Comcast’s VP tries to backtrack on data capping statements

Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen has come out against a statement he made earlier in the week about the future of Comcast broadband and data usage caps. While Cohen emphasized that there are “no plans to announce a new data usage policy,” the real truth is that you should expect data caps from more ISPs than just Comcast in the future. Cohen, perhaps the most publicly visible Comcast executive and lobbyist, who has been defending the nation’s largest cable company on several fronts in recent months, talked to industry analyst Craig Moffett earlier this week about data usage cap.

Trying to backtrack on comments made before the the MoffettNathanson Media and Communications Summit saying that all Comcast customers would be on a “capped” plan by 2019, Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen is now claiming in a blog post that the company has “no plans to announce a new data usage policy.” Cohen also claims that the company will be “looking at adding some unlimited data plans to our trials,” despite many of Comcast’s customers already effectively having unlimited data. Comcast is already testing caps, regardless of what the executive calls them. Two similar systems are being piloted. The first offers a 300GB ceiling for all data tiers, above which a fee will apply per each “block” of data consumed. The example given by Comcast is 50GB for $10. The second keeps the 300GB soft ceiling for the “Internet Essentials”, “Economy”, and “Performance” tiers with the “Blast” and “Extreme” plans having an unspecified additional amount. The block data charge remains unaffected.