer pushed for a definition of excessive use.

But on the Internet, consumer behavior does not stand still. As the technology company Cisco stated in a report last winter, “today’s ‘bandwidth hog’ is tomorrow’s average user.”

Some commentators were quick to characterize Comcast’s decision as having a chilling effect. Om Malik, the founder of the technology Web site GigaOm, called the cap “the end of the Internet as we know it.”

DSLReports.com, a Web site about consumer broadband information, said it indicated “a significant shift in the U.S. broadband market that won’t be reversible.”

In recent months Comcast and other companies have considered clamping down on their most active subscribers, saying the limits were necessary to ensure fair access to the network for all.

Comcast’s cap does not amount to Internet metering, the charging of different prices for different broadband speeds or usage, but the change to Comcast’s policy does not rule out metering in the future.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/technology/30comcast.html?em