Comcast will start charging Xfinity customers fees for exceeding their usage cap | Hacker News Reader

Comcast will start charging Xfinity customers fees for exceeding their usage cap

gizmodo.com

97 pointsdudul93 comments

One of the reasons that I like T-Mobile as a company is that they realized that the correct answer to network management is de-prioritization.

If someone is downloading a lot at 2am, it doesn't harm anyone. Let them have fun! There's no reason to care about someone using capacity on your network when almost no one else is using the network.

During peak times, it makes sense to give priority to those who use less data while still offering an acceptable level of service to those who use a lot of data.

I'm really hopeful that the next few years will bring competition to the home internet space. T-Mobile has been adding a lot more areas to its home internet footprint recently. Their service certainly isn't perfect and might not be what people here would be looking for (given that wireless home internet is likely to be slower than wired for a bit). However, competition would put pressure on Comcast. When T-Mobile started offering better terms for their mobile service, a lot of people said that T-Mobile's coverage wasn't good enough for them to switch. It was good enough for enough people to switch that AT&T and Verizon vastly changed their offerings. They went from offering me 3GB of data for $30 to offering me unlimited. It's hard to remember the 2012-era data plans at this point. Verizon has started offering wireless home internet as well, albeit on a more limited basis than T-Mobile.

T-Mobile's mobile offering didn't work for a lot of people back in 2013-2016, but it provided enough competition that Verizon and AT&T reintroduced unlimited data. Even if people on here won't switch to wireless home internet, it could provide an excellent option for people looking for a bill without hidden fees and unexpected increases in price. The churn from those customers will put pressure on Comcast to offer better terms for their service.

We have the same system but with electricity here( cheaper bills during night use).

My city (Fort Collins) is rolling out municipal fiber and I'm waiting with baited breath to jump the Comcast ship. No data caps, $40/mo cheaper, etc. I hope more places follow suit. These miserly ISPs desperately need competition. The broadband access available to rural folks like my Midwest rooted family is abhorrent.

In theory they are rolling it out, after several years I am yet to know a single person who has it available. Frankly it's been far too slow and with far too little communications.

A previous town I lived near took a few years to get started with Municipal fiber. First they wired up city offices/departments, schools, etc, in a traditional fiber network. They had a few years experiance with it. Then added a few commercial customers, and then a few apartment buildings downtown near their core.

Once they decided to do municipal fiber, it took at least 2 years to see anything. They had to:

- Test offering video/phone, and setup contracts to become a telco and TV provider with the state, regulators, etc - Negotiate video rebroadcast rights, find upstream telephony providers, etc

- Hire some consultants to help them plan out their GPON network, and decide what equipment to buy, and where to locate it to cover the entire town.

- Build the initial short fiber run to a brand new neighborhood that was getting built, and have them 'beta-test' the setup.

- Hired some contractors that specialize in running data cables to do the runs through town, but they had to wait at least 7 months for them to be free of other major projects before they could get started

- start building out the network from the central locations out to the suburbs. This meant larger building near downtown get first shot at access, as they are the first ones passed. Tunneling under streets, sidewalks, etc, rather than digging it all up is pretty spendy, and slow.

Since the approach they've taken here is more of a "We'd tell you but we'd have to kill you" there's not a lot of trust left - even from proponents. I'll probably still sign up but I already have GB fiber via C-link and it's fairly cheap, so I'm not super motivated. I also don't need any of the fluff you mentioned in point 1.

It's amazing what competition can do. When our local ISP (Monkeybrains in the Bay Area) rolled out into our building, the Comcast customer service representatives didn't even bother trying to match what I was getting for the price (500/500, no data cap, $35 a month).

if they didnt bother, what was the competition doing?

Nitpick: "Bated breath"

Family of four. 2 remote-schooled students, 2 WFH parents.

