Comcast Reluctantly Drops Data-Cap Enforcement in 12 States For Rest of 2021 (arstechnica.com) 60
Comcast is delaying a plan to enforce its 1.2TB data cap and overage fees in the Northeast US until 2022 after pressure from customers and lawmakers in multiple states. From a report: "[W]e are delaying implementation of our new data plan in our Northeast markets until 2022," Comcast said in an announcement yesterday. "We recognize that our data plan was new for our customers in the Northeast, and while only a very small percentage of customers need additional data, we are providing them with more time to become familiar with the new plan." Comcast has enforced the data cap in 27 of the 39 states in which it operates since 2016, but not in the Northeast states where Comcast faces competition from Verizon's un-capped FiOS fiber-to-the-home service. In November 2020, Comcast announced it would bring the cap to the other 12 states and the District of Columbia starting in January 2021. But with yesterday's announcement, no one in those 12 states and DC will be charged overage fees by Comcast in all of 2021.
Jerks (Score:5, Insightful)
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Maybe they could hire Steve Martin [wikipedia.org] for their next ads?
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I've always had a business account here at home, and have never encountered this type thing.
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Yes, pretty much every ISP has it for DSL, Cable, and Satellite providers. Fiber providers, so far, have not implemented them anywhere I've seen yet.
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Spectrum (formerly Time Warner) has no data cap.
Re: Jerks (Score:1)
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I don't have a problem with decent size datacaps if there are reasonable ways to increase it when needed. LIke a 1 TB datacap that charges you $10 for each extra TB is reasonable to me. One that charges you $10 for each 50 GB isn't reasonable. Also there should be a reasonable package that is unlimited.
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“Pretty much every”?
Nope.
Verizon has never had a cap on their DSL or FIOS products.
I also live in Altice (f/k/a Cablevision) territory; same there as well.
It’s not a thing here in the NYC Metro area, and implementing such would be a very very bad business decision indeed.
DSL, Docsis, fiber, all uncapped, in one of the largest metro areas in the world ... proves there’s no technical need for it.
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Hmm..so, why don't more people just get business accounts. It seems for the most part I"ve seen, that they are in the same ballpark price, and you not only don't have data caps, but you also don't have ports blocked, static IP address, etc.
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Remember, this is Comcast. Call their Customer "Support" line, then get back to us. :-)
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Capping data during a pandemic, when most people are stuck at home, is about the jerkeyest move I've ever seen.
Comcast: "Hold my beer".
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how was it "jerky"?
so - you work from home, saving in fuel costs and possibly tolls
why is so impossible that the user just changes the internet plan they are on with more download (if not unlimited)
in Australia - many of my work mates just went and paid for a higher plan - they didn't whinge expecting their ISP to give them free data.
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It's not free data. I pay for it, and dearly considering they've jacked my rates up $20/mo every year. Alas I have no alternatives available because "natural monopoly" supported by local government.
It's also not like, as the summary and article point out, like customers entered into an agreement with a quota. They said up for a fixed transfer rate, but nothing about not being able to use if fully.
I wonder why (Score:3, Informative)
Could it be this : https://arstechnica.com/tech-p... [arstechnica.com]
Comcast never does anything to be nice. I hope that bill still goes forward with a permanent ban
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Exactly, we have to keep the pressure on if there are to be any real long lasting results. Unfortunately they often have enough plants in the legislature [gq.com] to keep it from happening.
Price Increase (Score:4, Informative)
Knowing Comcast, they'll raise prices by a few dollars instead and disguise it as a Internet Infrastructure Surcharge [slashdot.org]
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Can we kick them and hard. (Score:2)
you pay for an unlimited amount of time to use the network , but the time is only unlimited if you use don't use it too often.
Kind of like paying for a 'yearly pass' for a road that only allows you to use the road a limited number of times in a year.
