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AT&T Caps Bandwidth On Former @Home Users
graznar writes: "It seems that AT&T users have been limited to 1.5 megabits of bandwidth. According to AT&T (after calling and waiting for 30 minutes), the service my friend was originally on went bankrupt (@home maybe?) so they were transferred to an alternate network. AT&T claims they will be getting this back up to speed soon. What I would like to know is if this is a nation wide problem, or if this is just in California where he lives?" More generally, I wonder what type of experiences -- good or bad -- the people who've just gone through a forcible @home weaning are experiencing.
Really, is 1.5Mbits too slow for $50 a month? Perhaps you can do better with dsl? (Hint: you can't)
I have Charter Pipeline and I think it may be caped @ 1.5Mbits (I used to get 2-2.5Mbits max), do you see me complaining?
No, I think $34/month(1 year contract) is an excellent deal for 256kbit/1.5mbit cable that has about a 99.5% uptime.
Your friend should count himself lucky to still have cable in his situation.
@home made a fatal flaw by trying to offer more than they could offer. 10Mbps access speeds. Having basically a T3 for every customer to the internet is business suicide and was purely moronic for them to ever have offered. (Example, they' failed.)
T-1 speeds are plenty fast enough, I just want the latency to drop. I dare anyone (other than in Chicago) to get a T-1 for 5 times the price they pay for a cable modem.. Ok I can already hear the "well I can run a server, bla bla waaaah,waaaah. Yes you can on a Real T-1 and you are paying through the budd mercilessly for it. A T-1 is from $700 - $1500 a month USD and this gives you nothing but a wire from A to B no net access at all. you need to pay another $400 - $800 a month for that. So you're paying $1100 to $2300 USD a month for a T-1 line... 1.5Mbps (MAX, you usually get much less) and the right to run servers, porn sites, warez sites. whatever...
You have a residental cable modem, you pay $40.0 - $60.00 a month for T-1 like speeds for download so you get the net effect that the guy being mercilessly raped by the phone company and ISP does for a miniscule fraction.
and now we bitch about it. Good grief, Us americans are a bunch of snotty spoiled brats. No wonder the rest of the world cant stand us.
I agree, that most of us signed up under the old advertising which promise things that were never possible, and we knew it. and now we are looking for a reason to complain about it... Just like how we get pissed when the police start enforcing the traffic laws on our stretch of highway to work. we are minorly inconvienced and that pisses us off.
My question? what are your alternatives? DSL isnt as fast as 1.5Mbps (some are but it's rare, very rare) sattelite? please dont mention that, I dont need to laugh that hard.. can we say 3sec ping times at the minimum? What have any of you done to create any free alternatives? 802.11b freenets are super easy to create and cost peanuts to build the hardware. (Granted you will never get your precious 10Mbps back. never ever unless you buy your own T-3)
It is about time that people quit whining and start acting. every one of the problems we face today can be solved without billions of dollars, and special laws or lawyers.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I signed up with @home/ATT as soon as it was available in my area (Silicon Valley), and that was almost 2 years ago. Here's what the progression has been in my bandwidth:
Date............Download.....Upload
Mar 2000.....4.5 Mb.........1.5 Mb
Sept 2000....4.5 Mb.........128 Kb
Dec 20001....1.5 Mb.........128 Kb
But I'm still paying the same price! If this continues, soon I'll be better off with IDSL, the only DSL service offered in my area.
The future isn't what it used to be.
So, basically, you're complaining that for fifty dollars a month, you're *only* getting download speeds of a T1, which still go for a hell of a lot more?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
At first I thought your speeds looked impressive, but those caps would make it unusable. I could hit them within two hours easily. On one day I probably downloaded 6 full isos (and not just to be 1337), and I regularly transfer large files to people through my server. At the sustained transfer rate of 10Mbps, you could hit your download cap for the day in 2 minutes - I'd consider that service to have a very low availability. Even if they let you save unused transfers for other days, that service is next to useless for anyone who does more than read the news and email.
My DSL is only 1.5Mbps/384Kbps, but it's a much better deal because I can transfer as much as I want (of course, I haven't tried using the full bandwidth 24/7 for a month straight...). I can't remember the last downtime that was caused by something outside my network (the Linksys router being the main point of failure), and I haven't found any limits other than the basic bandwidth limitations. You may have a fast connection, but I don't see how that can be useable with the limits they put on it. I never knew using the bandwidth you bought was abuse... it may sound like a lot, but even the 10Mbps for "steady transfer" is just a rate for very short bursts according to your description.
