Mediacom, a cable company with about 1.4 million Internet customers across 22 states, is telling heavy uploaders to reduce their data usage-even when those users are well below their monthly data caps. Mediacom's fastest Internet plan offers gigabit download speeds and 50Mbps upload speeds with a monthly data cap of 6TB. But as Stop the Cap wrote in a detailed report on Wednesday, the ISP is "reach[ing] out to a growing number of its heavy uploaders and telling them to reduce usage or face a speed throttle or the possible closure of their account." Mediacom told Ars that it is contacting heavy uploaders "more frequently than before" because of increased usage triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The company said that heavy uploaders "may be under their total bandwidth usage allowance but still have a negative impact on Mediacom's network." Mediacom's terms and conditions say the company charges $10 fees for each additional block of 50GB used by customers who exceed the data cap. But users may be warned about their usage long before they risk overage fees. One user in East Moline, Illinois, who described the predicament on a DSLReports forum in early January, said they paid for the 6TB plan "to make sure we wouldn't go over the cap" and had never used more than 4TB. The user wrote:

So, got a call from the Mediacom fraud and abuse department today. The rep told me they were calling customers that have "higher than average" bandwidth usage as they are having network issues. I hurried up and checked my account and only used a bit over 2.5TB last month. He told me my upload was 450GB over their average and if I didn't reduce my usage they would either throttle or disconnect me. I argued that I used less than half of the total data allowed by my plan, but he said my 1.2TB of upload was too much and that this was my warning.

Another gigabit user in Missouri named Cory told Stop the Cap that the 6TB monthly cap "is way more than I will ever use, but I still received a warning letter claiming I was uploading too much. I discovered I used about 900GB over the last two months, setting up a cloud backup of my computer. At most I can send files at around 50Mbps, which they claim is interfering with other customers in my neighborhood. I don't understand."

Letters sent by Mediacom to heavy uploaders said, "your account's usage is greater than 99.5 percent of all Service customers. Due to your excessive use, you are negatively impacting Mediacom's network and other users of the Service."

The letter goes on to say that it's a "violation" of Mediacom's acceptable use policy to "use excessive bandwidth, whether upstream or downstream, that in Mediacom's sole opinion, places an unusually large burden on the network or goes over normal usage. Mediacom has the right to impose limits on excessive bandwidth consumption via any means available to Mediacom."

Even without the overall data caps, Mediacom's Internet plans have built-in limits on uploading. While the gigabit-download plan limits uploads to 50Mbps, the 60Mbps-download plan limits uploads to just 5Mbps and the 100Mbps-download plan limits uploads to 10Mbps. The 60/5Mbps plan has a 200GB monthly cap, and the 100/10Mbps plan has a 1TB cap. We asked Mediacom why it hasn't upgraded its network enough to fully support the upload speeds and data allotments that its customers pay for, but we didn't receive an answer. New versions of the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS), which have been heavily hyped by the cable industry, can support symmetrical download and upload speeds of 10Gbps. Even an earlier version of the DOCSIS 3.1 standard that's now widely deployed theoretically allows 10Gbps downloads and 1Gbps upload speeds. But the cable industry has been slow to raise upload speeds.