Once you go over your data allotment, Comcast will automatically bill you $10 for every additional 50GB of data your household uses, up to a maximum of $100. If you don’t want to worry about your usage, you’ll need to either spend an additional $30 every month on an unlimited plan or $25 monthly on the xFi Complete package that comes with unlimited data and a modem rental.
If you live in one of the following states, you’ll need to keep track of your usage: Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, West Virginia and the District of Columbia. Additionally, Comcast will implement the cap in parts of Virginia and Ohio where it wasn’t already in place. Incidentally, those areas are places where the company competes against Verizon (PoliticSay’s parent company) and its FiOS fiber-to-the-home service. As things currently stand, FiOS customers don’t have to worry about their usage.
In defending the new policy, Comcast told The Verge and other websites that 95 percent of its customers don’t use anywhere near 1.2TB of data in a given month. The median monthly data usage is closer to 308GB, according to the company. On its website, Comcast notes 1.2TB of data translates to about 21,600 hours of continuous music streaming or 34,000 hours of gaming.
