A Comcast executive has said that the company expects to implement usage-based billing—that's data caps to you and me—for all of its customers within the next five years.


The news came out of a call with investors yesterday. In fact, Comcast already applies data caps in some areas—including parts of Alabama, Georgia, Central Kentucky, Maine and South Carolina—where customers generally get 300GB of data per month before extra charges of $10 per 50GB kick in.

Apparently 98 percent of users never exceed that 300GB limit, but during the call yesterday Comcast said that it would potentially up the limit to 500GB a month in the next five years. That would see even fewer users exceeding the data cap—unless, of course, 4K streaming really takes off. [Ars Technica]