Comcast's New Plans Dump the Data Caps (pcmag.com) 67
Comcast is introducing new simplified, contract-free broadband plans that eliminate its unpopular 1.2TB data cap for residential customers. "The company began enforcing a data cap in 2008, when it set that limit at 250GB," notes PCMag. "Four years later, it raised that to 300GB, then lifted it to 1TB in 2016 and inched it up again to 1.25TB in 2020 after suspending it entirely during the early months of the pandemic." The report notes that existing customers will need to switch to these updated plans to benefit from the cap removal. PCMag reports: Steve Croney, Comcast's COO for connectivity and platforms, describes these new "everyday price plans" as "built on simplicity and transparency -- no hidden fees, no confusion." Comcast began showing the new plans on its sign-up pages Thursday morning. The monthly rates largely match those announced when Comcast advertised a rate-lock offer in April:
- 300Mbps downloads for $40 with a one-year lock or $55 with a five-year lock, then $70 a month
- 500Mbps for $55 with a one-year lock or $70 with a five-year lock, then $85
- 1Gbps for $70 with a one-year lock or $85 a month with a five-year lock, then $100
- 2Gbps for $100 with a one-year lock or $115 with a five-year lock, then $130
Upload speeds on those plans will vary by location but should start at 40Mbps. These plans also include one year of Xfinity Mobile wireless service, which combines Verizon's coverage with Comcast's Wi-Fi network.
- 300Mbps downloads for $40 with a one-year lock or $55 with a five-year lock, then $70 a month
- 500Mbps for $55 with a one-year lock or $70 with a five-year lock, then $85
- 1Gbps for $70 with a one-year lock or $85 a month with a five-year lock, then $100
- 2Gbps for $100 with a one-year lock or $115 with a five-year lock, then $130
Upload speeds on those plans will vary by location but should start at 40Mbps. These plans also include one year of Xfinity Mobile wireless service, which combines Verizon's coverage with Comcast's Wi-Fi network.
In case anyone is wondering why (Score:5, Insightful)
It's almost as if competition improves the quality of products and their price...
Also StarLink (Score:2)
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Also StarLink, which is not super-fast but is good enough and doesn't have caps on most plans.
I have Starlink for my RV, which my wife uses for quarterly audit visits to the corporate mothership. She can stream 1080P with some buffering, once the client figures out what it needs, it settles in pretty well. It massively beats RV campground WiFi, and for my purposes... 60ms ping from Texas to the west coast.
I can't complain too much... Except for losing my astro-photography hobby... Been thinking of taking up ham radio again and doing pen-testing. :D
T
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Doesn't StarLink keep raising its rates, a la Comcast?
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But 5g is good enough for most
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The problem with any wireless technology is that the service will degrade as there are more users. The heavy use of fixed wireless in an area also degrades the service of things that actually need to be wireless - eg cellphones, vehicles etc.
Such services are a very poor choice in cities and even small towns, and the only reason they're being used at all is the poor service provided by the incumbent wireline providers.
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the only reason they're being used at all is the poor service provided by the incumbent wireline providers.
Yup. I would have never went with wireless had better alternatives be available. My only real options are still Comcast or 5G.
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The problem with ANY communications technology is that the service will degrade as there are more users.
Both wireless and wired modes suffer contention problems, it's just that wired modes have so much more capacity than wireless.
Re: In case anyone is wondering why (Score:2)
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Same here. Omni Fiber came in two years ago and starting burying fiber. My neighborhood started hooking up last year and I was one of the first to do it. $45 a month for 350 up/down, no contracts, no hidden fees. Plans go all the way up to 2Gb up/down for $105 but 350 is more than enough. Screw cable, AT&T, and all the others. Fiber is the way to go. Even if the other players get fiber laid I would not switch back after all the years of fuckery from them.
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I gotta say after decades of getting fucked over by Comcast/Xifnity it was pure joy to walk into their office with my kit and ask to cancel my service. Their rep. never even tried to talk me out of it, nor ask about
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As the kids say, that is some late-stage capitalism, right there.
