Tag Archive for: caps

Charter tries to convince FCC that broadband customers want data caps

Illustration of a water hose with Internet data trickling out of it, represented by 1s and 0s.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Charter Communications has claimed to the Federal Communications Commission that broadband users enjoy having Internet plans with data caps, in a filing arguing that Charter should be allowed to impose caps on its Spectrum Internet service starting next year.

Charter isn’t currently allowed to impose data caps because of conditions the FCC placed on its 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable. The data-cap condition is scheduled to expire on May 18, 2023, but Charter in June petitioned the FCC to let the condition expire two years early, in May 2021.

With consumer-advocacy groups and Internet users opposing the petition, Charter filed a response with the FCC last week, saying that plans with data caps are “popular.”

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

Charter’s gigabit cable with no data caps is ready for 27 million homes

Enlarge / Charter’s Spectrum Internet Gig rolled out to these new locations in June 2018. (credit: Charter)

Charter’s gigabit Internet service launched to another 4 million homes this month, and now more than 27 million homes in Charter’s territory can get the ISP’s fastest offering. Charter is aiming to make the “Spectrum Internet Gig” service—with actual download speeds of up to 940Mbps—available to nearly all of the homes in its cable footprint by the end of this year.

The current 27 million home deployment is “more than halfway to our goal of making gigabit connections available to virtually our entire 41-state footprint,” Charter, the second largest US cable company after Comcast, said in an announcement last week. “By Labor Day, we’ll be rolling out to even more cities to get closer to that year-end goal.”

Charter’s cable network extends to about 50 million homes and businesses across the US. Prices for the gigabit service have ranged from $ 105 to $ 125 a month; DSLReports notes that the cost for consumers “var[ies] slightly depending on local competition.”

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

Home Internet data caps and overage fees expand to more US cities

Data cap cash. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Cox is continuing the trend of bringing data caps and overage fees to customers in new cities.

Cox, the third largest cable company in the US after Comcast and Charter, has 6 million residential and business customers in 18 states. Much like Comcast, it has instituted a 1TB (1,024GB) monthly data cap and charges $ 10 for each additional 50GB block of data. Also like Comcast, Cox has been bringing the overage fees to a few cities at a time instead of deploying them to its entire territory all at once.

Cox brought the data caps first to Cleveland, Ohio, and then to Florida and Georgia in October 2016. This week, Cox expanded the overage fees to Arkansas; Connecticut; Kansas; Omaha, Nebraska; Iowa; and Sun Valley, Idaho. Customers can get data usage alerts from a browser, e-mail, text message, or automated phone call when they hit 85 percent, 100 percent, and 125 percent of their monthly data plans.

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Technology Lab – Ars Technica

Comcast gets closer to nationwide data caps with expansion in 18 states

Enlarge / A Comcast data cap notification. (credit: Comcast)

Comcast is bringing data caps to a bunch of new cities beginning November 1, roughly doubling the number of markets where it imposes data limits and overage fees. As before, customers will be allowed to use 1TB of data per month before being hit with overage charges of $ 10 for each additional 50GB. For an extra $ 50 per month, customers can purchase unlimited data.

Prior to the expansion, Comcast said it was enforcing data caps in 14 percent of the markets in its 39-state territory. Instead of immediately imposing caps nationwide, Comcast has been steadily rolling them out to new markets since 2012, usually adding a few at a time and gauging customer feedback before expanding to more. The caps were originally 300GB a month, but as more customers started exceeding them, they were boosted to 1TB (downloads and uploads combined) this year. Comcast says more than 99 percent of its customers use less than a terabyte of data.

Markets in 18 states will face data caps and overage fees for the first time, though other markets in some of these states were already capped.

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Technology Lab – Ars Technica