Clarifying comments made at the MoffettNathanson Media & Communication Summit in New York on Wednesday that some misinterpreted as a firm commitment that Comcast would implement usage-based policies across the board in five years, Comcast EVP and chief diversity officer David Cohen said that’s not the case.
“To be clear, we have no plans to announce a new data usage policy,” Cohen wrote Thursday in this blog post, pointing out that Comcast suspended its previous 250-Gigabyte-per-month excessive use policy in 2012. “Since then, we’ve had no data caps for any of our customers anywhere in the country.”
Comcast, however, is testing usage-based policies that link soft monthly caps with overage fees in a handful of markets, including Atlanta. In those tests, customers are fitted with a monthly limit of 300 GB per month before they are faced with a $10 charge for each additional bucket of 50 GB. Comcast is also testing a “Flexible-Data Option” that’s tailored to light Internet users
"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," Cohen wrote.
At the conference, Cohen predicted that Comcast could have a usage-based billing model rolled out across its footprint within five years, but also said that he expected that the “vast majority of our customers would never be caught in the buying [of] additional buckets of usage.”
In the wake of the FCC’s vote to pursue new Open Internet rules, which will weigh the use of so-called “fast lanes,” Cohen also noted that “Comcast has never offered paid prioritization, we are not offering it today, and we’re not considering entering into any paid prioritization creating fast lane deals with content owners.”
Comcast is the only ISP that remains bound to the original, and now mostly-vacated FCC Open Internet order until 2018 per the terms of its acquisition of NBCUniversal.
