This year marked a turning point for Comcast, the cable giant: It now has more Internet than TV customers. And it's trying out how to charge you for the amount of data you use, much the way Verizon and AT&T do for wireless customers.
Why risk doing something that upsets customers? Most large cable companies — AT&T and some smaller providers are the main exceptions — offer unlimited data plans.
The reason is simple. Comcast currently takes in more revenue from video customers than from Internet customers, but that's not likely to be true forever. A small but growing number of consumers are skipping cable subscriptions as hours spent watching video shifts online. So finding a way to charge for heavier Internet use could bolster Comcast's revenue as the ranks of its cable customers shrink.
For instance, the company lost 48,000 cable customers in its just-reported third quarter while adding 320,000 Internet customers. Even so, Comcast says the loss in the cable customers was the smallest for the third quarter since 2006, when it gained 10,000 subscribers in the July-September period. Revenue rose 8.3 percent to $18.7 billion in the July-September period, while net income dropped 23 percent to $2 billion because of a tax gain from last year.
Even as it considers new charges on data usage, Comcast is raising the capacity for consumers to get data. On Tuesday, for the second time in three months, it announced that consumers in several metro areas, including the Twin Cities, would be able to boost their broadband speed with a reboot of their Comcast modem.
For many customers, the new change means that Comcast's service will have tripled in speed since midsummer.
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