Charlie Douglas, a spokesperson for Comcast Corporation, called back to clarify what "excessive usage" means and why the company's actions to end its relationship with these customers is good for gamers. First, Douglas defines Comcast's "excessive use" as any customer who downloads the equivalent of 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures or 13 million emails in a month.

So if you have two channels of Internet radio running all the time, you are going to get dropped from Comcast. If you listen to Internet radio during the day, and you use your Netflix WatchNow subscription in the evening, you are going to get dropped from Comcast.

What will non-technical customers think of this? People will relate it to other media delivery mechanisms. Can you imagine your satellite TV provider calling up to complain about your "excessive use" of the television? Can you imagine your NPR affiliate calling to ask you to turn off the radio more often? You know, when you're not "really", seriously, listening to the program?

This plays right into the DSL propaganda about "dedicated" bandwidth.

Comcast Clarifies High Speed Extreme Use Policy