“Commenters have clearly demonstrated how fees and overage charges, unclear information about data caps, and throttling or caps in the midst of public crises such as natural disasters negatively affect consumers, especially consumers in the lowest income brackets,” the filing stated.

The groups stated that “many low-income households have no choice but to be limited by data caps because lower priced plan tiers, the only ones they can afford, are typically capped.” Their filing prompted the FCC to do something about it, arguing that federal law supplies “ample rulemaking authority to regulate data caps as they are an unjustified, unreasonable business practice and unreasonably discriminate against low-income individuals.”

The filing priced quote a December 2023 report by not-for-profit wire service Capital B about broadband gain access to issues dealt with by Black Americans in backwoods. The post explained Internet users such as Gloria Simmons, who had actually resided in Devereux, Georgia, for over 50 years.

“But as a retiree on a fixed income, it’s too expensive, she says,” the Capital B report stated. “She pays $60 a month for fixed wireless Internet with AT&T. But some months, if she goes over her data usage, it’s $10 for each additional 50 gigabytes of data. If it increases, she says she’ll cancel the service, despite its convenience.”

Free Press: “inequitable concern” for low-income users

Remarks submitted last month by advocacy group Free Press stated that some ISPs do not enforce information caps due to the fact that of competitors from fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) and repaired cordless services. Charter does not enforce caps, and Comcast has actually prevented caps in the Northeast United States where Verizon’s un-capped FiOS fiber-to-the-home service is extensively released, Free Press stated.

“ISPs like Cox and Comcast (outside of its northeast territory) continue to show that they want their customers to use as much data as possible, so long as they pay a monthly fee for unlimited data, and/or ‘upgrade’ their service with an expensive monthly equipment rental,” Free Press composed. “Comcast’s continued use of cap-and-fee pricing is particularly egregious because it repeatedly gloats about how robust its network is relative to others in terms of handling heavy traffic volume, and it does not impose caps in the parts of its service area where it faces more robust FTTH competition from FTTH providers.”