You know how much you love your Comcast service? Well then just wait until you start getting hit with overage fees for using it too much. The Times Leader reports that Comcast has started new trials of data caps for home broadband services in several big markets around the country, highlighted by Atlanta, Georgia.
Other markets where lucky duckies can look forward to bandwidth caps are Huntsville and Mobile, Alabama; Charleston, South Carolina; Tuscon, Arizona; Knoxville and Memphis, Tennessee; Jackson, Mississippi; Augusta and Savannah, Georgia; the entire region of central Kentucky and the entire state of Maine. If that sounds like huge number of places that are going to get hit with bandwidth caps, that’s because it is — after all, we’re talking about several cities and even an entire state.
Comcast has been dancing around slapping its entire customer base with bandwidth caps for a while now. Even though the company insists that these new caps are just trials that may not ever be expanded to the rest of the country, Comcast Executive VP David Cohen said earlier this year that the company wants to move toward “usage-based billing” in which “people who use more should pay more and people who use less should pay less.”
Of course, Cohen also said this year that it’s unlikely that “customer bills are going to go down or even increase less rapidly” if Comcast is allowed to merge with Time Warner Cable. When you take this into account, then what Cohen really seems to be saying is that “people who use more should see their bills increase more rapidly while people who use less may see their bills increase less rapidly.”
