In November, Comcast notified customers in northeast states that they would start seeing a data cap on their internet plans at the beginning of this year. The company saw immediate backlash from both customers and state reps. After Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro negotiated with the company, Comcast agreed to push back data caps to July 2021. Now, they’re pushing that date back even further, to 2022.
“…we are delaying implementation of our new data plan in our Northeast markets until 2022,” Comcast wrote in a statement yesterday. “We recognize that our data plan was new for our customers in the Northeast, and while only a very small percentage of customers need additional data, we are providing them with more time to become familiar with the new plan.”
While Comcast claims that only about 5% of customers use more than 1.2 TB of data in a month, those opposing the data cap point out that with many employees still working from home along with students taking classes from home, it has been much easier for households to reach that limit.
Customers in the 27 states that already had a data cap on their plan will continue to have that cap and fees for going over the monthly data limit. The northeast markets that will be affected by the data cap beginning in 2022 include Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Vermont, and West Virginia. An exact date for data caps to go into effect was not given.