Comcast has deemed it necessary to create a new Internet paradigm in Shreveport starting December 1st: data caps.
Like it has with other municipalities around the country including Atlanta, Miami, and Nashville, the new data plan limits current users to 300 GB per month. This means you are limited to the amount of Internet you can use each month, just like on your cell phone, when previously you had unlimited Internet.
Let me say that again: Comcast is going to modify your existing data plan to limit your access to the Internet. Your bill will remain the same, but you will get less product. We called Comcast customer support this morning and confirmed as much.
Not wanting to miss an opportunity to rake in cash, Comcast is adding an unlimited plan for $35 a month on top of your existing bill. What’s worse is that users will be automatically default to the limited data plan unless they contact Comcast before December 1st and accept the new $35 charge to “upgrade” to a service they were already getting. If you forget to upgrade, you will be charged $10 for each additional 50 GB you use over 300 GB.
Comcast doesn’t think you’ll use 300 GB and is expecting that only a small number of users will be affected.
“Very few of our customers are impacted by data plans, but for those who are we are offering an unlimited data plan for only $35 a month,” Sara Jo Walker, Comcast spokesperson said in another interview. The email Comcast users were sent said “The median usage for XFINITY Internet customers is 40 GB of data in a month.”
Which is, frankly, a crock of shit. Here’s how I reach that conclusion:
Most of you probably have Netflix, Hulu, HBO GO, or something like that. You’ve probably at least attempted to Netflix and chill sometime in the last month, right? How much do you watch? It may seem like magic, but all that content comes over your Internet connection and would count against your monthly allotment of data.
So here’s where the math starts. The average American household watches over 1,800 hours of television per year; that’s 5 hours a day. If you watched all 5 on streaming, that would eat up as much as 2.5 GB per hour, or 12.5 GB per day. If you watched that 7 days a week, that’s 375 GB a of data per month in Netflix or streaming video services alone. But, for the sake of argument, let’s say you haven’t cut the cord and you only watch 3 hours a day of streaming. Let’s say you catch up on an episode of Empire and one of American Horror Story. Or maybe you pop on a feature-length movie at 2.5 GB per hour played in HD (an automatic setting). You’d still be eating up 225 GB just in video watching. And we all know there are those weekends where you watch an entire season of True Detective.
But surely the rest available is enough to cover the rest of your Internet usage? Maybe, maybe not. Remember those Buzzfeed-type sites with all the GIFs? Each GIF can be between 24 and 100 MB each; visiting 15 a month would result in 1 GB of use per month just from 15 web page loads. Not to mention that Facebook auto-plays videos and now automatically loads some article content. And our calculations don’t really include YouTube videos, Snapchats, music streams, and things of that nature.
Whatever your usage, the point is they are capping what used to be an unlimited amount of data without reducing your existing fees and that’s wrong. The freedom to use the internet how and when you want is a part of the very fabric of today’s technology economy. Clearly, this cap is at least partially about the new shift in revenue from traditional television services like Comcast to those like Netflix. And the worst part is, Netflix is already paying Comcast for additional bandwidth to make sure their customers don’t have to incur charges like this.
At the end of the day, you need to seriously assess how much Internet you’re using before December 1st and make a call. If you’re a heavy social and streaming user, then you need to be sure to upgrade. If you don’t and you go over, you will be subject to overage fees. Bossier City’s Suddenlink already caps users between 250 and 350 GB depending on their plan specifics, and satellite customers are, many times, limited to data allotments between 2 and 150 GB, so it’s nothing new to the area. But this move essentially eliminates the only de facto unlimited data option for our area.
But what can we do? It might be too late to stop the automatic switch from happening at all, but it’s definitely not too late to file a complaint with the FCC about the change in service and data cap – against the 2 year contract you signed. And, as it turns out, Comcast has already been the subject of thousands of complaints to the FCC about incorrect billing on overage charges and data use calculations. It’s worth contacting your city councilmember along with your state and federal government representatives.
It’s worth mentioning that Business Class customers aren’t going to be affected by this change, so if you have a home business on residential Internet, it may be time to look at that service from Comcast as an alternative since it’s CHEAPER than unlimited residential. It’s also not too late to start the discussion about options for competition. Heliopolis has been a supporter of alternative Internet service providers or municipal options like fiber, with speeds 100s of times what you’re getting now for the same price, for a while now that Comcast’s monopoly-creating exclusivity agreement with the City of Shreveport hasn’t been renewed. Maybe it’s time to look to the market to help solve this problem, but without comparable competition, who’s going to stop them?