One of the things that has made the Internet a massive form of commerce for businesses and the consumer is the availability of broadband download speeds. Beginning in the late 1990s Internet service providers began to offer affordable fast download speeds to households.

The results served to turn the Internet from just a way to send email and view web sites to downloading music, movies, TV shows and of course games. Not only that but faster broadband speeds served to give gamers a way to truly play online titles like MMOs and first person shooters with little to no lag unlike playing such games on 56K modems.

However, the expansion of the game industry on the Internet could be in jeopardy thanks to a recent move by one the biggest ISPs in the US. Starting this month, Comcast will begin enforcing a 250 GB monthly limit on its broadband download residential customers. While that cap seems very generous, the reality is that hardcore gamers on both the PC and broadband-enabled game consoles could find themselves approaching or even exceeding those limits in the near future.

Comcast has been quick to defend its decision to have such limits, saying that their program has already been in place for some time. Comcast's PR spokesperson Charlie Douglas told Big Download, "250 GB a month is an extremely large amount of bandwidth. Fewer than one percent of our customers come close to that amount of use in a month. It's about 100 times the amount of a typical customer and some extreme users go even farther beyond the threshold."

Douglas added, "The program is not new. We've had it in place for many years. The only thing that is new is that we are providing a specific number. In the past, we had not, but we listened to the customers who wanted us to disclose a number and made this announcement."

And what happens when a Comcast customer exceeds that threshold? Douglas told us, "Currently, we call far fewer than one percent of our customers on the phone and ask them to curb their usage. The vast majority do so voluntarily, but we do explain that if they choose not to curb their usage and they remain among our heaviest users for a second time within six months that we reserve the right to suspend their account for a year."

While Comcast, and indeed all ISPs in the US, are trying to keep their traffic free of customers who use bandwidth for illegal activities (such as BitTorrent downloads of pirated games) the truth is that more and more customers are downloading larger files for legitimate purposes.

Full games that are several gigs in sizes are becoming more and more common as they are downloaded and purchased via services like Steam, Impulse and Direct2Drive. Even free files of game demos and patches can be quite large as well. The PC game industry is moving toward a download business model as retail sales of PC games continue to drop. Because of this having a broadband cap could put an upper limit on how the game industry can grow in this area.

However even the console game industry could be affected by broadband caps. Not only are full games and patches being offered for the Xbox 360 and PS3 consoles but both also offer high-definition movies and TV shows for rental and download that are usually several gigs in size.