Comcast is planning to introduce a 1.2TB home internet monthly data cap to customers in the northeast US as well. Starting next year, Xfinity subscribers based in Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Vermont, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia, as well as parts of North Carolina and Ohio, will have to pay an overage fee if they exceed the monthly data limit.
The cap will go into effect in these regions in January 2021. However, Comcast won’t charge the overage fee until April. The company says it wants to give customers the first two months – January and February – to understand how the data limit affects them without charging them for any additional data they use.
From March 2021 onwards, customers who use more than 1.2TB of data in a month will have to pay $10 per additional 50GB of data, plus tax. The monthly overage fee, however, will not exceed $100 each month, no matter how much data you use. So whether you use 500GB or 1TB of additional data, you will not be charged more than $100.
Additionally, customers who exceed the 1.2TB limit for the first time will get a “courtesy month” and will not be charged an overage fee. So Xfinity customers essentially will not have to pay for exceeding the 1.2TB data limit until April 2021. Customers will, of course, get notifications as they approach the 1.2TB threshold.
Interestingly, Comcast will offer this “courtesy month” once every 12 months. However, customers who exceed the limit only once in 12 months will get this free month. If you use more than 1.2TB of data in more than one month within a year, you will no longer get the “courtesy month.”
Comcast customers now have a home internet data cap throughout the nation
This data cap has already been in effect for Comcast customers in other parts of the country since November 2016. With the impending expansion, Comcast has now introduced the cap in every market in the US where its services are available.
Comcast users, as expected, are not happy about it. However, according to the company, the vast majority of its customers never use 1.2TB of data in a month. Only five percent of users exceed the limit. The data usage by those few customers makes up more than 20 percent of the company’s overall network usage. Comcast now wants them to pay an overage fee.
The median monthly data use by Xfinity customers over the past six months was around 308GB. That’s just about one-fourth of the monthly limit. It goes without saying that this monthly data cap is only applicable to customers who are not on an unlimited plan.