There are probably a few reasons why Comcast decided to raise the cap. First, the FCC just required that one of the conditions for Charter’s purchase of Time Warner is that they impose no data caps on customers for seven years. In making that statement the FCC said that they had serious concerns about ISP data caps if those same ISPs also owned video programming, like Time Warner. In such cases, the ISP imposing data caps is favoring their own content over Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu delivered over the Internet.
And of course, the ISP that owns the most content is Comcast. They not only own NBC and other TV networks, but they just announced last week that they are going to buy DreamWorks. And so the company probably raised the data caps voluntarily rather than have it imposed on them during any investigation of the DreamWorks purchase.
Comcast was also taking a lot of bashing about the data caps. Data cap complaints have soared to become the most common consumer issue at the FCC. People complained that Comcast wasn’t measuring their usage correctly and that the caps were penalizing them for watching online video rather than buying Comcast video.
I always found the numbers that Comcast quoted about data caps to be suspicious. When they imposed the 300 GB data caps they said that only 8% of their customers exceeded that cap each month. They said last week that 1% of their customers exceed the 1 TB limit. I always thought the 8% number sounded too small, and if the TB number is correct it probably is. It’s hard to think that any household that watches a significant amount of online video doesn’t hit the 300 GB cap.
In addition to video, anybody who downloads games and 4K movies are surely exceeding that cap. It’s not unusual for a game or 4K movie file to be between 40 GB and 60 GB, and it wouldn’t take long for files that large to blow the 300 GB data cap.
But what perplexes me is that if the FCC is generically against data caps, why did they just impose a cap on the new Lifeline data programs? They imposed a cap on any customer getting a landline data subsidy to a 150 GB monthly cap and imposed an unbelievably paltry cap on mobile data of ½ GB per month. I’ve been scratching my head since I read the order trying to figure out why there are any data caps at all on the Lifeline plan.
This is particularly perplexing since one of the major stated purposes of the Lifeline plan is to close the “homework gap.” From everything I read, a large part of homework these days is assigning videos for homework. Students watch schoolwork videos at home, saving valuable class time to then discuss the video. But having data caps on homework plans – or allowing mobile data to be used for this purpose – is puzzling.
There are still a few big players in the industry with data caps that the FCC is surely watching. Both Verizon and AT&T now have video products as part of their monthly service that don’t count against their mobile data caps. It’s hard to think that this is going to be allowed to stand. Mobile data in the USA is close to the most expensive data in the world and hopefully the FCC can find a way to get the wireless carriers to raise data caps in the same way that they are getting the big landline companies to do so. I think the FCC just missed a big chance by not requiring removal of data caps as a requirement to buy new spectrum.
People in the rest of the world are amazed at our data caps. For most of the world, if you have a mobile data plan you can use it pretty much as much as you want. Foreign cellular providers don’t make any promises that mobile data will always be available, but they expect customers to actually use it. The fact that US cellular carriers impose incredibly stingy data caps is frustrating and I hope the FCC has the wireless carriers in their crosshairs.