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El Reg reports
The US state of Oregon says it will charge Comcast tens of millions of dollars in taxes after revoking a tax break the cable giant had claimed on its broadband service.
The state's Department of Revenue (DOR) has denied a request by Comcast that it be granted an exemption reserved for companies that offer gigabit internet service in the state.
Written to lure Google's Fiber service to Portland after years of courtship, the tax break would give exemptions to reward the installation of high-speed fiber broadband.
Comcast [claimed] its "Gigabit Pro" service tops out at 2Gbit/s and thus made the cable giant eligible to claim the same breaks as Google.
The DOR, however, did not agree, and it ruled earlier this week that Comcast will have to pay the taxes.
[...] Critics of Comcast have previously argued that the Gigabit Pro service is prohibitively expensive (up to $4,600 a year) and only reaches a small number of Oregon residents.
[...] Both Google and Frontier also had their applications denied because neither has an active gigabit service in the state.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29 2016, @11:42PM
A lack of data caps should also be considered as well. What's the point of having a gigabit connection when all you can download is 100 gigabytes per month which has a maximum average of (100 gigabytes / (2,592,000 seconds per month)) = 0.03858 MB / second = 0.3086 Mb/sec. The data cap essentially negates much of the purpose of having high speed because your maximum average speed per second is the data cap divided by the number of seconds per month.