These are really great for consumers who are locked into a limited monopoly. I think when comcast wants to give up an all the telecommunications goodies that prevent others from entering into the market they can be free to consider such irritating limits BUT th
they suck in numerous ways (Score:2, Informative)
- got their "free" flex device, because it had several streaming apps I wanted to be able to play on my TV, not just using a browser. turns out you can't use their apps without subscribing *through them*--you can't use existing credentials... super lame. so now it collects dust.
- my bill is late because their automatic payment system fails with my card. works fine using their one-time payment system. irony is they gave me a late fee, and now when I log in they offer "get a $10 late fee credit if you sign up
But why? (Score:4)
I don't get it. I'm not in the US but I have never heard anything good about Comcast. Why has the market not killed them yet?
Re:But why? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:But why? (Score:5, Funny)
Because in many areas of US the "market" is essentially Comcast or bust if you require anything significantly better than dial-up or cheaper than a niche high-bandwidth technology. Other areas have similar issues, only with a different carrier.
So not true, why through the free market, here in a major city of two million not only is the nearest fiber about a mile away, I've got my choice of xfinity or Comcast business.
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If you REALLY want to get angry, you'll read up that the telcos have received tens of billions in grants from the government to expand fiber deployments. They have often pocketed this money and entirely not performed. There's no penalty for
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Did you mean, telcos won't mind losing these (rural) customers? The subsidy of the rural infrastructure by cities, and the telcos middleman role in facilitating this, is a source of ill-will towards them. Historically they would have preferred to just skip all the places where every farmhouse has its own 5 miles of wires, and did so, until they were required to run those lines.
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Rural infrastructure isn't just farm houses deep in the boonies. It's also how the internet gets from cities to cities. Mind, telcos also tend to make a much bigger margin on business internet than residential. I pay an upper five figure range for internet to 30 locations. Residential customers finance the network and metaphorically keep the lights on. Business and government contracts are their profit. Again,
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If the telcos lose enough rural customers, they lose a lot of the political cover for the money they get for doing little to nothing.
If the rest of America is anything like my neighborhood, they are going to lose quite a few urban and suburban customers as well.
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Did you mean, telcos won't mind losing these (rural) customers? The subsidy of the rural infrastructure by cities, and the telcos middleman role in facilitating this, is a source of ill-will towards them. Historically they would have preferred to just skip all the places where every farmhouse has its own 5 miles of wires, and did so, until they were required to run those lines.
No, GP had it right. Telcos get $billions is subsidies for serving rural/remote areas...and they pocket most of it while doing a shit job. SpaceX recently won a good chunk of the latest round of that funding and the Telco's are already suing to have it taken away. They claim starlink is unproven and won't work...so of course they should get the money. The 'problem' is Starlink Beta is already far superior (in covered areas) to the crap service most rural customers get.
The next 18 months are going to be
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"It relies exclusively on government issued monopolies."
They have been illegal since the Telecommunications Act of 1996. https://www.fcc.gov/general/te... [fcc.gov].
Why do people keep repeating this easily refuted fact?
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I'm not an Elon Musk fanboy, but I will be very happy when Starlink is able to give the telcos a good kicking. Beta customers are getting 150-200 Mbps on a fraction of the eventual constellation. Rural customers and businesses probably will sign up by the millions. I'm sure the telcos won't like losing those customers, but they're not going to like being cut out of network infrastructure funds that they used to just pocket. Customers cost money, they tend to have margin of 10-20%. Tens of billions with a margin of 100% is going to actually hurt.
The cost of Starlink and the fact that it isn't designed for high population density areas will probably mean that the people in areas that are already served by cable Internet won't really have much incentive (if any) to switch to Starlink. There may be a few telco customers that will switch but I have a feeling it won't be enough to worry the telcos too much.
Starlink is mainly geared to rural areas that have no decent landline service or extremely poor service (i.e. anything less than ~5mbps).
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> Other areas have similar issues, only with a different carrier.
It really depends on the area and the attitude of the ISP. I've Midco (which covers areas in Kansas, Minnesota, North & South Dakota and Wisconsin) residential service, I have no data cap. I can/do routinely download in a day what Comcast would charge me more for if I did in a month. According to my router, I have downloaded 17.3 TB.
