Comcast to begin capping data use

[Big Blitz]

They announced this Tuesday....as everyone was scrambling to get on Thanksgiving break.  

 

Its Comcast now.  But it will be all of them soon.  They are claiming that 95% of their customers don't use 1.2 terabytes....they're lying.  I know my family uses almost 2 terabytes a month since the pandemic started.  You might want to check bc this is what's coming Jan 1:

 

Comcast enforces data caps nationwide, will AT&T, Verizon, Charter and other internet providers follow?

 

Tuesday, the nation’s largest internet provider announced that, starting Jan. 1, it would extend its 1.2 terabyte data cap to previously exempt service areas – meaning once you hit that limit, you'll have to pay more to use more. 

 

After a three-month grace period, residential subscribers in 14 states from West Virginia to Maine, plus the District of Columbia, will face surcharges of up to $100 for exceeding that limit.

 

“We’re aligning our Northeast markets with the data plan that the rest of the country has had for several years, and 95 percent of our customers are not impacted by it even with the increased usage during the pandemic,” spokesman Joel Shadle said in an email. “The small percentage of customers who reach 1.2TB in a month will be notified multiple times as they approach the threshold, and will have unlimited data options at reduced prices if they choose.”

 

That 95% figure leaves almost 1.4 million of Philadelphia-based Comcast’s 27.84 million residential broadband customers on the hook, after one courtesy month a year, for overage fees of $10 per each 50 gigabytes of additional data, up to a monthly cap of $100.

 

Subscribers can get unlimited data by paying a $30 monthly surcharge or, if they already pay $14 monthly to rent Comcast’s modem – they shouldn't – by adding its $11 xFi Complete service bundle. Comcast’s $299.99 2 Gbps Gigabit Pro service also includes unlimited data.

 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2020/11/25/comcast-xfinity-data-cap-att-verizon-charter-internet-provider/6425921002/

 

 

 

Ahhhh........just a little sliver of what socialism is like.  Caps. 

 

Edited November 28, 2020 by Big Blitz

[LikeIGiveADarn]

I wonder how Starlink is going to effect these companies?

[Warcodered]

Well this would ***** suck.

 

13 hours ago, Big Blitz said:

Ahhhh........just a little sliver of what socialism is like.  Caps.

Socialism....you do realize that this would be happening due to an unregulated market and monopolies being allowed to do whatever the hell they want right? I mean I'm not advocating socialism but this seems like a weird thing to pull from this.

Edited November 28, 2020 by Warcodered

[Big Blitz]

1 minute ago, Warcodered said:

Well this would ***** suck.

 

Socialism....you do realize that this would be happening due to an unregulated market and monopolies being allowed to do whatever the hell they want right? I mean I'm advocating socialism but this seems like a weird thing to pull from this.

 

 

You pay for your service.  You're used to your version of unlimited----your viewing streaming internet behavior etc.  

 

Now, you have to start watching it like the days you only had 8 gigs on your cell phone plan.  "Hey kids get off Netflix we're getting close to a terabyte!"

 

You never had to do this with your home use. 

 

Yes I get it.  In a way, this is also capitalism at work here.   Yea, if only we had more options.  You have barely 2 or 3 good ones and the rest are garbage.   

[Big Blitz]

Comcast lost 2 billion dollars in 2020.

 

Cutting cable no doubt hurt (btw check out what's in store for cable subscribers).  But that's not your customers problem.  Cable cutting has been happening for 5 years now.   

 

So instead of giving us better options, better service, and most importantly find ways to attract more customers and keep the ones you have by finding ways to lower costs-----during this time no less where "we're all in this mandatory home schooling teleworking together" insanity, they are raising your costs and making you monitor data use if you can't or don't spend to go over terabytes the government is essentially making you use.  

 

Great scam for Silicon Valley continues.  They are the big winners of insane virus response.  I wonder how much they'd have pushed lockdownd and suppressed "wrong think" if they all were at risk of losing their jobs and didn't have luxury of teleworking.   

 

 

[Doc Brown]

2 hours ago, Big Blitz said:

They announced this Tuesday....as everyone was scrambling to get on Thanksgiving break.  

 

Its Comcast now.  But it will be all of them soon.  They are claiming that 95% of their customers don't use 1.2 terabytes....they're lying.  I know my family uses almost 2 terabytes a month since the pandemic started.  You might want to check bc this is what's coming Jan 1:

 

Comcast enforces data caps nationwide, will AT&T, Verizon, Charter and other internet providers follow?