Actual data from my firewall.

      month        rx      |     tx      |    total    |   avg. rate
    ------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
      Dec '19    482.56 GiB |  139.53 GiB |  622.09 GiB |    2.00 Mbit/s
      Jan '20    607.55 GiB |  139.11 GiB |  746.65 GiB |    2.39 Mbit/s
      Feb '20    497.22 GiB |  125.76 GiB |  622.99 GiB |    2.14 Mbit/s
      Mar '20    781.27 GiB |  162.63 GiB |  943.90 GiB |    3.03 Mbit/s
      Apr '20    794.96 GiB |  107.11 GiB |  902.06 GiB |    2.99 Mbit/s
      May '20    923.63 GiB |   88.38 GiB |    0.99 TiB |    3.25 Mbit/s
      Jun '20    907.10 GiB |  109.46 GiB |    0.99 TiB |    3.37 Mbit/s
      Jul '20    727.22 GiB |  100.19 GiB |  827.41 GiB |    2.65 Mbit/s
      Aug '20    649.34 GiB |   77.79 GiB |  727.13 GiB |    2.33 Mbit/s
      Sep '20    700.47 GiB |  108.37 GiB |  808.84 GiB |    2.68 Mbit/s
      Oct '20      1.02 TiB |  140.51 GiB |    1.15 TiB |    3.79 Mbit/s
      Nov '20    779.75 GiB |   82.85 GiB |  862.60 GiB |    3.61 Mbit/s

November isn't over yet. We are clearly within spitting distance of that cap. Luckily, we aren't Comcast customers.

Seems smart -- if people are going to be WFH or going to Zoom school full time, might as well get an extra $100/month from them. They can't say no.

It'll be interesting to see whether broadband competitors match the offer or just siphon off a handful of switching customers. In Massachusetts many Internet markets are a monopoly (Comcast) or a duopoly (Comcast + Verizon or RCN).

There are also a tiny handful of municipal providers (including Braintree, Norwood, Whip City Fiber for Westfield and area, and Russell). If people are still heavily working/attending school from home in March I can imagine a bit of pressure on towns and cities to do the very hard work of starting up Internet as a utility.

You don’t need 1.2 TB a month to wfh or use zoom

I’m sure someone will come here and say “well my use case for wfh involves uploading 1 TB a day”, but no, that’s not normal

> “well my use case for wfh involves uploading 1 TB a day”, but no, that’s not normal

1.2 / 30 = 40GB a day. Seems fairly low to me. Considering families with children attending online school as well, then clump in streaming services such as Netflix.

Especially considering there's multiple games out there now that are 60+ gigs. My guess based on the unifi graphs of my connection for 7 people is that our biggest consumers are Netflix, and game downloads. One roommate alone ate over 150 gigs in game downloads in the last month.

WHF or Zoom only, no. But a normal household will also have streaming video and most of their phones on wifi while at home.

And that's a quick pivot from 1.2/month to 1/day. Nobody is saying 1/day is normal, but no one is arguing the cap should be 30/month

I have virtually no cap. But in regards to bandwidth speed. That’s about my marketed down/up anyway. It’s what they sold me, big asterisk, but I usually get 1/5 - 1/4 of that, which is still decent. However, if they have a family all working, studying, streaming, and playing games from home they may need closer to the 1 Tb. It’s their use case, why does it have to be policed and justified as “you don’t actually need that, let me tell you what you really need.” Put another way, even all current use cases do not encompass all future use cases so why promote the restrictions? All of which boils down to: the entitled gall, to dictate.

I think that less than 1.2 TB is reasonable if you are essentially the only user of that connection and do want to sacrifice 4K for 1080p for example. Once you factor video calls AND videos (this is doubly true for homeschool, you should know that presentations are usually transmitted as video in real time even though it is silly as it is), you start to eat that 40GB allocation for each day. Add two people working at home and two schoolchildren definitely surpass 40GB per day even when they sacrificed entertainment.

I work from home (and have for a few years) but have one kid doing google meet based classes daily (probably 3-4 hours per day), video chats with friends she misses, and occasional netflix for all 4 of us. I used 700GB with XFinity last month. If my wife was working from home, and Son was taking online classes, we would be well over.

Uploading more than 1.2 TB in a month is extremely normal for anyone using any online backup service such as Crashplan, also. Especially when you first set it up. Comcast has vastly increased the cost and hassle of using such services, now, for all its customers. Customers should react accordingly: punish Comcast severely in the marketplace wherever possible. Unfortunately, a lot of customers don't have a 2nd good choice for broadband where they live, and Comcast knows it.

Unlimited data with Comcast is only $30/month on top of your bill, having the overages upper limit be 3x the price of unlimited data though seems a little extreme.