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It's because they are facing heavy competition from 5G internet. It's enough to stream at 720p, maybe even 1080p and of course it's more than enough to shop. Hell I know people working from home using it as their primary internet just fine.
It's almost as if competition improves the quality of products and their price...
And here I was thinking that we were talking about mobile telephony services. I forgot the US has data caps on land line services, for context, Australia, land of the fee, did away with data caps on land line connections well over 15 years ago. The only reason my £7 pay monthly mobile connection has a data cap is because if it didn't there'd be no reason to ever spend more, as it stands I'm pretty sure I'm getting nowhere near the minuscule 12 GB cap I've been lumped with.
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5G plans aren't very cost-effective in my area compared to the cable company. They charge the same amount as cable company, and you get less bandwidth as you mention.
We need other alternatives.
AT&T started building out fiber in my neighborhood 3 years ago, but the project has gone nowhere. Dead fiber and coiled up distribution box pigtails are everywhere.
It almost seems like they gave up. Maybe they decided to abandon the buildout, but there's no public sources of news with that.
Companies do give up and
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Unless you're running services out of your link why would you need symmetric speeds?
LOL Why you do you need 300 mbit? 500 mbit? a gigabit? WHY WHY TELL ME...!! If you can't you don't really need it!11!!!
For your information the Internet is not a network of spectators.
If you need symmetric speeds get a business plan.
LOL I have a business plan and crappy upload speeds remain. This is a feature of Comcast's shitty outdated dead end RF technology while everyone else has moved on to FTTP.
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LOL I have a business plan and crappy upload speeds remain. This is a feature of Comcast's shitty outdated dead end RF technology while everyone else has moved on to FTTP.
"Barely adequate" is the enemy of progress.
If you had an area with no service and a sizable customer base then deploying new fibre is viable as you can quickly get a lot of customers.
For an area which is already served by some legacy technology it's much less profitable to deploy something new, depending on just how bad the legacy technology is.
The existing comcast cabling provides barely adequate service for a lot of people, so only a few enthusiasts and heavy users would switch to the new service.
Heavy us
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Local municipal fiber installs are the Achille's Heel of the legacy ISPs who have neglected to reinvest and modernize their own infrastructure.
I live in an 80+ home neighborhood that is 0.5 miles outside the city limits. For 10+ years, the only real ISP option in my neighborhood was Comcast.
The real kicker was, AT&T's fiber internet stopped 0.5 miles down the road at the city/county line. Of course Comcast knew that, so every year or two they'd raise prices and force us to play the revolving ":threate
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Unless you're running services out of your link why would you need symmetric speeds? If you need symmetric speeds get a business plan.
What if I'm a DropBox/OneDrive subscriber storing hundreds of megabits per second to local storage that is also backed up to a cloud provider? I'm not running a service, but I sure as heck "need" ("need" vs. "want" can be subjective here) upload speeds at least as fast as my write-to-disk speeds.
I do agree with your solution though: If I really need high upload speeds, whether I'm running a server or not, I need to find a provider that offers them at a price I'm willing to pay, or learn to do without. If
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Backups can be lazy, for instance when you download cyberpunk there's little chance that the download server is going to be turned off imminently *and* your local drive is going to fail at the same time. Uploading the backup data could take place at night over the next few days even with a poor upload rate.
Of course for something you've downloaded rather than created, there's no point downloading and reuploading again. We need protocols like fxp where you transfer the file directly from one server to anothe
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No idea why anyone would mod you offtopic. I backup 7TB to my NAS every 2 weeks in under 4 hours. At least 2TB are self-made content - photos, videos, music. I do incrementals each night also. I'm in a wildfire risk area and would really like an offsite backup.
Even with 350 Mbps upload that I currently have with Comcast, which is currently their top speed, the full backup would take 45 hours on cloud. That is just too long, and not something that fits during one night like my LAN backup. If I need to actual
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I have 1 gigabit up/down fibre and use four different online backup services. None of them have uploaded data anywhere near 30 mbps, let alone 1 gigabit. All of my devices are at least 1 gigabit ethernet and the fibre modem is rated at 10 gigabit.
