Comcast Usage Soars 34 Percent To 200GB a Month, Pushing Users Closer To Data Cap

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast said its customers' monthly Internet data usage increased 34 percent between Q1 2018 and Q1 2019, rising to a median of 200GB. The rise is being driven by streaming video, and, in particular, 4K video, Comcast said. The median customer is using only about 20 percent of Comcast's 1TB data cap, which is enforced in 27 of Comcast's 39 states. But the rise in median usage almost certainly means that more Comcast customers are exceeding the 1TB cap.

OpenVault research on the U.S. cable industry found [in January] that 4.1 percent of households were using at least 1TB a month, up from 2.1 percent the previous year. That same research found that U.S. cable Internet customers were using an average of 268.7GB per month. Comcast used to reveal the percentage of its customers that exceed its data cap, but the company seems to have stopped making that data public. In late 2013, when the cap was 300GB, Comcast was saying that only 2 percent of its customers used more than that. By late 2015, that was up to 8 percent.

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