I personally think my ISP has done something even better: they let you open any port, and yet the IIS worm attack rate from their subnet is very low - maybe they are smart enough to kick off people who have more worms than real software on their computers, but I haven't found out. That's real abuse of a service, not trying to use the bandwidth you think you have.
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
"...as my warez kiddie neighbor's son found out last week, they are capping uploads to 10MB/day and downloads to 150MB/day. After that point, their filters drop about 25% of your packets and the connection is pretty
much useless until midnight."
The implication that someone who downloads more than 150MB of data in a day is of course linked to some form of mischief is both ludicrous and wrongheaded. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to use more than 150MB of downstream data transfer per day.
There are days where I may do a complete network install of an operating system by FTP... everything from system sources to X11 and perhaps 350 software packages... I could easily hit a few gigabytes in a day... and none of it on any "warez kiddie" (read: illegitimate) purpose.
I don't mean to offend, but, it sounds like the service you need (basically "fast web browsing") is one-way satellite service.
A broadband service that caps data transfer such as you describe is a rip off.
This is an issue where private monopolies aren't really listening to "demand." Yes, a large number of people simply want "fast web browsing," but for the most part, any broadband service will provide that... however, there is a large segment of the computing population who'd like to be able to do more than just that.
It baffles me as to why these companies do everything in their power to curtail this sort of thing. Surely they must realize that if these people could afford "business-class" service and the QOS guarantees that provides, they would have contracted for the service already. So there's certainly no economic motivation--at least, not one that has any meaningful chance of playing out.
(Well, acutally, the above assumes that we're talking about companies who are in the business of providing data services. However, we're increasingly seeing Internet providers that are becoming dominated by media production companies. Time Warner is the perfect example. I've written about this before on Slashdot, and, it seems that large media companies are tailoring commercially available residential internet services to curtail not only alternative media voice, but, of course protect their all-important "intellectual property." Thus, we've got Internet services that behave more and more like television. Custom--and restrictive--browsers, proxies, network filters, asynchronous transfer rates ludicrously biased in favour of downstream (consumptive) usage over upstream (productive) usage... the list goes on. It seems a little insidious, but, the more you look at it... you start to see that from the perspective of a media company, not an ISP, the sorts of business practices being pursued by some broadband providers make more sense.)
bacchusrx.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
As for your comparison with satellite access - I am not sure why you brought this up, but IIRC it costs about $70/month and has horrible latency. Contrast with my 8ms ping times to Yahoo for half the price, and the cable modem wins hands down.
The simple fact remains that your cable company has to pay for a lot of extra T1s every time a handful of warez kiddies join their network. And anything they can do to keep their costs down (and avoid raising rates or going bankrupt) is just swell. Especially if it keeps my level of service high.
Bill
I think the point is that speeds are relative, and if i was getting 4mb/s before, i can reasonably be unhappy when it gets capped at 1.5, and often is way slower. On top of the bandwidth problem, the dns servers seem to be really unreliable. I routinely get 'unknown host' errors when trying to go to frequently visited sites like google or slashdot. As somebody else mentioned, the news servers sometimes don't work, and lastly, sometimes I get 'dhcp server unreachable' for hours.
In short, AT&T has really managed to f&%k up what previously was a pretty awesome service. That's my experience in SF bay area.
The reason I went with DSL (ok, originally there wasn't cable in that area) and stayed with it is because the price isn't that different, I get multiple static IPs, my router is in bridge mode, they don't care if I run FreeBSD, outbound port 80 isn't blocked, and my upload speed is twice what cable's is, with the option to increase it dramatically for an increase of fees. Last time I checked, you can't upgrade your feature set on the cable lines.
:)
... I used to work for Excite@Home!
I've moved once since I got DSL, and purposely selected a location that would allow me to still have DSL access. (Might as well face it, I'm addicted to broadband)...
I have a really decent uptime record, and tight-vnc rocks over my connection, even with an only 30 kilobyte/sec upload stream (yes, I use ssh tunneling from work to get into my home boxen).
The kicker?
I get clueless salesmen coming to my door now telling me that I can now get cable internet access in my neigborhood. I tell them I'm not interested in switching from DSL, and they proceed to tell my how much slower DSL is than cable (not anymore buck-o). They end up leaving my porch confused, bewildered, looking sheepish and often feeling dumb after I set them straight on how their service actually works (they really don't like it when I tell them I used to work for @Home).
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy, and taste good with ketchup.