 

Tuesday, the nation’s largest internet provider announced that, starting Jan. 1, it would extend its 1.2 terabyte data cap to previously exempt service areas – meaning once you hit that limit, you'll have to pay more to use more. 

 

After a three-month grace period, residential subscribers in 14 states from West Virginia to Maine, plus the District of Columbia, will face surcharges of up to $100 for exceeding that limit.

 

“We’re aligning our Northeast markets with the data plan that the rest of the country has had for several years, and 95 percent of our customers are not impacted by it even with the increased usage during the pandemic,” spokesman Joel Shadle said in an email. “The small percentage of customers who reach 1.2TB in a month will be notified multiple times as they approach the threshold, and will have unlimited data options at reduced prices if they choose."

 

A TERABYTE????  Who the hell are these 5% of people that exceed that limit?  I didn't even know that was possible.  Get an outside hobby.  Anything.

[SoTier]

3 hours ago, Big Blitz said:

 

 

You pay for your service.  You're used to your version of unlimited----your viewing streaming internet behavior etc.  

 

Now, you have to start watching it like the days you only had 8 gigs on your cell phone plan.  "Hey kids get off Netflix we're getting close to a terabyte!"

 

You never had to do this your home use. 

 

Yes I get it.  In a way, this is also capitalism at work here.   Yea, if only we had more options.  You have barely 2 or 3 good ones and the rest are garbage.   

 

 

  This ain't socialism, skippy!   It's capitalism at it's finest.                   No wonder you're a Trumplet ...my dog understands the difference between socialism and captialism better than you do:  socialism to him is sharing his balls with me if I ask him for one while captialism is gathering as many of his balls as he can find and keeping them all to himself. 

 

[oldmanfan]

A private business decides on its own policies and that’s socialism.  Right.

[Tiberius]

I’m moving to Russia now 

[PetermansRedemption]

This is stupid. Anyone who uses more than that knows it, and they will leave. Anyone who doesn’t use that isn’t going to care and they will not make any money off of those people. 
 

There will always be one company that realizes the value of being the “only uncapped provider” far outweighs any money they would make by capping data. 

[Big Blitz]

5 hours ago, SoTier said:

 

 

  This ain't socialism, skippy!   It's capitalism at it's finest.                   No wonder you're a Trumplet ...my dog understands the difference between socialism and captialism better than you do:  socialism to him is sharing his balls with me if I ask him for one while captialism is gathering as many of his balls as he can find and keeping them all to himself. 

 

 

9 hours ago, Big Blitz said:

 

Yes I get it.  In a way, this is also capitalism at work here.   Yea, if only we had more options.  You have barely 2 or 3 good ones and the rest are garbage.   

 

 

You clearly can't comprehend anything.  

 

This is crony capitalism; they "can" do this because they know your options are limited.  

 

Socialism = your goods once controlled by a single entity (if private companies are nationalized) become rationed.  

 

 

Guarantee half the people that read this story for the first time started looking up #1 what the hell a terabyte is and #2 are they over.  

[WideNine]

10 hours ago, Big Blitz said:

They announced this Tuesday....as everyone was scrambling to get on Thanksgiving break.  

 

Its Comcast now.  But it will be all of them soon.  They are claiming that 95% of their customers don't use 1.2 terabytes....they're lying.  I know my family uses almost 2 terabytes a month since the pandemic started.  You might want to check bc this is what's coming Jan 1:

 

Comcast enforces data caps nationwide, will AT&T, Verizon, Charter and other internet providers follow?

 

Tuesday, the nation’s largest internet provider announced that, starting Jan. 1, it would extend its 1.2 terabyte data cap to previously exempt service areas – meaning once you hit that limit, you'll have to pay more to use more. 

 

After a three-month grace period, residential subscribers in 14 states from West Virginia to Maine, plus the District of Columbia, will face surcharges of up to $100 for exceeding that limit.

 

“We’re aligning our Northeast markets with the data plan that the rest of the country has had for several years, and 95 percent of our customers are not impacted by it even with the increased usage during the pandemic,” spokesman Joel Shadle said in an email. “The small percentage of customers who reach 1.2TB in a month will be notified multiple times as they approach the threshold, and will have unlimited data options at reduced prices if they choose.”