Even Amazon S3 throttles to around 12 mbps when uploading. Sometimes it gets close to 18 mbps. I live ten miles away from AWS us-east-1.
Wasabi is the quickest at around 30 mbps upload with iDrive and iDrive e2 a close second. BackBlaze in S3 mode is similar.
Th
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For working from home I frequently need to upload large files ranging from 300mb to 8gb. Faster upload is extremely helpful for that.
Users frequently do video conferencing these days which needs decent upstream to a degree.
Guides from services such as netflix say you need 20mb for a 4k stream, so the current downstream rates being offered are also much higher than most people have any practical use for beyond "waiting less time for large downloads".
Downloading large files could also be done in a much smarte
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Comcast's project Genesis (aka next-gen, aka mid-split) gets one part way to higher uploads (200mbps today), and their next offering called X-class will be symmetric (at least up to 2gbps). Some people have those options today, and some will need to continue to wait until Comcast completes the plant construction(s) in their location (whenever that might happen).
If I had my choice (at somewhat cheaper pricing), I would go for Comcast's X-10 (10gbps fiber metro-E offering).
Also Fiber (Score:3)
Still lots of small operators trenching fiber eroding Comcast's market share. This pricing is still way too high and you only get the price in the summary with a $10 autopay discount.
Comcast has been relentless in fucking people over - constantly raising prices, playing games with all kinds of bullshit fees that change even while under contract. Wouldn't trust them.
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As someone with fiber from a small local company, they're not able to compete with Comcast. Yes, right now they give me crazy speeds for cheap but it's only for so long, while they gain market share and push into new areas. They're going to have to increase rates substantially to become profitable in the future. Right now they're all losing money.
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Yeah, I like how the e-mail they sent out said they're switching to an "industry leading" limit of 20 GB storage. No, the industry leading limit was 1 TB that they previously had, now they're knocking it down by a factor of 50 and telling people it's a Good Thing(tm).
If you're over the limit at the switch you will no longer be able to send or receive e-mail until you get below the limit.
Oh, and want to know how much you're using? Sure, we'll tell you, but only if you switch to the newest (crappy) version
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the industry leading limit was 1 TB that they previously had
I had to blink twice when I read the announcement. They say it's "industry leading" but the previous quota on Yahoo was 1 TB. So shady.
Wi-Fi Wi-Fi Wi-Fi (Score:2)
The only Comcast link provided talks mostly about wi-fi for some reason... and does NOT mention data caps, one way or the other. I'd really like to see an explicit statement "we are removing our data caps".
I'll also be curious to see if these new plans would actually nerf my current Comcast upload speed, which is officially 150mbps but typically is just shy of 180mbps. That upload speed is more important to me than the 1.2TB cap, which I've only hit once.
Nope, I was wrong (Score:2)
I now see the statement "All plans include Unlimited Data".
Still wondering about those upload speeds, though.
Re: Nope, I was wrong (Score:2)
200 up in mid split areas
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More than 200 up. My Gigabit x2 plan is marketed as 2100 down / 300 Mbps up. They overprovision, however. Speedtest I just did shows 1429 down / 360 up, on wired LAN, of course.
Not sure why the downstream is not higher, gotta try and bypass my pfSense custom PC router to see if it's faster with direct PC modem connection.
Not that I really need the full 2100 down, but if it's less than advertised, maybe I can get Comcast to fix it / provide compensation for not delivering.
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Actually not the router. My Linux NAS just got 2294 down / 352 up. Must be something with my Windows desktop. Likely the Hyper-V NIC driver slowing down the connection, sigh. Weird because my LAN transfers (iperf3) still hit >9 Gb/s.
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It's kind of a complex question. It depends on where you are and what plan you currently have.
If you're in a mid-split area (where Comcast is using a larger range of frequencies for upload traffic) and had a plan to take advantage of it - which it sounds like you are - then the new plans actually regress on upload speeds. The old ~1Gbps and ~2Gbps plans had 300Mbps nominal uploads (closer to 360Mbps due to overprovisioning), while all other plans were 150Mbp
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You're still stuck with... (Score:3)
the absolute WORST customer service on the face of the planet.
I wouldn't touch Comcast if they paid me to use one of their backbone connections.
Way too much frustration dealing with such incompetent idiots.
LOL (Score:1)
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I'm paying $70/month for 600/600. No contract, no stupid lock in, no bullshit.
I hope that becomes the new normal everywhere. AT&T ignored me (and hated on Linux) for decades, so I will never use them again.
The local utility company laid fiber throughout the city, then brought in CenturyLink/Quantum Fiber to service it at $65/month for symmetrical gigabit with no restrictions of any kind and no data caps. Then Brightspeed took over Quantum Fiber and eventually raised the monthly price to $70/month. It's been that way for a couple years now, and it's still a great service. Still no
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Because they can get away with it due to little or no competition.
Cool (Score:2)
Don't know if I can switch as I'm still on a locked in rate, but I'm already a customer paying the extra for unlimited data.
Yes Comcast is notorious for high prices and bad customer service, and I'd love to support my local ISP (which I did for a long time), but the local guys have absolute shitting reliability. I'm paying more for Comcast and I'm locked in for a year or two but honestly the increase in reliability has been more than worth it (with the local guys I was getting disconnects probably a dozen
And they are all crap (Score:1)
Too little too late (Score:1)
Inverse pricing logic (Score:2)
On the other side of the Atlantic... (Score:2)
Wait WTF? (Score:2)
You guys still have (had?) data caps over there?
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Jesus Christ, at least it's not universal. Honestly I've not seen a data cap in about 20 years. And I've lived in 4 different countries in that time.
Still stuck with Windstream 27 MPBS DL..... (Score:2)
LMAO, Data Caps? (Score:2)
How is this still a thing in 2025. America is really behind when it comes to land-based internet. I can't remember the last time I heard "Data Cap" when it comes to home internet. I have a data cap on my cell phone, but its like 100Gb a month or something unreasonably large that I'll never hit.
Oh America... (Score:2)
The Saga of Komkast (Score:2)
The Saga of Komkast: The Curse of the Unbreaking Contract
In the ancient days, when streaming was young and modems still whispered in tongues of static, there lived a clan of mortals who sought the holy flame of Internet.
I. The Great Tempting
In the year of the Dreaded Bundle, came a rider from the north — a messenger of Komkast, clad in forged khakis and cursed polo.
He spake thus:
"Lo, you who seek download speeds of legend — take up this plan! A mere pittance of coin! Gigabits shall rain upon your hearth like mead in Valhalla!"
The clan rejoiced. A horn was blown. A router was installed.
They knew not the doom that had entered their hall.
II. The Tri
They still don't seem to get it (Score:2)
They're losing customers due to pricing and data caps.
Problem: They're losing customers
Contributing factor to problem: Pricing & Data Caps
Solution: Fix prices and remove data caps.
EXCEPT THAT THEY DOING IT FOR NEW CUSTOMERS ONLY .... or do you want to just say cancel after listening to stupid songs and repeating yourself 12 times talking to a moron? I bet 75% of the people that wo
Do you want to get on the phone with one of the worst customer service companies on the planet to 'negotiate' the new deal
Comcast service is just lies (Score:2)
I had the 1.2gb comcast service for years. Never once saw anything over 300mbit upstream, and downstream was somewhere around 30-ish on a good day. I spent hundreds of dollars on my own cable modems, which upgrading didn't seem to do squat. Then comcast started sending me emails saying that I should upgrade my cable modem to increase my speed -- which shouldn't have been true, since I had a modem rated for > 1gbit speeds. Then they did what they always do, which is start jacking up prices.
AT&T fiber
Way too little, way too late. (Score:1)
Moment I could get fiber I put Comcast and their data caps in my rear view. They are one of the most despised companies year after year for a reason. It will be hard to come back from that, and I wish them all the worst, because they are awful.