Comcast/Xfinity return to their pricing shenanigans

For anybody theoretically following this blog, you might recall this post from the beginning of the year, where I ran up against the data cap Comcast imposed on customers in my region while testing Google's Stadia service.  In the meantime, of course, we've had this whole COVID-19 thing get unleashed... and, in the early days, Comcast did the socially-responsible thing with a nation full of people stuck at home, and suspended their data caps entirely.

So, now we're in July, fresh off of a few months with no data caps enforced, and no stories reaching the public of massive outages or slowdowns due to all of the increased traffic on those previously-capped Comcast internet connections.  Rather than take that as an indicator as to the caps not serving their stated purpose (which would, of course, lead one to think they should be eliminated entirely, possibly reducing Comcast's income in the process), Comcast has brought caps back into play effective July 1st.  However, even they must have had a think about how justifiable their previous system was, since they made a few changes.

First, they raised their cap from 1TB to a massive... 1.2TB.  I mean, sure, if you're going to bother capping, higher is better, but that increase is almost insignificant for most use cases I can come up with.  Heck, even in my case, that's just less than I would need to use Stadia a similar amount as in my previous tests, so I'd still be flirting with triggering that $10 per 50GB overage fee (which is still in place, although the highest you could go over is down to $100 from $200 per month).  Worse, if I'm reading the email they sent out to their customers yesterday correctly, they're also reducing their "free" overage months from 2 to 1 going forward.

Second, they're offering a "cheaper" alternative for getting "unlimited" data.  Branded as "xFi Complete", it's basically a $25 per month modem/router rental fee.  Of course, it also includes something they're calling "Advanced Security", but what "security features" they could be implementing that they can't handle through equipment on their end of the connection... well, all I can come up with is monitoring and managing traffic internal to my network, which they have no business inspecting, in my opinion.  It's also worth noting that using their equipment means it also has a "public" WiFi access network built in, and, while it's separate from your personal network, that's still effectively paying Comcast for the privilege of housing equipment to provide their services to strangers, which is wrong in and of itself.

One could argue that, all in all, this is still better than what the status quo was last year, and therefore I should be happy/grateful/whatever.  However, the fact is that they did fine without any of this silliness for months, and could simply have left their systems in what I would call a more proper state than try to prod people to give them more money and/or give up more of their privacy.  Oh well, these things have a way of evening out, given enough time... in my case, there's a residential fiber company trying to work their way into the market, so it might just be "grin and bear it" until they eventually reach my area, much like I did for Comcast's internet back in dial-up days.