Because broadband isn’t expensive enough already I suppose.

Last month I wrote about a West Coast ISP that began offering high-speed Internet plans with download limits. According to a piece at Broadband Reports, Comcast is considering putting a 250GB download limit on customers and charging fees for exceeding the limit.

Comcast has been doing a bang up job for it’s customers. For the past year, experts and customers have been shaking their fists at Comcast’s attempts to disrupt bandwidth intensive bit-torrent traffic over their network.

However there seems to be growing resistance to Comcast’s and other ISPs’ push to more tightly control the Internet traffic that flows through their networks. Tuesday, Sen. Ron Wyden, a democrat from Oregon, made some strong remarks, warning the ISPs. It sounds like the growing support for customer protection has finally started to reach some of the politicians through their constituency. I wonder if Comcast is scared.

Verizon and Comcast are rolling out the next generation of high-speed technology to limited markets. The new connections are going to deliver about 25 times the rate of the average broadband connections that are most widely available today. Verizon’s FiOS has been available to folks in a number of states for over a year now, and Comcast just showed up to the party; offering its new service in Minneapolis/St. Paul in the past few months.

Not in Chicago though – Boo.

While I’ve mentioned Comcast’s plans before, this Wired article has a good break-down of what the new lines will be capable of and where this is all headed.

The United States is still behind in the broadband game. Many other advanced nations have higher adoption, availability and speeds. Its great that the telecom companies are pushing things forward, but this was supposed to happen a while ago.