Downloading music via the Internet has become very popular, as for very little money or in many cases for free, you can download MP3 tracks for your MP3 players from various websites, including of course iTunes.

However, the act of downloading music from websites for your iPod or MP3 players does come with one small problem, it uses an awful lot of bandwidth. This probably doesn’t bother the average music fan, but it does cause concern for the Internet service provider involved. So much so that Comcast has imposed a limit on the amount of data that US based customers can download. The limit is a rather hefty 250 GB per month, but one that could be breached if you’re an avid music and movie downloader.

Comcast had originally been far more heavy handed, and had even blocked access to some peer-to-peer sites where Internet users would share music files online.

This posed a problem as users didn’t know exactly how much bandwidth they had available to them, how much they had used or whether they were being penalised for downloading music and MP3 files.

Now with the limit, users know exactly how much they are able to download. However the proposed penalty for breaking the 250 GB limit is to have their service banned for a whole year.

Similarly in the UK recently Virgin Media sent out letters to users who had used too much bandwidth in their opinion, causing panic over what they were able to do online.

The problem for the ISPs is that if some users are hogging bandwidth, then the service suffers for other users.