Hull-based network builder and UK broadband ISP KCOM, which serves much of East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, has announced that customers who still take packages with a capped data allowance will be able to enjoy unlimited usage over the Christmas and New Year period (19th December 2022 to 9th January 2023 inclusive).
The operator’s full fibre (FTTP) infrastructure can now reach around 300,000 premises across the region (up from the c.250,000 at the end of last year) and they’re currently investing another £100m (here) to cover an additional 50,000 premises across East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire (14 new locations), as well as to upgrade their network to support 10Gbps speeds and move away from copper.
However, not all of KCOM’s customers have adopted their modern “unlimited” usage packages, which still leaves around 7,000 homes and businesses on their capped data plans. But the ISP has now decided to suspend those usage caps until 9th January 2023.
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Neil Bartholomew, MD of KCOM Retail, said:
“After what has been another challenging year for many people, we want everybody to be able to enjoy themselves this Christmas; that’s why we’re removing the data caps for everybody.
That means everyone will be able to stream the latest Christmas specials from Netflix and Amazon, enjoy playing all day on their new game consoles, stream endless Christmas party songs and keep in touch with relatives all over the world online without any worries about going over their caps.
And because services such as Netflix, Amazon and YouTube are all cached locally on our KCOM servers, it means there will be no buffering or delays when millions across the country are all trying to watch the must-see shows this winter.”
The last time KCOM did this was during the height of the pandemic and over the Christmas 2020 period.
Broadband should be unlimited for full fibre not capped data allowance otherwise full fibre are total pointless!
As much as many people would argue that’s the sensible way to go, given that bandwidth and traffic are by far the most expensive parts of a connection to provide, being able to offer discounted packages to people who really don’t need an unlimited connection does make a level of sense.
What techy people often forget is that there’s a huge number of people who almost never use streaming services, don’t play computer games and have an actual TV, who only ever use their internet connection for email and web browsing. They generally aren’t willing to pay any more than absolutely necessary, so why wouldn’t it make sense to offer a discounted, traffic limited plan for people who just don’t need unlimited?
That’s what a monopoly does. Bad business practices. Too bad openreach only has balls to overbuild on smaller providers
@Phil. Most of the 7,000 customers are on legacy packages, which will also include KCOM’s older copper based ADSL/VDSL plans.
If you can find Openreach a bigger provider in the UK to overbuild than CityFibre or VMO2 I’m sure they’ll consider it, Wilson.
@AndyK, I used to be with a provider called Metronet many years ago and from what I remember, you get so much data for the first payment and then pay extra for more. It was in the early days of ADSL. Those days most people did not use a load of data and I found I saved money by using it compared to others, sadly Plusnet grabbed hold of them in 2005 and that was it, I went with AOL after for a month. These days it is different, people use so much more data with streaming being what uses the most data, so for a majority of people a pay as you go system would not work