Comcast boosts internet speeds through the Northeast

If you’re in Maryland and noticed yesterday that your cat videos loaded a little bit faster, there’s a reason: Comcast increased its internet speeds across 14 Northeastern states, from Maine through Virginia and DC.

The telecom giant announced the following changes to its Xfinity offerings’ upload and download speeds in these markets:

• Extreme Pro — Download speeds from 800 to 900 Mbps; upload speeds increased from 15 to 20 Mbps
• Blast! — Download speeds increased from 400 to 600 Mbps; upload speeds doubled from 10 to 20 Mbps
• Performance Pro — Download speeds increased from 200 to 300 Mbps; upload speeds doubled from 5 to 10 Mbps
• Performance — Upload speeds doubled from 5 to 10 Mbps, while download speeds remain at 100 Mbps
• Performance Starter — Upload speeds doubled from 5 to 10 Mbps, while download speeds remain at 50 Mbps

All of these boosts were offered to customers at no additional costs, according to Comcast’s announcement yesterday. But as the pandemic subsides and 2023 rolls around for Comcast’s only United States division without a data cap, that cost is likely coming.

And sure, Comcast said in 2020 that data caps wouldn’t affect the roughly 95% of customers it said used less than 1.2 Terabytes of data. But as Technical.ly reporter Holly Quinn noted, with the rise of 4k, the average household could soon easily exceed a TB of data usage in a month. That’s not including the data used by those working remotely or requiring the occasional week of remote learning.

Donte Kirby is a 2020-2022 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.