Comcast Exec Says Bandwidth Cap Comments Taken 'Out of Context'

When Comcast's David Cohen recently told attendees at the MoffettNathanson Media & Communications Summit conference that it's likely that all Comcast users will face some kind of usage cap within five years, his comments made news. And not in a way that is helpful for a company trying to get approval for a $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable.

The following day Cohen - who is officially Comcast's Executive Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer, posted a blog entry in which he attempted to clarify comments he argued were "picked up out of context and misinterpreted in a number of places."

To be clear, we have no plans to announce a new data usage policy. In 2012, we suspended our 250 GB data cap in order to conduct a few pilot programs that were more customer friendly than a static cap. Since then, we’ve had no data caps for any of our customers anywhere in the country. We have been trialing a few flexible data consumption plans, including a plan that enables customers who wanted to use more data be given the option to pay more to do so, and a plan for those who use less data the option to save some money.  We decided to implement these trials to learn what our customers’ reaction is to what we think are reasonable data consumption plans. We certainly have no interest in adopting any plans that our customers find unreasonable or disruptive to their Internet experience.
 
It’s important to note that we remain in trial mode only. We're now also looking at adding some unlimited data plans to our trials. We have always said that as the Internet, and our customers’ use of it, continues to evolve, so will Comcast and our policies.

But I think it's important to clarify a few of Cohen's points.

The current Comcast data cap "trial mode" could hardly be described as small in scope. The current 300 Gigabytes (GB) of data covers customers in Huntsville and Mobile, AL; Atlanta, Augusta and Savannah, GA; Central Kentucky; Maine; Jackson, MS; Knoxville and Memphis, TN; and Charleston, SC.

Under the terms of the deal being tested in those areas, customers who hit the 300 Gigabytes monthly limit get an extra 50 Gigs for free for three months. On month four, they're automatically charged $10 per 50 Gigs of useage.

Customers who don't don't think they'll need that much bandwidth can opt for a "flexible-data" option. But under that plan, customers are only allocated 5 Gigs per month and will be charged $1 per each additional Gig used.

I haven't been able to figure out exactly how many Comcast subscribers are currently working under a bandwidth cap, but given the size of the markets, it is certainly in the low millions. Granted, Comcast is a large company, but that size of a test seems more substantial than a "few pilot programs."

It's also important to mention that these Southern markets are also ones that have a smaller DSL customer footprint and fewer broadband options than in many of Comcast's other markets. Which ensures that unhappy customers won't have many options other than the new Comcast bandwidth cap plans.