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Comcast To Charge $30 For Unlimited Data Over 300GB Cap
For some time, Comcast has been testing 300 GB monthly data caps in certain markets. An anonymous reader notes a policy change unveiled today that gives customers in those markets the ability to switch back to unlimited data for $30 extra. Previously (and currently, for customers who don't pay the extra $30), Comcast would charge $10 per 50GB above the cap. "Comcast's intent on this front has been clear for some time. Comcast lobbyist and VP David Cohen last year strongly suggested that usage caps would be arriving for all Comcast customers sooner or later. The idea of charging users a premium to avoid arbitrary usage restrictions has been a pipe dream of incumbent ISP executives for a decade." The new policy goes into effect on October 1.
That is no problem, but they must not be allowed to advertise it as an unlimited plan. It also indicates that the government must work on strengthening free competition.
I guess this is supposed to be inferred (and the second to last sentence mentions ISP) but it might have been good to clarify that this is a download data cap for cable Internet customers. Not a data cap for wireless cellphone data (transmitted over 3G/4G).
Notice how they chose territories, they avoid areas where customers are known to be vocal.
I switched from cable back to DSL when my local cable company added a 300 GB cap. My upload speed is slower, but I would rather have no caps than a bit more speed and worry that the kids are watching Netflix a few hours too many a month.
Better known as 318230.
The non-dick solution would to just be to keep the old system but cap the overage charges at $30, so you can get unlimited for $30/month without having to guess how much bandwidth you're going to use up to a month in advance.
Hell, I went through 100 GB in the last three days just picking up two new games on Steam.
I mean it's either unlimited or limited. These are mutually contradictory: it must be one or the other, surely? Hell, calling it "really freaking big" would at least arguably mean what it says. But saying it's unlimited when it's not? How can that not be false advertising?
It's like people who use the phrase "very unique" like there are stages of uniqueness. These are absolutes: unique (one of a kind) or not unique. Unlimited (no limit of any kind) or limited (has a limit). It's really that simple.
Not even close. Check mine though.
For some ISPs, the caps don't apply between 2am and 8am. This is similar to "unlimited nights and weekends" cell phone plans. Does Comcast really need to cap usage when nobody's using the network, or is it just a money grab?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
If this results in their advertising clearly stating what I get for my money, it is a very good thing.
TFA does state that they will email when adding each additional $10/50GB block to your plan.
Now, it we can get a bit more competition in each of our communities, we will be all set,
Because if it's not Internet3 strong, it's overpriced.
Had it with living in a third world country.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A year from now, I look forward to hearing Comcast whine about how "No legitimate user could seriously expect to pay $30 for 1.5 petabytes per month. Obviously, unlimited didn't mean unlimited - We intended it to give only another 300GB. We need to limit these greedy users out of fairness to our other customers."
Fuck 'em. I don't know who to consider dumber - Comcast, or any of their customers who fall for this again.
Yes, no data caps on internet usage during low bandwidth hours would be a logical thing to do, but the average american complained about 'complicated' pricing schemes on cell phone plans. So, a flat number was chosen to stop the Netflix data guzzlers, and to minimize confusion among the general public.
Every time Comcast increases my bill, I drop a feature that costs the same amount. They're getting perilously close to the point where that feature will be "TV".
An open message to Comcast execs: be absolutely sure you're ready to make customers decide between your content and Netflix. I bet you'd be surprised how often the response won't be what you'd hope.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Comcast just officially killed 4k streaming. We'll be stuck in the dark ages of the Comonopoly while the world upgrades.
Hey that's great they are finally charging those bandwidth hogs for what they use so the rest of us don't have to subsidize them. This means everyone elses prices are going down right? RIGHT?
I'm not against this basic premiss of charging for bandwidth. My issue is that there are monopolies and duopolies everywhere that ensure we don't have competition. The other issue is these companies are not pure bandwidth suppliers. There is a conflict of interest here. It should be illegal to provide both video and internet access.
What I'd like to see is the last mile being accessible to any company which wants to provide internet access. Bulk discounts should be mandatory and equal (one company doesn't get preference over another company) and the physical provider of the connection should be banned from serving end-users. There should also be *options*. Cable, copper, fiber, power, etc. Not just one or the other (ie cable or copper).
I also think the idea that we need to restrict rolling out these types of physical connections to avoid tearing up the roads, etc to be more or less just FUD by the entrenched monopolies. The sheer costs prevent there from being a significant amount of interference and in those places where any interference is a problem (NYC) rules can be put in place to ensure things are coordinated (ie company A, B, and C want to run new lines, and all can, but it must be done at the same time).
It's only once you get out to the middle of nowhere (very low density) that it becomes untenable for these companies to make money too.
