The Philadelphia telecommunications giant, which will charge more for customers who exceed 1.2 terabytes a month, has put the pricing plan into effect in other parts of the country and is now applying the policy to the populous Northeast, including Connecticut.
Comcast is not alone: Cox Communications also is charging more for online activity.
Comcast spokeswoman Kristen Roberts said 5% of customers, or “super users,” account for 20% of the network use. Of its 27 million Internet customer households, 95% will not be charged because 1.2 terabytes is a “massive amount of data,” Comcast said.
With so much data, customers can video conference for 3,500 hours, watch 1,200 hours of distance learning videos, stream 500 hours of high-definition video content a month or play more than 34,000 hours of online games, Comcast said.
The median data use — with half above and half below — among Comcast’s customers is 308 gigabytes, “which doesn’t come anywhere close to the 1.2 terabyte level,” Roberts said.
Open Vault, which studies data use, said Internet use has soared in the pandemic, with increases ranging between 19.2% to nearly 60% since March 2.
“As entire populations are self-quarantined because of COVID-19, broadband has emerged as a lifeline for housebound consumers, who are straining operators’ systems and subscribers’ own in-home networks as never before,” it said.
Consumer advocates criticize limits on the Internet because it’s critically needed during the pandemic.
Stop the Cap!, a consumer advocate, blasted telecommunications companies for the Internet limits. Rising Internet use due to employees working at home and students taught online will expose a growing number of customers to “overlimit fees,” it said.
“We feel that the ‘us vs. them’ mentality promulgated by many companies attempting to argue for caps and tiered pricing is designed to manipulate public opinion by engendering fictional stereotypes of ‘bandwidth hogs’ and ‘abusers,’ suggesting that some people are unfairly benefiting from overuse of services at another’s expense,” it said.
Other advocates accuse broadband providers of taking advantage of a lack of competition by imposing arbitrary and expensive limits and fees. High-resolution video, software patches and game streaming already pressed up against Internet limits even before the pandemic forced employees to work from home and their children to take online lessons.
Some outside the industry defend the limits and fees. For customers who expect to exceed the 1.2 terabyte limit regularly, the company offers unlimited plans for an additional fee, said Daniel Lyons, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., free market think tank.
“In other words, consumers have unlimited broadband use,” he wrote on the organization’s website. “They simply must pay for what they consume, just like water, electricity and virtually every other good in society other than all-you-can-eat buffets.”
Comcast is deferring additional charges. Customers will be credited for overages of more than 1.2 terabytes in January and February and will receive a “courtesy month credit” for another month.
Customers may enroll in Comcast’s unlimited data plan for an extra $11 a month if they are “xFi” customers. Customers who are not on an unlimited data plan will be charged $10 for every 50 gigabyte “block” of more than 1.2 terabytes. The maximum monthly overage charge is $100.
Cox said it recently raised “data allowances” by 25%, and more than 95% of customers will not be charged for overages “even at the current increased consumption levels due to social distancing and learn and work from home activities.”
It’s also waiving the overage charge the first time customers exceed their increased data allowance, with 1.25 terabytes a month “more data than the vast majority of customers will need,” spokeswoman Stacie Schafer wrote in an email.
Customers who consistently use more than 1.25 terabytes may buy an unlimited data plan option.
Cox provided unlimited data to customers at the start of the pandemic because it did not know the impact on customers of learning and working from home, Schafer said. At the time, Cox offered 1 terabyte in all plans and nearly 90% of customers would not have been charged for exceeding data plans even as they remain at home, she said.
©2020 The Hartford Courant, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
