Data caps have long been thought of as a threat to esports. Placing a limit on the amount of data that individuals can receive from their ISPs seems to have a direct conflict with the esports crowd, which includes many that not only stream many hours of HD esports coverage a week, but also often play the games themselves—adding many game downloads and updates to their internet usage.

However, big news from Comcast last week may indicate a change of direction in that perceived threat. The change is a big one—Comcast is raising all data caps to allow 1TB of data before incurring additional charges. Per CNNMoney:

“According to Comcast, that 1 terabyte would let customers stream about 700 hours of video and download 60,000 high-resolution photos each month. Meanwhile, 16 people could simultaneously play online video games every hour the entire month long.”

Comcast’s old cap was 300 GB, and they found that about 8% of users went over this limit. The new cap, Comcast estimates, will affect less than 1% of users.

But what’s the reality for esports?

Still, we wondered, how will data caps affect esports moving forward? So, we got in touch with a Comcast engineer, who agreed to fill us in anonymously.

The first thing to know is that the new cap would be almost impossible to break by simply watching streams. “Really, even if you have a full family constantly watching HD video, 1TB is hard to reach,” they say. And playing games themselves uses a very minimal amount of bandwidth.

The engineer reasoned that a “super heavy user,” somebody constantly watching HD videos and installing Steam games, could potentially break the cap. “It’s possible if you stream all day long, but even then, Comcast doesn’t cut off data until around 3 TB of use.”

The reasoning for caps, he explains, has less to do with limiting use, and more to do with discouraging customers from running servers in residential neighborhoods, which makes everybody else in the neighborhood have poor service.

“In each neighborhood, there are only a few hundred channels, each 32 MBs wide, that provide customers with internet through coaxial cables. Most modern modems only use 8-16 MBs, and Twitch itself uses around 7 MBs. But, if you have someone using all 32 MBs on all channels, like you can with a server or with heavy torrenting, you’d effectively cut off that area’s available Internet pipe for everyone else.”

In the future, the 1 TB cap could affect viewers, but those scenarios mostly involve 4k streaming becoming the norm. Even VR transitions would not increase a user’s data usage, because VR images are simply “the same rendered images skewed slightly so it looks like your eyes are watching it.”

So there you have it, from within Comcast itself—esports is unlikely to be affected by data caps. Of course, this all depends on other ISPs following Comcast’s model, but with the FCC paying increasing attention to caps, we should all sleep soundly that the future of esports looks likely to be unimpeded by them.