Everyone all at once needs to cancel there Comcast account and show them we don't agree! Luckily I have Verizon and Dish, but I hope Comcast greed doesn't spread to others! They are all greedy enough!
and charge him $30, we both get unlimited piratebay?
If other countries have 8000 mb/s and they're fighting for customers so much some people don't even pay a bill for the first year then afterwards it is only 20$/month, why can Comcast get away with this? Is it just that we're a wealthy country that they expect us to pay more? They sue legitimate competition away. How can we make competition in the telecommunication a political issue for the presidency this year?
Comcast offers 10mb/s for $90, and in foreign countries they get 8000mb/s for $20. We're getting charged 320,000% as much as they get charged in other countries, and this isn't counting the new hike.
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How does that compare to say 18 hours per household of TV per day every day using a Roku or Apple TV.
Pricing tiers were inevitable the moment the FCC decided to adopt their net neutrality rules. But I guess everyone prefers higher prices to invisible boogeymen.
The only reason they are making any changes is because the FCC is considering doing something.
As a point for comparison where I live there are two cable providers, Cox and Comcast, covering different parts of the city. Cox has a data cap, but it is 2TB. Also that is a soft cap. If you hit it, nothing happens. They may call and complain at you if you do it too much, but that's all. It is there to try and keep people reasonable, and so they can cut off someone in truly egregious cases (I've never actually heard of anyone getting cut off).
Now somehow both these companies can make money, yet only Comcast charges for overages and yet has much lower caps.
It is just a money grab. While some kind of soft cap or throttling can be needed to make sure people play nice (we can only have Internet fast and cheap if people share, otherwise the backhaul is prohibitively expensive) low hard caps with overage fees are just used to try and make more cash.
To get decent speeds I have to use CableOne. At $75 a month, I have a 300GB cap. The next tier is over $100 and it only hives me 100GB a month. I'm thinking of switching to DSL which would give me about half the throughput but at least I wouldn't have the stupid data caps.
at that rate, you could watch HD content for 222 hours straight (9.25 days) before you'd hit your 300GB cap
Divide by the number of people in the house who watch Netflix. And subtract all other uses of the connection, such as operating system and application updates on all devices in the household, downloads of purchased video games, web surfing, YouTube, and video chat with relatives in another state.
they must easily have over a million accounts old enough to have originally hooked-up to 'unlimited' plans.
So what? In my experience, Comcast is far less likely to use contracts longer than a year with an early termination fee than the phone company is. Most customers I imagine are on month-to-month terms. This means if Comcast wants to end unmetered plans, a customer can just choose to cancel service.
1Gb Down 1Gb Up Pure awesomeness no hassles, I hope comcast will die off and everyone will be able to use the full power of the internet.
You want to regularly use >300GB/mo and you call THEM greedy?
If you are streaming media rather than paying for cable and you have more than one person in the house, you can easily blow through 300 GB per month. So Comcast is gonna collect because (wait for it) ... they can!
I don't think it is particularly wrong for the cable companies to charge for higher usage, but when you are paying $70 / month for very mediocre speeds (about 15 to 20 Mbps), to charge extra because you use the service is kind of insulting.
Cable companies charge more for everything. The price of their phone service vs. Vonage or Magicjack is ridiculous. Anywhere there is competition to their service, they drop the price or increase what you get for the price. They are abusive monopolies that are not adequately regulated and are protected from competition. You need one or the other to keep them honest.
Just ask apple
Switched to a business plan and now I have unlimited data, a static ip, and a dedicated channel on the coax without sharing it with my neighbors. You are locked in for two years, but the service is great compared to the consumer offerings. The consumer service slows to a crawl at night due to everyone watching movies and gaming. My service is exactly the same speed.
After they upped my cable bill to an unreasonable level I decided to invest a little money in the situation. One OpenWRT-capable router (with some sane firewall rules) plus a 2.4GHz amplifier of questionable legality later and I have an open wifi network that spans the block. I now have four regular users, at least one of which I know for sure gave up his Comcast subscription when I set it up.
The most data usage I've ever seen from them was 30GB in a month. No visits from the FBI yet either. And I am in a high-density city environment.
ATT better they have a max overage fee vs a pay up front to be cap free.
it is Comcast policy that static IPs require a modem rental and that can run you $10-$20 mo on top of your base rate.
David Cohen. What are the odds he's not a Catholic?
If they're going to give you a deal for unlimited data if you sign up for a multi-year Triple Play contract.
And then have you re-negotiate for a "promotion" every six months or so. That re-negotiation bullshit is why I cut the cord in the first place.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Anyhow, I went to their local office to sign up for service and get my equipment. I asked the rep specifically and in no uncertain terms, "is there a data cap?" The answer was no. To be sure, I explained what I meant - some limit over which I would be charged extra. The answer was still no. This was in June.
