In our new age of abundant broadband, we’ve started to take bandwidth for granted, just like the air we breathe and the water we swim in.  But now, Comcast and others are saying, “Not so fast!”  And that may have a chilling effect on the multimedia-hungry customers that we web video marketers want to cultivate.

While your cable modem might advertise that it can deliver a couple of megabits of information a second…don’t assume you can run your modem full tilt, all the time.  That’s what a growing number of subscribers have been finding out the hard way lately, when they’ve gotten pink-slipped by their cable company for using their internet connections too much.

According to a Washington Post article this week:

As Internet users make more demands of the network, cable companies in particular could soon end up with a critically short supply of bandwidth, according to a report released this month by ABI Research, a New York market-research firm. This could lead to a bigger crackdown on heavy bandwidth users, said the report’s author, Stan Schatt.

“These new applications require huge amounts of bandwidth,” he said. Cable “used to have the upper hand because they basically enjoyed monopolies, but there are more competitive pressures now.”

What most people don’t realize is that the bandwidth that cable services offer is shared across a whole lot of users in a town or neighborhood.  When one of us is downloading a whole lot of movies or songs, then that means there’s that much less bandwidth left for our neighbors.  That was fine for a while, but in a YouTube/web video world, the demands on bandwidth have suddenly and dramatically increased.

In many cases, like Comcast, the bandwidth appetite that will bring cancellation is not clear; in others, like Cox Cable, the “Limitations of Service” are published, and in the basic service tier, the monthly limits are pretty modest: 3 gigabytes per month, which is only about 800 minutes of streaming video (about a half-hour a day).

I’m not sure this has any grave implications yet for those of us (and our clients) who use web video as an embedded component of our websites.  But it does suggest that something we take for granted may actually be limited.  When that happens, we may find our web video viewers getting a bit more discriminating about how they spend their time.