Comcast CEO Brian Roberts defended his company’s much-criticized data caps yesterday, saying that consumers should pay for Internet access based on how much data they use, just like they do with gas or electricity.
“Just as with every other thing in your life, if you drive 100,000 miles or 1,000 miles you buy more gasoline. If you turn on the air conditioning to 60 vs. 72 you consume more electricity,” Roberts said. “The same is true for [broadband] usage.” Cellular data is already billed this way, “the more bits you use, the more you pay,” he said. So why not cable Internet, too?
Roberts was being interviewed by Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget at the publication’s Ignition conference. (Video is available here.)
“When I ask your customers, ‘What should I ask Brian?’ they say, ‘Ask him about these data caps. They’re driving me crazy,’” Blodget said. “Why data caps and what about this accusation that you don’t charge for your own data but you clobber people when they watch Netflix?”
Roberts didn’t address the latter part of that question, which relates to Comcast’s in-home streaming service that doesn’t count against the cable company’s data caps. But before making his gas and electricity comparison, Roberts repeated Comcast’s argument that its data limits aren’t actually “data caps.”
“They’re not a cap,” Roberts said. “We don’t want anybody to ever not want to stay connected on our network.”
While Comcast doesn’t actually cut people off the Internet when they hit their 300GB-per-month data limits, customers do get charged an additional $10 for each 50GB used. Customers can also pay an extra $30 or $35 per month for unlimited data, depending on where they live. Comcast, the nation’s largest home Internet provider, has implemented the data caps in many cities but hasn’t rolled them out to its entire territory yet. “We’re just trialling ways to have a balanced relationship,” Roberts said. “You can watch hundreds of shows and movies and other things before you hit these levels, many devices, but I don’t think it’s illogical or something people should be paranoid about… it’s not that different than other industries.”