Skip to footer

Comcast, citing fairness, adds data caps in more cities

Comcast is expanding its "Data Usage Plan Trials" to cities in Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia. Customers in those cities will have a 300 GB data cap; they'll be charged $35 for additional increments of 50 GB.

|
Jeff Fusco/AP/File
Comcast will add data caps to residential Internet connections in some additional cities in Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia. Here, the Comcast logo is seen at the Comcast Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on October 19, 2015.

Most people don’t worry about how much Internet data they use in a month when they’re on their home WiFi network.

A typical residential connection is billed by speed tier, not usage, so as long as a person’s connection is fast enough, there’s no real obstacle to watching shows on Netflix, uploading and downloading large files, and sharing photos on social media.

But Comcast has been experimenting with metered home data plans, called “Data Usage Plan Trials,” and on Wednesday sent e-mails to customers in certain cities in Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia to inform them that they’ll get a data cap starting in December.

DSLReports, which first reported the expansion, noted that Comcast customers in certain cities will have their monthly usage capped at 300 GB. People who exceed that cap will be charged $10 for each additional 50 GB increment; or customers can opt to pay an additional $35 ($30 in some areas) to keep unlimited data.

“We believe that 300 GB is more than enough to meet your Internet usage needs,” Comcast said in the e-mail to customers.

Comcast says that only about 8 percent of its customers use more than 300 GB of data in a typical month, according to the Associated Press. Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas told the AP that the company sees data caps as a way to “introduce some more fairness” by making sure the heaviest users are paying their fair share. Comcast and other ISPs argued to the Government Accountability Office last year that heavy data use isn’t making wired networks congested, but that extra revenue from data caps could help fund network upgrades.

Exactly how much data is 300 GB? Comcast says you’d be able to stream 230 hours of HD video before you hit that cap; the average US household watches 240 hours of TV a month on top of social media activity, Web surfing, and other activities that use data. So users who have “cut the cord” by ditching their cable subscription in favor of online services such as Netflix and Hulu would be much more likely to incur penalties for blowing through their 300 GB cap each month.

Free Press, a consumer advocacy nonprofit, asked the FCC on Wednesday to investigate Comcast, saying the data caps are “part of Comcast's scheme to stifle innovation and choice in online video and cloud-based services.” The FCC’s Open Internet rules, put into place earlier this year, don’t make data caps illegal, but let the FCC judge on a case-by-case basis whether a company’s data caps are an “unreasonable interference” to customers’ Internet use.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Comcast, citing fairness, adds data caps in more cities
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2015/1105/Comcast-citing-fairness-adds-data-caps-in-more-cities
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe