Xfinity Increases Internet Pricing (2024)

Starting in January 2024, Xfinity (Comcast) will be raising their prices again. The 200 Mbps internet plan that I use will be increasing by 24%. Right now, I'm paying $62 per month, and I own the modem and router. If you have Xfinity for cable, phone, or internet, you can expect a similar increase for the services that you use. This has become an annual occurrence with Xfinity. They sent me an email a few weeks ago that said they were giving me a $5 discount for using autopay with a credit card. You can get a $10 discount if you use a bank account instead of a credit card. But I figure the fewer companies that have direct access to my bank account the better. Especially Xfinity who was hacked again in October 2023.

Xfinity is offering a free subscription to Peacock Premium if you have Platinum status. Normally that would cost $5.99 per month. I signed up for the offer because I'm basically paying for it anyway. With the $5 autopay discount my new monthly bill is $71 per month. That is too much for 200 Mbps with a 1.2 TB data cap and my own equipment. The only option to reduce my monthly bill is to apply for the Affordable Connectivity Program. This is a government program for eligible families to receive a benefit of up to $30 per month applied to the cost of their internet service.  To qualify the household income needs to be at or below 200% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines. For a 1-person household, the limit is $30,120. For a 2-person household, the limit is $40,880. I just found out that the program will stop accepting new applications and enrollments on February 7, 2024. Funding is expected to last through April 2024, running out completely in May, barring further Congressional appropriations. If the program ends, nearly 23 million households across the country are at risk of losing internet access.

On December 21st, Xfinity sent me an email saying that I had used 75% of my data for the month. Anyone without unlimited data has a data usage cap of 1.2TB (1200 GB). If you exceed the limit, Xfinity will bill you $10 for every 50GB over the limit. Normally, I don't come close to exceeding the limit. I did download a 90GB game on the Xbox, but that shouldn't have caused the data warning. We do stream a lot of movies on the Amazon Fire TV device, so I started to look at that for clues. In the settings menu under "Data Usage Monitoring" you can find "Monthly Top Data Usage". 

The top two data hogs were the FireTV player and the FireTV system. Data usage was 10x the previous month's data usage while other apps were in a normal range. I recently noticed that the FireTV device was auto playing video in the featured contest section on the home screen. Since the FireTV device is on whenever the TV is on, I thought that this had to be what was causing all of the data usage. In the settings menu under "Featured Content" you can turn off video and audio autoplay. This puts a still image in the featured content area instead of streaming video. The change should help lower the amount of data used by the FireTV player.