Comcast Corp. announced Monday that the company is doing away with its 1-terabyte monthly data-usage cap for broadband internet customers in Maine – at least for now.
The Philadelphia-based cable operator, which has service monopolies in Maine along the New Hampshire border and in and around Freeport, Brunswick and Bath, posted a notice on its website saying, “The Terabyte Internet Data Usage Plan is suspended in Maine, effective December 1, 2016.”
According to communications industry news site DSLReports, Comcast plans to issue a notice to Maine customers that states: “We’re writing to let you know that we are suspending our Terabyte Internet Data Usage Plan in the state of Maine. We do not currently have data plans anywhere in the Northeast. As a result, we want to ensure we have clear and consistent communications to our customers as well as have our engineering and operations teams aligned around one policy.”
According to DSLReports, industry analysts are unsure whether the suspension is merely a temporary move until Comcast decides to impose the usage cap on all of its service areas in the Northeast, which include parts of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut.
Comcast started imposing the data usage cap in certain metro areas in 2012 and has since expanded it to most of the company’s service areas, but it has resisted doing so in the Northeast. Some analysts speculate that the exception may be because of regional competition from Verizon’s FiOS internet service, which does not have a data usage cap.
According to Comcast’s website, it still imposes the 1-terabyte usage cap on customers in 27 states outside the Northeast.
The company has said that 1 terabyte of data is far more than most of its customers ever use in a month. It said more than 99 percent of customers do not come close to using a terabyte, and that the typical customer uses only about 60 gigabytes of data in a month – which is 6 percent of a terabyte.
J. Craig Anderson can be contacted at 791-6390 or at:
Twitter: jcraiganderson
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