At a UBS conference on Monday, Comcast executives made it public that the company isn’t exploring moving to a metered Internet access billing system. The company is seeing decreases in video subscribers, but more customers are subscribing to its broadband services. The company believes changing its pricing model would have a negative effect on its high-speed data subscriber growth.
In the third quarter, the provider saw 165,000 video subscribers leave but saw 261,000 new broadband users. Over 70 percent of its customer base now has two or more bundled services.
Instead, the company will concentrate on grow share and the average revenue per users, said CFO Michael Angelakis. Comcast president Neil Smit put it more directly. “We don’t want to nickel-and-dime customers at this point,” he said.
The company still has a 250GB per month hard cap in place since 2008. It’s not clear when this cap will increase despite speeds on the network topping 100Mbps in some areas.
The position is one Comcast stands firmly on and is unchanged from last year. Some other cable companies, most notably Time Warner Cable, are looking into usage-based billing in order to discourage users from using cheaper, more flexible Internet video in place of TV.