In most states that is $50/month but you can negotiate it into a plan. The plans are sketchy too, and often subject to changes and/or are limited time plans. One must be very explicit with their support/sales person.

$50/month was the old price. When cap enforcement resumed after the temporary suspension during the first couple of COVID months they announced they changed it to $30/month (or $11/month if you are renting their $14/month modem), cut the number of months you can go over the cap without the $10/50 GB charge from 3 to 1 per year, and raised the monthly cap from 1 TB to 1.229 TB.

The cap is high to begin with, but later they will begin to lower it and increase the cost. At this point, based on examples of other cable companies and wireless providers, it is almost a given.

Unless of course you believe that Comcast is a benevolent company that tries to help its customers instead of trying to gouge them at every opportunity (former customer, lots of hard feelings) :/

Fingers crossed for Starlink to put a serious dent into their business.

It's not that high to begin with, 1.2 Tb of data per month is fairly low in my opinion - especially if you have a family.

To put this in perspective (Hopefully I got the numbers correct, assuming everyone follows the convention of B=Bytes, and b=bits, and 8 bits per byte) -- I believe it is 1.2 TB, not Tb (bytes, not bits). A quick google search shows that Netflix HD streaming is 5 Mbps (bits), which is 2.25 GB (Bytes) per hour.

1.2 TB per month is 40 GB per day. Which is about 17 hours of Netflix HD per day. Seems like a lot, but not if you have multiple family members each watching something different (so just over 4 hours of Netflix per family member). In our case, we have a little one in the house, and Netflix is going most of the day as background for him (against my better judgement, however...). So to help mitigate the bandwidth usage, I adjusted all the profiles on Netflix to use the lowest quality setting, turn off auto-preview, and turned off auto-play next episode -- which cut my monthly usage by 2/3.

Also, a typical Linux ISO image may be about 5 GB (the one "large" item I typically download whenever a new CentOS or Debian/Ubuntu is released). So that is 8 Linux ISO's per day, so not too bad there.

The only thing I haven't measured yet is when what the kid's Zoom class uses up, and my remote RDP sessions. However with two adults in the house and a little one, my usage hovers around 500 GB -- but for some reason back in July I hit about 1 TB, and last month was 800GB.

Now if you have teens in the house, esp. if they are gamers, then I can easily seeing usage well beyond 1.2 TB.

Imagine you've purchased a digital-only PS5. So just buying and downloading a new game is probably going to eat up ten to fifteen percent of your monthly cap.

I imagine the Xbox Games Pass is even worse for this, since you're going to download many more games.

I'm not a gamer, so I'm curious which games use 120 - 160 GB when downloading them? Or is that the usage when playing them for a period of time (i.e., downloading assets on the fly)? And I thought that DVD games were huge (4.5 - 8 GB), but I haven't really kept up with current trends.

Edit -- just did some quick searches, it appears some games require 50 - 100 GB minimum storage -- is that what is downloaded, or do they generate game assets from compressed data after installation?

Some games (looking at you COD) have patches that are 50GB to download.

That's what is downloaded. Cyberpunk 2077 (releases next month) is supposedly a svelte 70 GB, while the new Call of Duty is a hefty ~133 GB download on the new consoles (and close to 200 when installed).

The games are usually compressed, but you can very easily find yourself downloading over 100 gigs for a single game in a month.

A big trend in games these days what is called "live" or "service" games. These are games that are having new content added on a regular schedule (monthly, or sometimes weekly). This means its not unusual to get updates that range in size from 20-60 gigs for a single game in a month. If you play a lot of games or have kids that play different games, you can very easily be burning 200-400 GBs of data a month just keeping your games up to date.

That is what is downloaded. Most AAA games are at least 32gb due to the large worlds and the level of detail required.

Everything that can be compressed is compressed, though there still is room for improvement on compressing mocap (motion capture) data. Mocap is done to get characters movements more natural and to help with lip syncing, though it can take up more room than plain video. Prerendered video is not very seamless and does allow player interaction with the scene beyond choose your own adventure type options. This is more of an issue if they want to show the player character as most games have extensive customization of the look of the player character.

AAA game sizes have gotten absurd over the last generation. lots of needlessly uncompressed audio as well. ime popular multiplayer games are getting patched constantly . i downloaded warthunder on a whim and just with updates alone the file size has already doubled. i haven't even had time to try the game yet.

