You've always had the _option_ of paying extra for unlimited data, however its only in the past month or two that they've started offering unlimited data as standard (in select markets).
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/stung-by-custome...
I’m sorry I still don’t get it. Could you explain that in different phrasing ?
A comcast customer always had the option to pay for unlimited data. I get that part. What is the 2nd part? “Started offering it as standard” means what?
In markets where Comcast has actual real competition, they "include" the unlimited data (aka no cap) with no extra charge when you sign up for their gigabit plans.
You pay for their highest tiered and highest bandwidth plan and they have the audacity to impose a cap making that bandwidth work against you? Crazy. My household internet usage is quite modest, nothing anyone on HN would call data intensive—casual video streaming being the lion's share, and I blow out 1TB every month without fail.
In the Bay Area Comcast offered (2017-2023 at least) internet with a default 1-1.2TiB/mo data cap that you can lift for the month for an extra 10-20usd (I don't recall, my roommate who played CoD was the one paying for this by himself on every month with huge updates).
There's barely any competition here. You can pretty much chose from Comcast Business or XFinity, which both are just Comcast because of a free market with free as in not in jail.
Really 10-20 more? When I asked, and I'm in the Bay Area, the unlimited plan was $5 a month more than it would cost if I leased their modem.
How much more was it than if you weren't leasing their modem?
It used to be 30/month for me. I was not renting their modem and got charged more for it.
If starlink ever gets more capacity, I'll probably switch. Right now I think the only way to get gigabit down on starlink is with four or five accounts and manually bonding the dishes together. As soon as that obstacle goes away, Comcast will have competition in my area and I intend take advantage of that.
That's not true. I tried getting unlimited data like 7-8 years ago and they said I needed a business account to get it.
What ISPs offer and how much they offer it for tends to vary wildly region to region.
If you live in a region where they have no meaningful competition (which is still fairly common in a lot of places in the US) well bend over and lube up.
They'll vary wildly, as much as they think they can get away with, in the hopes that you will never use the service and pay them as much as possible for it, and they'll bury your mailbox with crap to try to wear you down into coming back.
They will happily let you pay for years, for services that no longer exist, no longer connected to any of their networks. They'll take you to court rather than pay anything back; they know they are receiving extra money, and there's a significant amount that comes in, but "oh, it's so confusing, and there are so many legacy systems, we can't possibly catch every mistake."
The money they shuffle back and forth between each other, daily, reeks of book cooking - you might have a stretch of 20 miles of trunk in which there are 20 separate owners - not concurrent riding separate fiber lines, but in sequence, each paying rent to or getting rent paid by the adjacent rider, even though only a single company actually services the entire span.
It's funny how construction companies and ISPs get these rackets going, and then when people come along like these PrimeOne guys and offer a reasonable rate on a decent product, it's somehow vastly disruptive and threatening.
They'll expand, and be encouraged and allowed to expand, and after 5 or 6 years, the big ISPs will start circling, and eventually buy them out, and they'll retire happy. AT&T or Lumen will own their network inside of 10 years, and they'll claim it's modernized and upgraded infrastructure. People with shitty oversold undermaintained cable internet will be left alone until the money stops.
Starlink to phones is great, if it only didn't make ISPs so much money handling the base stations on the ground.
There's fiber all over the US just hanging there, unused, unmaintained, because merger after merger after merger left giant piles of assets under the ownership of companies like comcast and centurylink and at&t, who left infrastructure to rot, often built with public funding, and maintained their local monopolies and shitty service.
Whatever it is we're doing to regulate the industry at a federal level isn't working, but I imagine that's where a lot of the money goes.
A healthcare company I used to work for had a location in CA that, on paper, had 3 circuits - AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast. Each had their own Ciena box in their telecom closet. They were getting a circuit upgraded so one of them was newly installed and we needed to cut over the slowest one to an upgraded one.
Working with the director there, IIRC we traced down the Verizon and Comcast box as actually being connected to the AT&T box. After some checking of circuit IDs on boxes it seemed that the LEC for both the Verizon and Comcast circuits was AT&T, and AT&T was the actual owner of that single physical fiber going out there.
I wish I could sell the same thing 3 times, lol. Contracts were signed on all these circuits so there was no getting out of it.