Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA) will begin imposing data caps on customers in all of the states it operates in come 2021, after announcing that a dozen states in the Northeast that were previously excluded from the limitations would now be included. Starting in January, the cable operator will put all Xfinity customers under a monthly 1.2 terabyte cap on data usage and will charge them $10 for every 50 gigabytes of data they exceed the limit, up to a maximum of $100.
Cutting out cable Comcast reported it lost 273,000 cable customers in the third quarter, which was actually fewer than the 409,000 it lost in Q1 and the 477,000 that cut the cord in the second. Yet that brings the total number of consumers abandoning Xfinity so far this year to 1.16 million. At the same time, though, Comcast added 1.43 million high-speed internet customers to the rolls, suggesting that while customers were cutting the cord to cable programming, many were keeping their internet access.
Year to date, Comcast has added over 1.7 million one-product customers, which is easy to believe are mostly internet-only households, but overall it has lost almost 300,000 customers in total in 2020. That means consumers want Comcast's internet service, but not its cable and telephone offerings. The data cap helps recoup the lost revenue, and could be a sign Comcast expects net neutrality to return.
Staking out neutral ground Previously Comcast could charge bandwidth hogs like Netflix for direct access to its network, but net neutrality prohibited such access fees. After the FCC killed net neutrality in 2017, Comcast reportedly demanded fees again from Netflix, which eventually agreed to have the streaming service bundled with the Xfinity service, but which gave Comcast control over the important customer billing relationship. Assuming the Biden administration takes office in January, net neutrality could be back on the table. The fees Comcast collected from Netflix and others might not survive, but the data cap for people using its internet service to stream video would endure.