Flight Simulator 2020 was something around 120 GB. I think Call of Duty is pushing 200 GB and it made the news when they managed to shrink it.

On technical merits it makes more sense to implement a good QoS system to ensure fair and responsive access. Caps are a business tool to bolster margins.

Agreed. I just purchased an Xbox One and subscribed to their Netflix style buffet service for digital games. Game sizes range from 20-100GB. I've had to resort to only downloading 2-3 smaller games because my household already gets pretty close to our terabyte quota every month. These gamerpass services aren't nearly as great if you're limited to downloading a single game a month.

Especially during a global pandemic when schools and business are forced to being digital. I wouldn't hate this so much if it was 5TB, that is at least targeted at top 1% abusers.

They claim that this data cap would not impact 95% of their customers.

I think the timing of this policy change is especially tone deaf.

Divide and conquer usually works pretty well. Find some unsympathetic 5% here, another 5% there...

Is "using the throughput I pay for" considered abuse? The annoying thing with this is we're charged for throughput (100Mbps, 25Mbps, etc), but then also limited in how long you can sustain that rate.

With my Comcast Gigabit internet I could hit the MONTHLY cap in under 3 hours of the speed I paid for.

This cap is not high for many. I lived in a 4 person house with a 1 TB cap and for the last 3 months we lived there, we were over the cap routinely.

Editing to add context:

This happened in 2018. The cap started a couple of years before that and 1 TB seemed reasonable but content sizes grew and grew until we had to ration Netflix usage and game downloads. We were literally making the decision, "should I watch YouTube today or do I want to watch Netflix tomorrow." I don't think Comcast needs to lower the limit. Growing content sizes will be happy to reach the limit for them.

Agreed. My three person household would regularly hit my Comcast data cap of 1TB. They’re absolutely going to start lowering the cap, and they already charge you per Gb that you go over. They have an effective monopoly over my whole city, too. They’re the literal only choice for internet that’s not < 5mb.

Their years and years of lobbying is paying off already and it’s only going to get worse and worse for the end consumer. They are consistently rated as having one of the worse customer service experiences in the world. God help us all.

They've already raised the cap a couple times so it's hard to think they're going to lower it. At the end of the day, their monopoly is due to owning the cable franchise for certain cities and if you get enough of your paying customers pissed off enough to speak to their leaders, that can be revoked.

See: Charter's cable franchise in New York City.

Or they can just wait for data usage to increase over time. Many AAA gaming titles can chew upwards of 250GB for install, and things like 4K streaming are becoming more common. They don't even need to adjust the cap down, just wait a few years to cash in as more and more people begin to hit the limit.

For those working from home, pro tip:

Get Comcast Business class if you can't switch to a reasonable ISP, reasons follow:

- No Data Caps - You get priority on your node, and typically, there isn't more than a few others in the neighborhood that are also on business class, if at all (my technician who did the install told me I was the only one for my whole node, so I get priority over others in the neighborhood, all other things being equal)

- You get better uptime guarentees

- Frankly, their customer service is light years ahead of their consumer, but that isn't saying much

- extremely consistent speeds. I know a lot of people on the prosumer plans have this too (friends of mine on xfinity don't have a lot of speed dips) but I have never been under 75/30 (the base of my plan) and my router tests every day so I can have historical reports. I'm often over 100 down (always 30 up though)

The plans tend to be more than the consumer plans, of course, usually by 25-30 dollars, but you do get a little bit more than just no data caps, at least. Its been easier to deal with and I've had it for a few years.

I don't like Comcast, but this arrangement made dealing with them much less painful. I've actually been impressed with the service levels.

When I had xfinity (consumer Comcast, if you will) I had outages, speed dips, all kinds of things. Not since business class.

Your mileage may vary, of course. I wish I could switch to a different ISP like Sonic, but alas, my alternative is dialup or very slow DSL, so this is the next best thing I could find.

Just checked the pricing in Fremont, California (East Bay Area) - all require a 2 year agreement and some of them go up after the first year:

35 Mbps - $69.95/mo 100 Mbps - $109.90/mo 200 Mbps - $134.90/mo 300 Mbps - $164.90/mo 1 Gigabit - $499.95/mo

Seems significantly more expensive than residential service.