 

That 95% figure leaves almost 1.4 million of Philadelphia-based Comcast’s 27.84 million residential broadband customers on the hook, after one courtesy month a year, for overage fees of $10 per each 50 gigabytes of additional data, up to a monthly cap of $100.

 

Subscribers can get unlimited data by paying a $30 monthly surcharge or, if they already pay $14 monthly to rent Comcast’s modem – they shouldn't – by adding its $11 xFi Complete service bundle. Comcast’s $299.99 2 Gbps Gigabit Pro service also includes unlimited data.

 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2020/11/25/comcast-xfinity-data-cap-att-verizon-charter-internet-provider/6425921002/

 

 

 

Ahhhh........just a little sliver of what socialism is like.  Caps. 

 

 

Actually it was regulations pushed through by Democrats and a few moderate Republicans that kept the Corporate greed of broadband carriers in check. 

 

Lifting regulations is what leads to unchecked Corporate greed aka Enron, etc... It is a GOP SOP as bad as Dems tossing money at social issues like magic fairy dust.

 

It is dumb to label those very brakes that keep some bit of coin in our pockets instead of helping very wealthy companies gouge folks for more.

 

Not sure this example qualifies as "Socialism" you may want to look that word up.

 

 

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-net-neutrality-fcc-20171214-story.html

 

 

[Big Blitz]

53 minutes ago, WideNine said:

 

Actually it was regulations pushed through by Democrats and a few moderate Republicans that kept the Corporate greed of broadband carriers in check. 

 

Lifting regulations is what leads to unchecked Corporate greed aka Enron, etc... It is a GOP SOP as bad as Dems tossing money at social issues like magic fairy dust.

 

It is dumb to label those very brakes that keep some bit of coin in our pockets instead of helping very wealthy companies gouge folks for more.

 

Not sure this example qualifies as "Socialism" you may want to look that word up.

 

 

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-net-neutrality-fcc-20171214-story.html

 

 

 

 

Yea sorry chief.  While some parts of net neutrality may have been fine (not sure how we survived without net neutrality from 1995 to 2015 but we did) the reasons why Team Obama wanted it passed were not about the customer and certainly not about protecting them - and the attempts to amend or eliminate the provisions most concerning to any supporter of free speech and the potential for the federal government to decide what kind of content was "reasonable," was a non starter for Obama.  

 

They were trying to regulate the Internet the way they do the phone companies but also would grant them the ability to dictate what you would have a access to. 

 

This action by Comcast has nothing to do with net neutrality.  

[CookieG]

ATT has had a data cap for a while.  When I dumped Uverse, I kept its very basic package for $20 per month, because you get unlimited data.  I don't know if it was necessary, because idk if we approach 1 TB per month, or whatever their limit is.  Eh, I figured that since we were streaming TV, data usage would go up. 

 

The $20 isn't going to kill me

[Q-baby!]

Holy *****. Doesn’t anyone talk to each other anymore or maybe go outside? 

[TBBills]

@Big Blitz

Why the ***** did the OP try and turn it into socialism... Isn't this actually capitalism working at it's finest?

 

This is the supply and demand of capitalism... This is the farthest thing from socialism.

 

Also if you want to call this socialism... You know they did this while Trump is in office... They been doing this for at least 4 years now in other states.

Edited November 28, 2020 by TBBills

[WideNine]

10 hours ago, Big Blitz said:

 

 

Yea sorry chief.  While some parts of net neutrality may have been fine (not sure how we survived without net neutrality from 1995 to 2015 but we did) the reasons why Team Obama wanted it passed were not about the customer and certainly not about protecting them - and the attempts to amend or eliminate the provisions most concerning to any supporter of free speech and the potential for the federal government to decide what kind of content was "reasonable," was a non starter for Obama.  

 

They were trying to regulate the Internet the way they do the phone companies but also would grant them the ability to dictate what you would have a access to. 

 

This action by Comcast has nothing to do with net neutrality.  

 

It is a fallacy to think removing regulations improve services and lower costs.

 

Upon becoming FCC chairman in April 2017 as part of the Trump Administration, Ajit Pai proposed to repeal the neutrality policies, returning to the previous classification of ISPs as Title I services. The draft of the proposed repeal, published in May 2017, led to over 20 million comments to the FCC. Despite a majority of these favoring retaining the 2015 Open Internet Order, the FCC still voted in favor of repealing the Order, which went into effect in June 2018 despite efforts in Congress to stay the repeal.

