Home fiber broadband introduces monthly data caps

Early last week, Globe Telecom re-introduced their new home broadband plans that are delivered via very fast fiber Internet connection.

More and more Filipino households are getting fiber internet to their homes this year as kilometers of new fiber lines are installed beneath villages, subdivisions and into newly built residential buildings. With a starting plan of 50Mbps for about P2,500, you could go as fast as 1Gbps for under P10,000 a month.

Granted that not all households can afford P10,000 a month on 1Gbps Internet, the 50Mbps starter plan should be more than enough in terms of speed for most people.

What is most surprising of all is that the new fiber plans now come with their respective data caps:

Plan 1599: 20Mbps @ 150GB cap

Plan 1899: 50Mbps @ 300GB cap

Plan 2499:  100Mbps @ 1TB cap

Plan 4499: 200Mbps @ 1.5TB cap

Plan 6999: 500Mbps @ 3TB cap

Plan 9499: 1Gbps @ 6TB cap

The non-fiber connections (DSL, LTE) also have their own data caps as well:

Plan 999: 1Mbps @ 20GB cap

Plan 1099: 2Mbps @ 20GB cap

Plan 1299: 10Mbps @ 50GB cap (LTE)

Plan 1299: 10Mbps @ 100GB cap (DSL)

Plan 1599: 15Mbps @ 150GB cap (DSL)

This is not the first time we’ve seen wired broadband plans (DSL) having data caps but to see it also being implemented in fiber connections is certainly a new one.

The explanation before was that the data caps are used to manage network congestion and prevent some customers from abusing their connection.

The new data caps seem to look like it’s positioned to upsell customers and condition them into paying more if they want to consume more data.

Additional charges or add-on data allowances are priced as such:

5GB Data Boost: P149/month

30GB Data Boost: P299/month

60GB Data Boost: P499/month

Going back to the data caps, the higher end plans are provided some reasonably generous data caps between 1TB to 6TB for the 100Mbps to 1Gbps connections.

This could be enough for most homes with single users but could be easily used up in some instances.

• If you’re subscribed to Netflix Premium which offers Ultra HD settings, a one-hour TV series could eat up 7GB of data. That means  two-hour movies a day is already 28GB. That’s 840GB per month.

• If you stream over YouTube as well, a 1080p video stream could easily eat up 1.5GB per hour. For five hours of YouTube a day, that’s 7.5GB or 225GB a month.

Multiply that with the typical number of users at home and you could be seeing between 1TB to 3TB of usage per month. We’re not even including P2P (torrent) downloads that most people also do on a regular basis.

These are just some examples of data consumption you could be using if you have fast fiber internet connection.

With that in mind, the next time people would be looking at broadband plans, they won’t be looking at speed options past 50Mbps but rather on the corresponding data caps for each plan. And that could prove a bit worrisome.

It remains to be seen how consumers will react to this. On one hand, they could be encouraged to upgrade their broadband plans from a lower tier to a higher tier due to the needed data allocation they think they’d be using (which is the whole upselling idea anyway). Or, they’d be discouraged and just pick a slightly lower plan. Our guess is that customers will end up just getting the 50Mbps or 100Mbps and just pay for additional data allocation if ever they end up using more.