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.

Comments

whining about the rope

[Lumpy]

@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.

Hmmm

[SuiteSisterMary]

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?

Re:What they *should* have done

[krogoth]

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.