Comcast Is Imposing Data Caps At The Worst Possible Time

With more and more Americans being forced to work and attend school from home, the need for a dependable internet connection will intensify. Already we are seeing more households look into the different cox internet plans, hoping to upgrade to an even faster plan. With schools and companies relying on services like Google Meet and Zoom to hold meetings and school sessions, ISPs will start to feel the pinch with keeping up with the increased demand. With COVID continuing to ravage the country, the trend of working or going to school from home will continue. With Comcast announcing they’ll impose new data caps in January, millions of American homes will find themselves in a precarious position.

Beginning in January, Comcast will impose a 1.2TB data cap in all its markets. Any household that goes over that cap will get one warning and then charged $10 for each additional 50GB of data. According to Comcast, this new cap will only affect about 5% of US households. Seems legit, but their timing couldn’t be worse. With more families working from home, and with cable cutting becoming even more popular than ever, it seems like this wasn’t the most well thought out strategy. In fact, one might assume that the only motivation behind imposing these caps would be the potential that Comcast is starting to feel a strain on their network from all the increased traffic.

Either way, this scenario, in particular, should serve as motivation to invest in more bandwidth and a better backbone for the network. As costs for home internet continue to increase, there’s little room to argue against better investment in the infrastructure of a broadband network. America as a whole is continually at the top of the list in regards to the cost of broadband services compared to network availability compared to most of the rest of the world. Hopefully, in spite of the new caps being imposed, and in light of the ongoing pandemic, Comcast will allow themselves to be more flexible for the greater good of the customer.

Edit: Updated to reflect proper overage rate per data block