In December, I got an email announcing the "great news" that the cap was being raised from 250 to 300GB! So I called them and pointed out that this was complete and total BS, as I had been assured that no cap existed, so they weren't actually raising it they were creating it. The response was, "Oh, there was always a cap, we just didn't enforce it." I asked who was lying to me, the person telling me there was always a cap, or the manager at the service location. Not receiving an answer, I suggested they fuck themselves, sideways, with a chainsaw. Several later calls ended the same way.
I stopped peering linux and other 100% legitimate torrents just in case. I got a call one month that I was exceeding the cap, and had another long phone battle and had to threaten to take it up with the FTC to get them to waive it. I again recommended chainsaw insertion several times. Most conversations I had with Comcast involved that recommendation, as well as pointing out how they lied to me on several occasions.
My new provider, Charter, makes "No Cap" part of their marketing. They have yet to lie to me about anything. Comcast did try to extract an "early cancelation" fee from me when I moved, despite the fact that I made every effort to retain the service, and it was they who broke the contract by refusing to provide service at my new address. Also, when I told them I was moving, I told the woman they better not try to charge such a fee after I made a good faith effort to continue service. She said they wouldn't, since it was their fault and not mine. I was then transferred to someone who said, "$250". They appear to have dropped it.
Comcast lies. The way they do business is abhorrent, and it needs to stop. If someone is filing a class action suit, let me know. I want in.
they gotta make up the lost income from cord cutters somehow.
Oops, did I say "peering" when I meant "seeding"?
and unless they can prove to me that the electron factory has shut down they can go fsck themselves.
Assuming their motive is to head off some regulatory action, they missed an important detail.
GB/month bear little relation to their actual cost because it ignores busy versus non-busy network conditions.
Their main cost is to provide the capacity to handle busy times.
That capacity is sitting idle much of the time.
Yet, with this plan they are managing to charge for it when it is not costing anything.
A more reasonable plan would be to provide traffic management to provide fair bits/second sharing on a second by second basis of the capacity they have.
The problem with this plan is that is a bit harder technically, and during busy times it might highlight how much they have oversold their capacity.
This, in turn, might cause them to have to put in more capacity to support what they sold.
The regulator's path to this is to require them to provide some sort of minimum busy hour b/w guarantee to each customer.
This, provided with requiring charges connected to actual costs, might simulate the competitive environment that's missing.
It still does not fix the peering story.
That requires a clear definition of where the b/w needs to permit access to.
The interesting thing here is that Comcast is experimenting with other ways to define internet service.
They have not yet got it right, but at least they are trying.
That's what my ISP does, and I am pretty sure most/all do up here in Canada. Not sure if it is a legislative thing, or just a competitive thing. You get X amount of cap (depending on your package and how much you pay), and if you go over, you pay some exorbitant amount per GB, however it is capped I believe at 50$ or something like that (might be slightly more now). Presumably if you keep doing it, they probably have written in the 8000 page EULA that you agree to a larger more expensive package or something.
Fuck comcast
I have a beach house that runs on charter and my main house has comcast. Fuck comcast. I'd switch in a heartbeat if I could. Charter is double the speed for 2/3 the price, and every time I call in for something they don't try to upsell me on some bullshit. I want to punch comcast executive.
I was getting unlimited data transfer for the standard rate. Then they created a "soft cap" where they might cut off my service if I went over 200GB regularly. Now I pay $10 extra for every 50GB over, and now comcast is trying to sell me a new "unlimited" plan for an extra $30?
So when I start hitting 500GB is the new cap and charge cycle going to repeat?
Dump just enough cost onto everyone's internet bills that suddenly it's no longer more cost effective to cut the cord. (Since Comcast's video services are, of course, not counted against your cap.)
Brilliant! I'm sure they'll make a lot more money on cable subscriptions from this.
Comcast voted the 2014 "Worst Company In America"
When there is a lot of abuse, people make distracting comments, rather than trying to stop the abuse.
Comcast recieved subsidies to build network with X guaranteed dataspeed is their policy that * 30 days = 300GB? because then ok but otherwise they are breaking an agreement.
Dumped for Time Warner giving 300 down and 20 up now.
Really nice.
300GB might be plenty for people who are just browsing the web and checking their e-mail. But I just checked, and my average usage over the last 3 months is 700GB. That's for 3 people, streaming Twtich and Netflix and Pandora, and downloading games from Steam. I don't think this is an extreme use case, this strikes me as average. There is a helpful note on my usage page which states "Enforcement of the 250GB data consumption threshold is currently suspended". I think that, instead of up-charging people who go OVER 300GB, they should be offering a deal to people who stay UNDER 300GB.