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Comment by strictnein | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Your numbers are a little out of date.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.

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.

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