Earlier this month AT&T put in new broadband caps on its DSL and U-Verse Internet broadband services. It also started charging its customers overages fees if they go over those fairly small broadband caps. This setup hasn"t pleased many, particularly consumer groups. But at least one major provider of Internet services has said it has no plans to offer any metered or overage fees for its service even if it is still sticking to its broadband cap limits.
DSLReports.com"s story quotes Comcast CFO Mike Angelaki as saying, "First of all, be clear, we"re not adopting it." He added, however, "We"ve deployed the instrumentation that people need to ... gage how much they"re using, and if we ever wanted to go to usage-based billing or consumption-based billing, we could possibly do that." While that might seem like a way for Comcast to wiggle out of its promise at some point, Angelaki did add, "I don"t know why we would disrupt a pretty good run we"re having right now."
Of course the idea of having broadband caps on Internet services in the first place is the subject of much debate. ISP claim that heavy users take up lots of bandwidth and that caps are needed to keep the ISPs from losing money to these few heavy user customers. Others, such as the CEO of the video streaming company Netflix, have slammed that explanation, claiming via studies that the bandwidth costs are not nearly as much as the ISP suggest they are.