After turning the data usage meter off for the last three months of the pandemic quarantine period, Comcast has restored its limit on residential broadband usage for most customers.
But the No. 1 U.S. cable operator will now allow users, starting today, to gobble through 1.2 terabytes of data before it imposed additional charges, as opposed to the pre-pandemic limit of 1 TB.
Comcast outlines its updated data usage limit policy on this page.
The cable operator said it will now allow users to exceed the limit during one month without charges—it was previously offering two mulligans. However, Comcast reset the clock for all customers, meaning if you previously used one or more courtesy overages during 2020, Comcast isn’t counting that.
Comcast bills customers $10 for each bucket of 50 gigabytes for which they exceed the 1.2 TB limit.
These data usage policies apply to most of Comcast’s more than 29.1 million U.S. residential wireline broadband subscribers.
Notably, Charter Communications, the second largest U.S. wireline broadband service provider with just over 27.2 million customers, does not currently impose usage limits. But it has just petitioned the FCC to relax deal conditions related to its purchases of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks so that it may, among other things, set data caps.
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AT&T, which is the third biggest supplier of fixed broadband in the U.S. with around 15.3 million customers, has announced that it’s extending its moratorium on its 1 TB usage cap until Sept. 30.