Maybe its the plan I inherited or something like that, but I didn't have to sign a 2 year agreement and honestly 170 for 300 mbps isn't terrible (for Comcast) with the reliability I've been getting it'll be super consistent, at least, which isn't something to shake your fist at per say.

Not sure why it is that I didn't have to sign a 2 year agreement (I did originally get this via my employer, though I transitioned out of that years ago). Maybe I'm on a legacy plan?

I pay for 75/30, which maybe they don't offer in your area for some reason (I pay the low end of the spectrum here, 70 a month). Its always worked well for my household so I haven't thought to change it. Surprisingly, I'm tempted to see if I can get more speed for the dollars I'm paying.

You can negotiate with them. We negotiated a month-to-month plan instead of a 3 year commitment, which is what they were trying to sell us.

In Washington State they have already started enforcing this. I had to add $30 to my bill to cover the realities of WFH. Also you get to pay more to use your own equipment. It’s $25 to use their modem and router.

To break that down a little, adding unlimited data is $11/month if you use their current modem, which is $14/month to rent. Hence $25/month.

You can put their modem in bridge mode and use it with your own router. That’s probably what I would do if I needed unlimited.

You can also buy your own modem for less than $100

Yes, but this thread is about how doing so costs more than renting if you exceed the data cap.

oh I misunderstood, that's obscene

Late to the conversation but I wanted to switch the DNS for parents-in-law and found that Comcast has DNS settings locked down (not user changeable) on their router.

Since they're also using VoIP and cable from Comcast, I didn't go any further. I wanted to switch the DNS to AdGuard because my mother-in-law had a JavaScript pop-up that convinced her to call "Microsoft". I put uBlock Origin on Chrome and Edge.

Users can set the DNS setting on their devices to use something else but I bet it's a tiny fraction that do. As somebody who worked at an ISP, I can sympathize a little bit with not wanting customers to f*ck up their DNS.

I've had a 1TB monthly cap here in Minnesota for several years now. Luckily I live alone and I rarely hit the cap, and they give me one "courtesy" month a year where I can exceed the cap without penalty. Sad to see them rolling it out to more states, that must mean it has been a "success" for them. I'd love to switch away from Comcast but the only other option for me is significantly slower DSL.

>I had to add $30 to my bill

>It’s $25 to use their modem and router

Honestly this is the biggest farce of the whole caps situation.

Forcing people to overpay to rent their crappy modems because it's $5/month LESS than using your own equipment which doesn't get benefits such as particular customer support or replacements. (If something is wrong with your service they'll likely blame your equipment)

Doesn't cost any more to turn off data metering on your own modem, it's just an incentive to kill the market of people having their own (often better) modems which otherwise would cost less in the long term.

I suspect it's just so they have a higher chance of padding their "xfinitywifi" network spamming more than anything.

I would imagine this is to reduce their cost of supporting random devices on their network by creating a financial disincentive for people to put them there in the first place. Still sucks though because I upgraded my modem so I can use their 1Gbps service (which has been great in my neighborhood) to avoid renting and now renting is cheaper ... sometimes you can't win.

I suspect if you use their equipment, they can use it to offer service to other people roaming.

The upsetting part is the greed of it all and lack of any meaningful competition to switch to. If Elon’s Starlink works well it may be the nudge AT&T and Comcast need. Would also love to see a line of sight ISP and more towns start ISPs like there are in some states and other countries since laying the wires is too big of a startup cost for any new players that don’t have billions of dollars.

The irony is that of all of these fraudsters, Starlink would be the most reasonable to have data caps to begin with.

It would be great if Starlink could innovate an alternative to data caps since they're a very crude way to manage congestion.

Giving each customer a guaranteed bandwidth and a burst bandwidth should work. When the network is free you can use up to your burst speed, but the network is guaranteed to be large enough to support your minimum speed. During congestion, all packets beyond your minimum speed are at a lower priority and will be dropped as needed.

Minimum speeds tend to be tricky because they depend on the density of customers (if your neighbor signs up your minimum goes down) and they tend to be very low, like 1 Mbps.

I'm not sure how much Starlink will help. Starlink will only be viable in rural settings. A popular saying on Ars Technica is "Starlink is for those who wish they had Comcast to hate, not those who hate their Comcast."

