Comcast brings more greed to Connecticut
While health care workers have received the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, and further vaccinations are just weeks away, it cannot be ignored that the COVID-19 pandemic continues to be in full swing. If they’re not still at risk in the field, folks are forced to work and learn from home just to keep up with their workloads and their children’s homework. Those costs are adding up, especially in homes where at least one family member may have lost a job or seen reduced hours at work. Until things improve, families deserve relief.
Instead, if Comcast gets its way, they’ll start the new year with new hidden fees and a restrictive data cap.
Starting Jan. 1, Comcast will increase prices for TV and internet, with even customers on promotional pricing still seeing changes. Two television fees will jump by a combined $6.50 per month, or $78 a year, despite those fees not being included in advertised rates. Internet-only packages will increase by $4 per month, with all customers but unlimited ones receiving a nasty surprise of a 1.2-terabyte data cap. Any usage over that amount, which may seem high enough at first glance, would cost $10 for every 50 gigabytes. There are even more impending fees, including a $2.50-per-month rise in the cost of simply renting a cable box and internet plans rising by $3 monthly in most cases.
While the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, its financial pain harming so many right now didn’t bother Comcast. In fact, its most recently quarter report showed the pandemic has been great for the communications company, with earnings per share and revenue coming in above expectations. In normal times, in this context, consumer-unfriendly moves like these new fees would be derided. Right now? They’re indefensible.
What’s worse: the data cap is likely to serve as another hidden fee for many users. While Comcast claims the cap is fair and only targets subscribers using the most data, that’s an inaccurate representation. Between the requirements of the pandemic and the changing parameters of data delivery, this cap will trigger unwanted fees for users, and it won’t be their fault.
Our increasingly online existence these days alone will cause far too many people to suffer financially. Take online meetings, for example. The average Zoom call can use up to 2.4 gigabytes of data per hour; in a household with just one student learning virtually for 30 hours a week, five days a week, that adds up to 120 hours per month. Their education would swallow a full quarter of the data cap on its own. When Comcast’s “Internet Essentials” plan has helped keep many families connected, they too would fall victim to this data cap — it could increase their monthly cost from $10 to as much as $60, a budgetary increase that would be a gut punch.
Many offices have shifted to work-from-home formats, too, meaning households without children may fall afoul of the changing aspects of data delivery, as well. Then there’s entertainment. Depending on stream quality, binge-watching Netflix could add up to hundreds of gigabytes per month, while anyone able to track down the new Playstation 5 and download “Call of Duty” or “NBA 2K21” will be shocked when those games take up as many as 120 gigabytes, or 10 percent of their data cap, on their own.
This problem will not go away, either. In fact, it will likely get worse. As technology develops, data usage and requirements soar. Early projections indicate phone data usage will skyrocket through 2025; it’s not hard to imagine home data usage following a similar route, especially as we move toward widespread adoption of 4K TVs and similar technologies of increasing data demands.
What’s worse, there’s little recourse for some Comcast customers, who have no other options for television and internet. It’s classic exploitative business practice, preying on a captive audience. How else can you explain unadvertised, yet mandatory, price hikes that many customers won’t know about but by calling them greed? Some of it could also be explained by attempting to counter the increased trend of “cord-cutting” with cable, but these fees will likely only further inspire more customers to end their contracts. Others may blame increasing demands from broadcasters, but to deposit those rising costs solely at the feet of customers is similarly greedy.
Without regulation or competition, monopolistic companies will only further abuse their customers. We saw it here in Connecticut earlier this year with Eversource’s unacceptable rate hikes and we see it here as well. On the Energy and Technology Committee, we pledge to do whatever we can to force either, if not both, of those changes. If our utilities can’t help but make the need for stricter regulations and more competitive markets obvious, we hear them loud and clear.