The funny thing is that Comcast actually owns nearly half Midco, but doesn't control it, and according to
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This. And the fact that 1.2TB is absolutely fuck all in terms of todays internet bandwidth.
I also routinely do about 10TB/month. Fortunatley unlimited in the UK means a lot more than it does in the US.
All of this is because of MBAs. They should be illegal.
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Because the "market" is fictional. The very few companies in the market (not nearly enough to be what Smith had in mind for markets) long ago tied the invisible hand to a tree out back.
We have a legislature composed of a bunch of people who have no better than a grade school level understanding of economics who think one major provider and an expensive niche provider constitutes a competitive market.
Actual market forces will require dozens of providers (and by that, I do not mean dozens of resellers of one
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Because in many places they are the least bad option. Especially if you are focused on download rather than upload speeds.
Realistically in most places (and not just in the US) your choices for affordable last mile communication services are the incumbent telco* and (if there is one) the incumbent cableco. It's often very difficult for new providers to establish themselves both for regulatory reasons and simply because many of the costs of running a network scale more with the area served than than number of
If you don't like data caps (Score:2)
And if you want a law you're going to have to elect politicians who will pass one.
So the only question is, will you vote for politicians that you know will allow data caps because of other issues? How important is the Data Cap issue to you? What are the politicians you are voting for now giving you that is worth having your data capped?
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I don't want my politicians making laws about data caps. They shouldn't be mucking about controlling minutia how my ISP does business. That's treating just one symptom of a larger root problem.
I want politicians who will revoke the incumbent's monopoly status and institute a municipal fiber program. Once I have dark fiber to a nearby data center, I will have access to a selection of ISPs, and I can choose one with a pricing model I like.
Well... Be Careful What You Ask For... (Score:3)
I'm no defender of Comcast... pretty much ever. They have shitty customer service, contracts, and deceptive marketing.
But removing caps altogether is like removing speed limits to city streets. Ya, some areas would get a benefit, but abusers of the effort will likely cause significant harm.
The proposed data cap was set at 1.2TB. That's a lot. My wife and I both working remotely. We're constantly on video conferences. We're streaming video when we're not working. Last month, we burned through 187GB of our 1TB cap (26 GB of which was upload, and 20GB of which were video game downloads).
At that rate, a household of 5 would still be under cap. So who would be affected? Undergrads who pack 7 into a 2-bedroom apartment for sure. Larger families? Yep. But I'm pretty sure those groups could easily self-identify and prove the need.
So who's really going to benefit the most? Spammers. Illicit file-sharers. Zombie-computer exploiters.
I hope (hopelessly?) that Comcast shares their statistics on data use by account to show how few households actually benefit from legitimate use of the no-cap year and how concentrated the extreme users are. They'll need that data handy when nodes with multiple super-users begin going hog wild and slow down throughput for all their neighbors.
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I can't back up all my data from home to the cloud (client-side encryption) due to the Comcast data caps. I pick the important stuff to back up to the cloud with differential backups and use local backups that I rotate off site for my full backups. Comcast does offer the option of paying an extra $30/month for unlimited data, but I feel like they already overcharge. I am still using sneakernet in 2021 because of data caps.
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I have a bigger problem with the treatment of overages than with the cap itself. Charging for overages resulting in a massive surprise bill after the fact should be illegal. I'd be much more ok with a temporary speed reduction until the next month, or even having service suspended unless I actually buy additional capacity or wait until the new month.
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Good for you. However, I am getting different numbers than you. 3 people, my son a heavy PC gamer, my wife & stream some & I still game a bit myself. In the Before Times we regularly used 300GB+, 800GB a few times when my son had friends over & we went over 1.2TB twice.
Now during the Dark Times I work from home (wife does not), son has no friends over at all, ever & we come close every month, going over twice. The months we went over is when I had to attend "events", continuous improvem
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Again I say, good for you. I have no idea why we use some much data & you don't. I challenged Comcast a couple years ago when they claimed we went through 800GB in one day & they refunded the overage charge.