 

Still, telecommunication companies spent big to have lawmakers look the other way on its data caps. In 2015, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) and Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) proposed a net neutrality bill but did not include data caps in the legislation.

 

The telecom service industry was one of Thune’s top donors in the 2016 election cycle. Thune received more than $225,000 from the industry. Employees of AT&T, Verizon Inc. and Comcast were among the top contributors to Thune’s campaign committee and leadership PAC. They also collectively donated more than $70,000 to Upton’s campaign committee and leadership PAC that cycle. 

 

Also in 2015, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) introduced the No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act, which prohibited the FCC from regulating the rates charged for broadband internet access service. The bill passed the House but was lost in the Senate. Over the course of Kinzinger’s career, employees of AT&T gave $56,500 and affiliates of Comcast gave $55,250. 

 

The industry, consisting largely of internet service providers, spent more than $89.8 million on lobbying in 2015. Comcast and primary broadband trade association The Internet & Television Association (NCTA) were the top lobbying spenders in the industry. In that year, Comcast spent $15.5 million while the NCTA spent $14.1 million. 

 

Traditionally, the industry’s federal political giving is similar across both sides of the aisle. So far this cycle, Democrats received over $4.6 million in donations while Republicans received more than $4.2 million.

 

The temporary lift of data caps has tech critics hopeful that this will be a permanent change for consumers. 

 

 

I know this Pai character at the FCC is a trickle-down economics adherent, with dubious ideas of how lifting regulations will result in cheaper, better service. I have yet to see that happen in practice.

 

After businesses pass deregulation bills they almost always end up putting the squeeze on consumers and rather than invest in infra or create jobs they pocket the profits.

 

There is a reason they lobby so hard for deregulation - it is not altruism it is to allow unfettered gouging and profits.

 

 

Edited November 29, 2020 by WideNine

[TBBills]

17 hours ago, Big Blitz said:

 

 

Yea sorry chief.  While some parts of net neutrality may have been fine (not sure how we survived without net neutrality from 1995 to 2015 but we did) the reasons why Team Obama wanted it passed were not about the customer and certainly not about protecting them - and the attempts to amend or eliminate the provisions most concerning to any supporter of free speech and the potential for the federal government to decide what kind of content was "reasonable," was a non starter for Obama.  

 

They were trying to regulate the Internet the way they do the phone companies but also would grant them the ability to dictate what you would have a access to. 

 

This action by Comcast has nothing to do with net neutrality.  

I feel sorry for your family... They have a crazy dad.

[WideNine]

As I was saying about this Trump promoted FCC hack

 

https://www.zdnet.com/article/fcc-chairman-ajit-pai-out-net-neutrality-back-in/

 

How the US compares to other nations with our broadband companies infra investments, broadband speeds and cost structure...

 

IMO we have allowed their greed to put our nation at a competitive disadvantage.

 

https://broadbandnow.com/report/2018-fcc-international-data-insights/

 

 

[WideNine]

On 11/28/2020 at 1:18 AM, Doc Brown said:

A TERABYTE????  Who the hell are these 5% of people that exceed that limit?  I didn't even know that was possible.  Get an outside hobby.  Anything.

 

I am not a fan of caps, but even in the corporate world we would hunt down equipment/apps/users who were monopolizing Internet data.

 

A terabyte does exceed the mean average use in the US by a lot and could qualify as monopolizing resources. 

 

Someone could be hosting their own web services, or in the case of my own family we just have so many cloud-connected devices that drain bandwidth passively all day.

 

I wonder when someone will actually sue Google or other companies for all the apps and cookies that use your bandwidth to track you for marketing and online profiling?

 

Its like you are paying for a private road that strangers are using free of charge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[WideNine]

Another interesting item of note is how the availability of broadband is creating a digital divide in America where rural areas have far less opportunities to leverage the internet for business, employment, and services. This has the downstream effect of more people moving to already crowded urban areas.

 

Many people surveyed listed broadband access as a major factor when relocating to a new residence.

 

Looks like the FCC has started an initiative to try to rectify this issue, not sure if it will actually amount to better overall service and more diverse competition in the broadband space, but if rural areas did get much faster service it could help revitalize some of the more stagnant areas of our heartland. Perhaps an interesting read about the FCC's RDOF effort:

 

https://broadbandnow.com/report/rural-digital-opportunity-fund/