Comcast Expands Usage-Meter Rollout

Comcast continues to widen the availability of its Web-based bandwidth-usage monitoring tool for customers, making it available today in parts of Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington, D.C., Delaware and Maryland.

It’s now available in more than 20 states, after the MSO first launched the metering feature last December in Portland, Ore. (see Comcast Tests Data-Usage Meter In Oregon). Since then it has become available in parts of Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Texas, Utah, Washington State and Wisconsin.

Basically, the goal with this tool is to show subscribers how little they bandwidth they actually consume. Comcast has a 250-Gigabyte monthly cap for all data downloaded and uploaded, and it says less than 1% of subs actually get near that ceiling. The median monthly usage is 3-4 GB per subscriber, according to Comcast.

Is this a prelude to usage-based billing from Comcast — the issue over which Time Warner Cable was publicly flogged last year? (See Time Warner Cable: Three Mistakes on Usage Pricing.) No, according to Comcast — it has reiterated that it has no plans to implement or test usage-based pricing models.

Here’s what the operator’s data-usage portal looks like: