Today I received an email from Comcast informing me that we have consumed 90% of our 1 TB data alotment for the month. While I had been vaguely aware that Comcast has data caps, I had not encountered an issue with it until today.

What I find odd is that we have been averaging about 650 GB of data per month, and now mid-month Comcast is saying we have already consumed about 900 GB? What changed? Frankly, it doesn’t make sense.

Coincidentally, I noticed that mid last month our Internet download speed increased from around 70 mbps to 100 mbps. There seems to be a relationship between the increase in our bandwidth and how much Comcast claims we are now using. I didn’t ask for the bandwidth increase. I am wondering whether now that our speed is faster the streaming services we use have flipped over to higher data rate video streaming than we’ve been using previously?

What is frustrating is that the data usage meter Comcast provides is just a total consumption per month, it doesn’t show me a per day or even per week breakdown. In fact, I don’t know how I have any way to confirm that what Comcast is claiming I am consuming is what I am actually using!

Comcast provides 2 months of “free” data overage before they will start charging me $10 for each 50 GB we go over the cap per month, so I don’t have to do anything drastic right now. Right now I don’t even know how to begin to fight this thing, I am going to have to study the topic and see if there is something that I can implement on my end to show how much data we actually do consume per month.