As we were the first to report yesterday, Comcast has expanded its usage cap "trials" into Miami, the Florida Keys, and Fort Lauderdale. But those new trial markets also got a new option: to pay Comcast $30 extra to avoid the company's 300 GB cap, and instead get unlimited broadband. It's an option Comcast's FAQ insists brings greater "choice and flexibility" to these customers.
It's extremely unlikely these users agree. On Monday they had no usage caps, and by Tuesday they were informed they now had to pay $30 more just to have the exact same service they had on Monday. It's pretty hard to spin that.
Yet after our story broke Comcast began making the rounds trying to justify the decision, using some fairly familiar rhetoric if you've followed the US usage cap debate.
"Our data plan trials are part of our ongoing effort to create a fair, technologically-sound policy in which customers who use more data pay more, and customers who use less pay less," Comcast Florida spokesperson Mindy Kramer tells the Miami Herald.
Except that's not what's happening here. US broadband customers already pay some of the highest prices for broadband in the developed world, and extreme gluttons can easily be pushed to business-class tiers. Comcast's usage caps are effectively a price hike, and price hikes are only easily deployed in a market that lacks serious competition. In short, Comcast's taking advantage of a lack of competition to jack up prices and protect its TV revenues from Internet video.
Our data plan trials are part of our ongoing effort to create a fair, technologically-sound policy -Comcast |
If caps and overages were truly about being "fair," carriers would offer the nation's grandmothers a $5-$15 a month tier that accurately reflected her twice weekly, several megabyte browsing of the Weather Channel website. Instead, what we most often see are low caps and high overages layered
on top of already high existing flat rate pricing, raising rates for all users.
You'll note that the cable industry has given up on trying to argue that caps are necessary due to congestion, given that in the age of intelligent network hardware, caps are a ham-fisted and ineffective way of managing network load. But the cable industry still clings desperately to the argument that caps are purely motivated by a deep-rooted sense of fairness.
“To put things in perspective, 300 GB is an extremely large amount of data to use," Kramer continues. "The medium data use for our customers is 40 GB per month; about 70 percent of our customers use less than 100 GB per month. ... About 92 percent of our customers will see absolutely no impact on their monthly bills," Kramer said.
Except in the age of 4K video and 50 GB game downloads, 300 GB is no longer an "extremely large" amount of data for a household to use. And just because the usage caps don't impact the majority of Comcast customers today, doesn't mean they won't tomorrow, as every IOT device in the home begins pulling firmware updates. That caps are fair because some users won't hit them is flimsy logic, used to obfuscate the fact that customers just got hit with another ugly rate hike for bandwidth that (at least in the States) is getting cheaper to provide.
Meanwhile, it's curious that Comcast wants to push its luck with such an aggressive rate hike in the middle of a PR storm for having what's arguably the
worst customer service and customer reputation of
any company in the nation. Gosh, it's almost as if Comcast executives realize most of their customers live in captive, uncompetitive broadband markets, allowing the company to do whatever the hell it wants. As for those users, here's a reminder that they can
at least complain to the FCC about Comcast's latest act of fairness.