Dear Comcast: your “Terabyte Internet Experience” is a sham.
As the world changes and the Internet evolves, so do we. That’s why we are making a major change to our Internet data trials and moving to a terabyte data plan in all of our trial markets. (via Comcast’s Terabyte Internet Experience)
Want a guaranteed way to see how someone expresses anger?
Ask them about their data cap, like the Wall Street Journal did.
Traditionally a tool of the wireless industry as a way of providing simpler billing, to reduce the need to upgrade infrastructure as frequently, and recently, a selling point over other providers (e.g. T-Mobile’s Binge On), residential Internet service providers are jumping on-board.
For the past few years, my hometown of Tucson, AZ has served as a testing market for Comcast’s approach to data caps. In this time, the specifics have changed — 250GB, 300GB, 350GB.
So, we have created a new data plan that is so high that most of our customers will never have to think about how much data they use.
Every time I pick up my smartphone, and see Netflix reminding me that I haven’t binged the new season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, I’m haunted by the automated calls, emails, texts, popups on encrypted pages alerting me of my data usage.
I have to check my usage meter twice a day to make sure we’re still within our data budget for the week. Making my data cap 1000GB, instead of 350GB, isn’t going to change that.
Our typical customer uses only about 60 gigabytes of data in a month.
Now this is where the reasoning of a data cap goes out the window.
Setting arbitrary limits for every potential customer across every market area ,doesn’t justify the reasoning of reducing load on legacy or decaying network infrastructure, and seems to be completely based on outdated metrics of average usage.
Comcast’s “typical customer” is only streaming about 20 hours of HD video from Netflix, YouTube, and other streaming services. That’s about 40 minutes a day, or a single hour episode in HD of your favorite show on Netflix.
Let’s assume a “typical customer” of Comcast has:
- A residence with 2 adults and 1 teenager, and a wireless router.
- A TV that supports 1080p video
- An Internet casting/streaming device (e.g. Chromecast, FireTV, etc.)
- A custom PC for gaming or gaming console (e.g. Xbox One)
- A laptop shared by the adults used for work and streaming
- Everyone has a smartphone connected to the WiFi
Let’s say the household consumes 4 movies a month, watches 20 hour long TV shows, streams 20 hours of music a month, plays a few hours of League of Legends and Counter Strike, and everyone browses Facebook, email, and websites that aren’t plain text pages without images.
157.83GB of estimated data usage a month. I’d love to be challenged that the average Comcast customer uses their Internet less than that, given the growing trend of “cord cutters,” streaming content, and the fact that across the board, the Internet is requiring more and more data every year to deliver content — not to mention this tool doesn’t account for software updates for our devices, or background data on our mobile devices.
What can you do with a terabyte? A whole lot.
What a fantastic PR message to spread across the Internet —
until you start to consider the future of how we use the Internet.
The mainstream adoption of 4K video is coming, as are the early mass-market Virtual Reality devices and content.
Storage has gotten cheaper, average download speeds have increased, and the size of the content we consume, has increased. Games have gone to digital downloads, some of them nearing the 30GB in size (that’s nearly 10% of the current Comcast data cap).
How about Comcast’s own plans to rollout 2 Gigabit Speed? Which Comcast claims it will “help customers push the boundaries of what the Internet can do and do our part to inspire developers to think about what’s possible in a multi-gigabit future.” Or, as I like to think of it, “and even easier way to blow through your datacap without knowing it.”
According to Comcast, I’ve already used 39% of the future 1000GB data cap as of this afternoon.
My household data usage has ranged from 150GB — 300GB/mo over the last few years. In that time, I’ve had between 3–5 roommates, and at it’s peak, 17 Internet connected devices on the network.
In the past two months, I’ve filed two FCC complaints about Comcast’s practices with their data cap. According to Comcast, I’ve already used 39% of the future 1000GB data cap as of this afternoon.
That’s after reducing my home’s headcount from 5 adults, to 3…
… after moving my startup work to a coworking space downtown…
… after putting limits on any and all streaming activity on a weekly basis.
When I ask Comcast as to why my ASUS router reports far less utilization than their usage meter, I’m told to “unplug all Internet devices completely from their power source,” to avoid background data usage.
In the past, I’ve also been told that the modem I brought with me from my last address “may be a contributing factor,” but I’m more inclined to trust my SB6121 that doesn’t cost me yet another monthly fee to use.
Stream, tweet, post, game, or watch whatever you want online … and enjoy it all carefree.
What’s incredibly frustrating about this press release, policy change, and its reception by mainstream news, is that it doesn’t take effect until June 1st.
That’s 34 days and change of me watching my Comcast data usage meter like a hawk, accruing fees under the current policy, and hoping I’m wrong about the future of how we use the Internet for content.
Or Google, the city of Tucson, or Tom Wheeler and his gang can save me from my no-competition, data cap overage fee hell. That’d be nice…
