The FCC Is Ready to Hear Your Broadband Data Cap Horror Stories

If you’ve been wondering why your home broadband provider imposes a data cap on a wired connection that should have more than enough capacity, you officially have company in Washington: FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel wants answers to the same question.

Rosenworcel has asked her fellow commissioners to open a formal Notice of Inquiry into why data caps have persisted even after residential providers lifted those caps at the start of the pandemic without service suffering. This inquiry would also cover current data-usage trends and how data caps affect people’s ability to use their connections. 

“When we need access to the internet, we aren’t thinking about how much data it takes to complete a task, we just know it needs to get done,” Rosenworcel says(Opens in a new window).

The FCC has now set up a page—fcc.gov/datacapstories(Opens in a new window)–where you can share your own story about your provider’s data cap. The instructions for this Data Caps Experience Form note that it’s “meant to capture narrative information about the unique circumstances, conditions, and experience of consumers.” Since this is not a formal customer complaint, the FCC won’t share your input with your provider, it says.

If you’ve already exceeded your ISP’s data cap, the form is compatible with smartphone browsers. There’s also a PDF(Opens in a new window) you can download, print, fill out, and mail in. 

Data Caps: Not Necessary, But Still a Thing

The FCC has been getting complaints about data caps for years because some of the largest cable providers keep imposing them. Comcast—the biggest among them, and the largest broadband provider of any kind in the US—first announced a monthly limit of just 250GB a month in 2008 for its Xfinity home service. It switched in 2012 to charging extra for usage above 300GB in some markets, then raised the threshold to 1TB and extended it to more areas in 2016. 

That cap now stands at 1.2TB(Opens in a new window), with overage fees of $10 for each 50GB(Opens in a new window). You can avoid that with Comcast’s xFinity Complete add-on service bundle(Opens in a new window), which is $20 a month for the first year and then $25 a month thereafter.

Lifting those caps at the start of the pandemic didn’t cause Comcast problems, as the company bragged in a June 2020 post(Opens in a new window) that said “our network has more than enough capacity to provide stable, fast connections to tens of millions of customers, even in the face of unprecedented demand.”

Comcast has since put that cap back in place and was set to expand it to Northeast markets (where it often competes with Verizon’s unlimited-data Fios fiber broadband), then deferred that change in early 2021 after getting a barrage of complaints from customers and elected officials

The second-largest cable service, Charter Communications, renounced data caps as a condition for government approval of its 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks and has not reimposed them(Opens in a new window) after the expiration of that seven-year condition. Cox, the third-largest cable provider, has a 1.25TB(Opens in a new window) cap. 

These usage limits often aren’t made obvious to customers during signup. A 2021 survey found that 48% of respondents didn’t know their plan’s data cap. The FCC voted in November to address this problem by requiring a food-nutrition-style label for broadband service, but even tech-savvy users struggle to identify(Opens in a new window) which app, site, or service pushed their house over a cap.

Other providers have gone back and forth on data caps. SpaceX’s Starlink has seen its performance slow as usage has grown in the US and more than once floated a data-cap regime before relenting, most recently in May.

Can a Deadlocked FCC Get Anything Done?

The FCC inquiry may surface more details about data caps and their consequences. But while Rosenworcel’s proposed inquiry would assess the FCC’s authority to regulate caps, it’s less certain that any regulations will result. Almost 2.5 years into the Biden administration, the commission remains deadlocked at two Democratic and two Republican appointees. 

Biden had nominated a fifth member, longtime consumer advocate Gigi Sohn, alongside Rosenworcel back in October 2021. But the administration left Sohn, who would have been the first openly gay FCC commissioner, open to absurd character attacks(Opens in a new window) like being soft on sex trafficking and opposed the police because she is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation(Opens in a new window), a longstanding digital civil-rights group. 

In March, Sohn withdrew her nomination(Opens in a new window). The administration has since nominated Anna Gomez(Opens in a new window), a telecom lawyer who has worked in the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the FCC as well as Sprint Nextel. While Sohn regularly denounced data caps, policy types have said Gomez’s views on them are unclear(Opens in a new window). 

Meanwhile, a Senate bill last year would have banned “predatory” data caps but failed to get even a committee vote(Opens in a new window).