Comcast suspends 250GB data cap—for now

Everyone will get at least 300GB—and possibly more—when caps return.

Nate Anderson – May 17, 2012 4:34 PM | 105

Cable giant Comcast, one of the largest Internet providers in the US, today announced a suspension of its 250GB/month data cap policy while it looks for better alternatives.

The two new approaches it has in mind don't differ radically from the current setup, but they do improve it modestly by increasing data limits for all users. Comcast will trial the scenarios in two different markets this year (to be named later), and it will not enforce the cap at all for customers not in a test market. (Comcast draws a distinction between “enforcing” the 250GB data cap and "contacting the very small number of excessive users about their usage"—which will continue.)

Here are the two proposed approaches to limiting monthly data use:

Customers of Comcast's least-expensive Internet plans (Internet Essentials, Economy, and Performance) would receive 300GB of data per month. Those who subscribe to faster plans would get “increasing data allotments for each successive tier of high-speed service." Anyone who still exceeds the limit could purchase more data—$10 for 50GB.
All Comcast customers would get 300GB data caps and could purchase extra data for $10 per 50GB.

The first approach, obviously preferable to bandwidth-hungry users, could give users significant data cap boosts after four years at the older 250GB limit. The second approach simply provides 20 percent more data to everyone—divided across the four years the 250GB cap has been in place, this is extremely modest, though it's still unlikely to cause problems for all but the heaviest users.

Ars Video

Comcast says the changes aren't being spurred by an increase in customers bumping up against the current limit. "We are not doing this because all of a sudden we have large numbers of customers who are approaching the 250GB cap," Comcast VP David Cohen said on a phone call with journalists today.

We've been asking companies like Comcast and AT&T for years why, if data caps aren't about choking off nascent competition from Internet video, the caps haven't increased as core bandwidth costs have fallen. Clearly, the issue has become a concern to Comcast, which says on its corporate blog today that it has "never had any intention to limit the lawful use of the Internet or restrict our customers' ability to view online video.” And the company goes out of its way to say that it has “consistently treated all video carried over the public Internet the same whether it comes from our sites or anywhere else on the public Internet."

But the whole notion of the "public Internet" has caused problems of its own for Comcast, which insists that traffic it carries internally over a separate IP network doesn't count as the "public Internet." That's why it can offer Comcast video streams to the Xbox 360 without having them count against a user's data cap, even though Netflix video streamed to the same console would.

That move, announced a few weeks ago, sparked renewed criticism of both "data caps" and the approach to "managed services" that treats IP packets on the same wire differently from one another. While Comcast has been working on the new data cap plans for six months, the company notes that "in recent weeks, some of the conversation around our new product introductions focused on our data usage threshold rather than on the exciting opportunities we are offering our customers."

Cohen also made clear that the data caps discussion preceded the recent controversy. "There's been a little bit of noise recently with the launch of our Xfinity application on Xbox," he said, "but this has been part of an ongoing discussion at this company for several years and intensive analysis over the past six months."

The new plans thus try to remove the sting from arguments about data caps and video competition by showing that Comcast doesn't fear its users accessing online video—even hundreds of gigabytes of it per month. Comcast is willing to increase their limits to prove it.