> Would also love to see a line of sight ISP

The problem with rural broadband, no matter if line-of-sight, FTTN, FTTB or even LTE/5G is that there will always be some sort of "concentrator point" needed which will need a high speed uplink themselves. And since we're talking about rural, this uplink is the expensive part as you will want to put it below ground so that random car crashes, forest fires, lighting strikes, wind damage, falling trees or anything don't take down the single uplink for days.

You can link up such concentrators using directional wireless (this is how many LTE stations are uplinked, for example), but suffer from degraded performance in bad weather, lower total performance for the satellite stations/APs, and it isn't always possible (as it's line-of-sight based).

Source: worked in constructions digging trenches for FTTN buildouts in Germany.

The way Starlink works there is a certain amount of bandwidth available between a satellite and a ground terminal, and a certain amount available satellite to satellite.

This means that there is a limit on how many customers they can handle per square kilometer without degrading performance. That limit is much lower than the number of customers the major terrestrial ISPs serve in urban and suburban areas.

Their plans are to support 5 million customers total across the whole US. That’s less than 10% of the number of cable broadband customers.

This is complicated for many reasons...

A lot of people want wired connections (like gamers) for performance. For a company to have wired connections they typically need to be on the telephone poles. But, there are very restrictive laws in most states on who can even put things on there. For example, where I live it's utilities, telephone, cable, and municipalities. An internet only company can't get on the pole. This is very limiting.

Data caps are going to get easier to go over as we get more 4k streaming. Comcast offers their own streaming service that doesn't count against the cap. This provides them a major advantage and 4k causes more cap issues for typical people.

I don't personally notice the cap I have (I have comcast due to no real competition where I live). I've had a cap for years. I've hit the cap when I setup a new backup solution and it goes crazy doing uploads to a remote location. Otherwise I've not gotten into trouble. But, the more 4k shows we watch the more I see my house coming closer to it.

What we need is more competitive situations and laws that enable that.

Sadly, the district I live in has an Xfinity call center located in it and all my representatives seemingly adore Comcast for providing jobs. Thankfully, I do have a choice in ISP and wouldn't ever consider switching to Comcast.

I'd feel better about this if they gave a discount (even a modest one) to everyone who isn't hitting the cap. Then it would feel like the plan was designed to be redistributive, not punitive. They'd get some additional revenue from high-usage customers and give up some revenue from their other customers.

Instead it feels like a heads-I-win-tails-nothing-changes situation.

I totally admit and agree that the psychology of such things matters, but isn't that just the same thing with a different coat of paint?

e.g. "Comcast announces that effective next June, prices will be raised by $30 for all customers.

In order to mitigate this price increase, Comcast is also announcing that low-usage customers who are willing to have a 1 TB transfer cap are able to get a $30 discount."

In your example, yes. I was envisioning an actual discount from current pricing for all customers, so that low-usage customers would actually come out ahead compared to their previous pricing.

In your example, there's no way for any customer to come out ahead, so it is just a different way of framing Comcast's existing plan.

> Comcast says customers will be notified as they approach their monthly data limit, but the ISP currently doesn’t give its customers a way to independently verify meter readings.

You can check your usage on their website or in their "My Account" mobile app. The app is particularly easy...open app, hit "internet", and scroll down a little.

Yes, that's not "independently verified", and I've seen occasional complaints that it is wrong, but:

• Those complaints are always that the Comcast number is too high, not too low, and since it is the Comcast number that will be used to determine if you've gone over, that's the one you want to use.

• In most cases I've seen, the Comcast numbers turned out to be more accurate. The person claiming they were too high did something like fail to account for upload traffic, or their monitoring didn't include IPv6 traffic, or only covered wired traffic.

You might think IPv6 would not be significant, but Disney+ definitely can stream IPv6 and Amazon Fire TV devices will use it when available. I watched several 4K UHD movies that way and according to the traffic stats on my TP-Link Archer A7 router the traffic to the Fire TV Stick was under a gig total. Next movie I used tcpdump while watching to verify that the stream was indeed IPv6, and reported not counting IPv6 as a bug to TP-Link. I'm pretty sure I also saw some of the apps on my Samsung TV using IPv6 streaming.