I'm not taking sides in this, but how do you not know where 800gb/day went. It's like when your water company says you used a lot, no I mean a LOT, of water for the month, you can take it as a point of pride, well yes I love long showers, and still at least check for a leaking toilet. Gaming can explain 800gb, like a new system re-downloading a chunk of your library, but regularly seems odd. It'd be nice to rule out things like a hacked tv participating in a botnet for example, wouldn't it?
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My son had friends over, the three of them gamed for 12 hours plus. I'm sure they downloaded large games & all that. We talked about what games they were & how many downloads & I did the math & figured in the speeds we had at the time. These were very rough estimates but it sure did not seem possible. At the time we were getting no more than 100Mbps, so unless my math is wrong we are talking about over 19 hours of continual downloading to hit 800GPs. & I never actually sustained 100
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Sorry, I missed your mention of a hacked TV. Nope, no Internet connected TVs here. We use the Amazon stick thing for our streaming.
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But removing caps altogether is like removing speed limits to city streets. Ya, some areas would get a benefit, but abusers of the effort will likely cause significant harm.
What "abusers"? People using the speed that is being advertised? Moreover, data caps can be removed with a fairly small additional payment ($30 for Comcast).
There is no technical justification for the data cap on the wired lines. None.
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"a household of 5 would still be under cap. "
I am a single person who still gets DVDs from Netflix instead of streaming and who doesn't download shady copies of every movie possible just because I have the torrent for it. I pulled 1.7TB in November, 1.2TB in December, and 1.0TB in January. And Comcast already raised my rate another $20 before the overage charge was going to start.
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Whereas I'm in a household of two and the first I knew of the bogus cap was when I received a notice about hitting 75% of our quota half-way through January. I watch everything in SD but do have to remote in to various machines for work, push and pull a modest a mount of data around, etc.
Neither your experience nor my own may be representative, but it is wrong to imply that 640K should be enough for everyone.
Fuck Comcast (Score:1)
When I got cable internet in my area it was from Adelphia. I paid $30 per month for unlimited internet only. But Adelphia also threw in basic cable for free. When Comcast took over, the cable went away immediately, and the price jumped to $52 per month. Oh, and I no longer got credit toward my bill when there was an outage.
At some point there were data caps added and multiple charges and price increases over the years. When fiber was added to my neighborhood I got rid of Comcast. By that point my 300/70 mb
Fuck Comcast (Score:1)
why only the NE? (Score:1)
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Because, as covered when this story first came up, the fucking caps don't/didn't actually exist here. It's something they chose to roll out last month, unannounced; I got a notice at the end of the month that I was at 75% of hitherto non-existent quota. Perfect fucking timing, but it has fortunately shown a bigger spotlight on what fucking greedy bastards they are, and incurred a lot of push-back.
1.2 TB not enough for a tech using household... (Score:1)
This is our usage, and I don't consider any of our use overly abusive, not even downloading that much 'on purpose'. When you have 3 kids and about 90 devices on your network this is the kind of usage you'll see with normal daily use:
Month Total Monthly Usage Total Monthly Overage
August
08/01/2020 - 08/31/2020 2033 GB 0 GB
September
09/01/2020 - 09/30/2020 1470 GB 0 GB
October
10/01/2020 - 10/31/2020 1477 GB 0 GB
November
11/01/2020 - 11/30/2020 972 GB 0 GB
December
12/01/2020
1.2TB is trivial to blow past (Score:2)
It's not about capping people, it's about setting a (somewhat) reasonable bar today that they know people will blow past in the not-distant future. This will effectively force everyone onto higher rate plans without comcast actually having to increase rates. They can pretend they're they 'good guy' and keep base rates static for years to come.
1.2TB though? Come on. A cloud NVR, an amateur (or pro...lol) photographer/videographer uploading, content streamers, 4k TV streaming. Just like applications that