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.
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
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