Comcast, at least in the recent past, edits http responses to put in injected data cap alert messages, breaking all kinds of stuff.

So it comes down to something like this

1. Comcast cable internet - $65 2. Uncap monthly limit - $30 3. Fast VPN service[0] - $10 4. Netflix subscription - $15

[0] Comcast is known for injecting HTML/JS into http traffic

So about $120/mo not too far from paying for cable 10 years ago.

I wasn't aware that there even were Comcast customers without data caps anymore.

I have 1Gbps service with them and pay for uncapped. With the cap you can break it three times before they start charging you extra. It's cool to hate Comcast, but it's not an unreasonable system - people who utilize 2TB a month probably should pay more than those who utilize 200GB.

I think uncapped is $50/month, but I've had a friend mention that they were able to get it for $25/month if they leased their modem from Comcast, another $10 a month for a total of $35.

It’s not the data caps that really gets me heated. It’s their exclusion of their own services from the caps and the anti-consumer practices and the lobbying and the stifling of competition that really get to me.

And to top it all off their customer service makes me want to run into traffic just at the thought of having to deal with them. It’s like volunteering to be gaslit.

Data leaving their network is going to be more expensive for them.

I also have cable through them and got rid of all of our cable boxes. This was because they noticed I wasn't using them and they contacted me about that. They have a really simple way to return hardware now - https://xfinity.com/returns

Now I just stream my cable to my TVs via the Roku app (my TVs are mainly TCLs, which have Roku built in) and that isn't counted against my cap. As a customer of theirs that has saved me ~$60 a month and my TV usage doesn't get counted against my data cap. That $60 basically covers the cost of uncapped service. This seems to be a pretty good deal to me.

How is it more expensive?

The cap was lifted during the summer and as far as I know their infra was able to take it without problem. They claim that 95% of their customers would not be impacted by this new cap. So, why is it needed in the 1st place?

> Data leaving their network is going to be more expensive for them.

Not $10/50GiB more expensive. They want people using their streaming services, and I'm certain they already have their call center employees using the "tired of extra fees? just buy xfinity TV"

It's anticompetitive, other streaming services just can't compete on these terms.

But the caps are setup to extract as much money as possible which isn’t fair. They’re scaring people who might not ever hit it into paying, as I have friends that do. If what they say is correct in only a small percent hit the cap then why even bother if it isn’t really about money?

The first three times you go over the cap they notify you and you're not charged anything extra. There's nothing to be "scared" of.

I know that, you know that, but their average consumer doesn’t. Their sales people push it even.

I didn't know that until Comcast told me about it. The first time you go over the cap they tell you about it.

Oh, praise be our generous, forgiving corporate masters. bows down

In WA at least, it went from 3 (2?) -> 1 time over along with the other changes. (from 1TB -> 1.2TB)

It's a LOT less wiggle room than it used to be.

If you go over your cap once (probably near the end of the month where you won't actually get benefit from the extra data you use from the "courtesy month") you're 12 months out from not risking data charges.

No data rolls over to the next month which should be criminal if you're charging for overages.

Your numbers are a little out of date. The updated this all 3 or 4 months ago. It's now:

1. Data cap for capped plans is 1.229 TB/month.

2. You can go over once every 12 months without penalty. After that it is $10 per 50 GB over.

3. It's $30/month to uncap if you are not renting a modem from them.

4. It's $11/month to uncap if you are using their modem. The modem rental is $14/month.

Items 3 and 4 are hilarious.

I'm one of these people, it's super frustrating.

Because of where our building sits we can't even do fixed wireless, so despite living in a major US city my options are pay comcast or get 1mbps (!) dsl.

It’s really interesting reading these comments and mentally replacing “bytes” (Internet) with any of the other public utilities units such as “watts” (power) or “gallons” (water, trash).

Well, the good news is they rarely deliver their advertised speeds, so at least you have longer to hit the cap.

At my current speed I could exhaust the data cap in 0.6% of a month if they gave me full speed down. (not to mention up).

It's too bad capitalism doesn't work the way we're told as children that it's supposed to work. The US has various captive markets with very limited competition. It's time to end this.

That isn't a very neutral headline...

That's because it's Gizmodo and this is what they do.

It is, however, more informative than the veneer of neutrality would be.

Where's the lie?

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