Comcast insists that its 250 GB limit will be sufficient for gamers, even those who download large files. Douglas states, "We want our customers to use our service to enjoy all that the Internet has to offer. We also have an obligation to ensure that all of our customers have a good online experience every time they use our service."

Douglas also told us, "One of the ways we ensure that customers have a good quality experience is by implementing our Acceptable Use Policy and working with excessive users to ask them to curb their usage. Again, 250 GB a month is an extremely large amount of bandwidth and based on your example, you could download a lot of games and patches with that amount."

However, others believe that any download cap could seriously affect gamers. The Entertainment Consumers Association has been leading the fight against such caps. The ECA's Director of Government Affairs, Jennifer Mercurio, told Big Download, "Basically bandwidth caps are most onerous to video game players. And considering that over 40 percent of all gamers play online, and that, according NPD over 65 percent of American households play video games, that's a lot of folks impacted by proposed or existing bandwidth caps."

Mercurio addsd, "ECA doesn't agree with ISP bandwidth caps, which is why two weeks ago we launched a Say No Bandwidth Cape campaign under our Gamers for Net Neutrality initiative. Thousands of gamers from across the nation have sent letters to Time Warner, Frontier, Comcast and others to protest either proposed or existing caps. I'm happy to report that the campaign is already working, and we've already had a great response from some ISPs that we're hoping to build on; and we hope that more gamers take action to speak their minds."

Mercurio's mention of Time Warner Cable refers to the company's recent test of metering Internet use in one of its cities. Last June Beaumont, Texas customers of Time Warner's Internet services were subject to an extra $1 per gigabyte of use if they went over a certain amount of bandwidth.

Time Warner has yet to expand this program to other areas of the country and as Mercurio tells us, "In response to our Say No Bandwidth Caps campaign, Time Warner has reached out to strengthen the dialog with ECA on this and other matters, and we look forward to working with them on the issues affecting ECA members."

However, Comcast has not been as accommodating with the ECA's discussions. Mercurio told us, "Comcast also responded rather quickly to our campaign, but to say that they believe that 'video games...do not use much bandwidth.' We obviously disagree on that point. We're hearing that video game play can blow through bandwidth rather quickly, and that 250 GB will seem even more onerous as online video games, and console games with online components, become more sophisticated. We're also reaching out to Comcast to talk about these issues in greater depth."