Cox Expands Home Internet Data Caps, While CenturyLink Abandons Them (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Cox, the third largest U.S. cable company, last week started charging overage fees to customers in four more states. Internet provider CenturyLink, on the other hand, recently ended an experiment with data caps and is giving bill credits to customers in the state of Washington who were charged overage fees during the yearlong trial. Cox, which operates in 18 states with about six million residential and business customers, last week brought overage fees to Arizona, Louisiana, Nevada, and Oklahoma. Cox was already enforcing data caps and overage fees in Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Ohio. California, Rhode Island, and Virginia technically have monthly caps but no enforcement of overage fees, according to Cox's list of data caps by location. Massachusetts and North Carolina seem to be exempt from the Cox data caps altogether. Similar to Comcast, Cox lets capped customers use 1TB of data a month and charges $10 for each additional block of 50GB. Cox will introduce a pricier "unlimited" plan later this year, Multichannel News reported. If Cox continues to match Comcast's pricing, the unlimited data plan would cost an additional $50 a month above what customers normally pay. A year ago, CenturyLink started a data-cap trial in Yakima, Washington, imposing a 300GB-per-month cap and overage fees of $10 for each additional 50GB. But instead of expanding the overage fees to more cities, CenturyLink ended the "usage-based billing program."

Comments

Would be interesting if we had a choice

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> [BrandA] Expands Home Internet Data Caps, While [BrandA] Abandons Them

I guess this would be mildly interesting if we had a choice between two companies for cable/broadband service. However, as things stand, cable/broadband service is similar to Obamacare plan providers: residents of many if not most countries simply don't get a choice and have to pay whatever the local monopoly wants.

Re:Would be interesting if we had a choice

[pr0fessor]

Century link is dsl and cox is cable those are the only two internet options in my area.

Re:Would be interesting if we had a choice

[Slashdot Junky]

These days a ton of people are watching all of their TV via Netflix, Youtube...

Plus, the cap applies to the account, and households with more than one person are having to share the monthly usage allotted by the account's service plan. I have one user in my house, me, as a general rule, so I am not likely to find an imposed cap to be a problem. If I had a wife and a couple of kids, I'd be in a different boat.

Re:Would be interesting if we had a choice

[pr0fessor]

If you and every neighbor are streaming HD and online gaming after work for 3-4 hours between 6PM and 10 PM then you won't exceed the cap and the network will still lag at that time of day not because a few users are hogs but because everyone showed up at the same time. You want to blame the teenagers that are out of school for the summer and sitting around playing xbox all day, it's not their fault everyone comes home around the same time every evening.

CAPS are a way to create more revenue without spending more.

Re:Would be interesting if we had a choice

[ncc74656]

As it happens, Cox and CenturyLink are the two options we have in Las Vegas. I've had cable-modem service since 2000, back when it was Prime Cable. I've had no reason to switch until now, and the email I received recently showed only one month out of three where I somehow went over 1 TB (and the other two were a fair bit under). If overage charges become a regular occurrence and if CenturyLink is at least competitive with speeds and prices (currently paying about $70 for 50/5 Internet-only service), a change might be worthwhile.

Re:Would be interesting if we had a choice

[Solandri]

simply don't get a choice and have to pay whatever the local government-granted monopoly wants

FTFY.

The solution is already within our power - get your local government to stop granting these stupid monopolies. For whatever reason, that is the choice we made - instead of letting the market sort this out with competition, we decided it would be better to let elected government officials do it through regulation. And they chose/were bribed to create monopolies via regulation which are causing all these problems. We can

• Pressure our elected officials to change the regulations,
• or vote the bastards out and replace them with new politicians who won't grant monopolies,
• or decide that regulating this was a bad idea in the first place because there's no accounting for the stupidity of politicians, and restore the free market and let competition fix it.

Per their SEC filing it costs them $9/mo

[rsilvergun]

to offer internet service. That came from their last SEC filing and if there's one place you don't lie it's your SEC filing. I pay $80/mo for service. That's $71/mo of pure profit times however many million subscribers. There's a reason they airdrop lawyers every time a town mayor sneezes and it comes out sounding like "Municipal Broadband". Broadband, like healthcare, is much, much cheaper when it's paid for by the government and they know it. They don't want _you_ knowing it.

Then let them upgrade their bloody network

[rsilvergun]

I give them billions in taxpayer subsidies for it. They then pocket those subsidies, skip the network upgrades, shut down municipal broadband and then claim there's just not enough bandwidth. But there's always _plenty_ of bandwidth for their Pay-Per-View networks to stream in glorious 4k for $100 a program. Meanwhile their SEC filings show internet costs $9/mo to provide (customer service included).

Not to sound rude, but why is it so hard to accept that your being lied to?