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AT&T Broadband Introduces Tiered Pricing
Joey Patterson writes "It had to happen sooner or later. CNET reports that AT&T Broadband has introduced a tiered pricing plan called UltraLink (3 Mbps down/384 kbps up) for $79.99/month if you buy your own modem and $82.95/month if you lease one of theirs."
what do you need bigger upload on a cable modem for ? they won't let you run any kind of server.
It is a bit steep, considering astound offers 1.5mb each way on a fiber connect for 40$ a month, and it's cheaper if you get phone and cable from them as well.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Bloody hell! Here in Calgary, AB, Canada I have 1.5Mbps down, 640Kbps up, for CDN$34.95 per month with a bought modem, $39.95 with a leased one. Cap is 5GB down, 1GB up.
That's DSL; the cable company pricing is similar, and the performance (I was a cable customer) is virtually identical -- it's theoretically 3Mbps down, but I never saw that. However, there's theoretically no bandwidth cap. That's with Shaw Cable, for the other Canadians reading this: YMMV with Rogers et. al.
Mind you, IIRC, Calgary and Edmonton were the first two cities in NA (maybe the world?) where you could get broadband at any residential address, so the competition has been going on longer, which affects the pricing, but MAN the prices quoted in the article are expensive!
Comcast has been offering a premium service for a few months now:
/ Ad ditionalProducts/serviceupgrades.asp
http://comcast.comcastonline.com/memberservices
They don't seem to promote it though.
"500kbit cable for $50/month"
Ouchies. Broadband in the US is *expensive*, apparently... I have a 2Mbit down/400Kbit up ADSL line here and it costs me $40 Cdn$... about $25 US$ per month.
Not only is it cheap and fast, it's VERY reliable too... I think I've had maybe 2 outages in the last year, and none that lasted more than 2 or 3 hours.
- Jester
I watch in vain as yet more people fail to understand the evils of tiered pricing.
Recently, Case Western University decided to equip thousands of computers with a 1gb/s fiber network. They didn't quite know what people would use the bandwidth for, but they wanted to find out.
Why am I bringing this up? Ordinary users will only pay AT&T the cheapest price possible for a broadband connection. Now, that's $45; soon, AT&T may introduce a $20-$25 package, and theoretically some people now paying the higher price would downgrade to that package.
But there's tons of high-bandwidth applications available that most people don't use yet. Imagine real-time videoconferencing with resolutions as good as a printer. Imagine downloading OS or application upgrades from the Net in seconds. Hell, who would need hard drives anymore; bandwidth would be faster! There's all sorts of things we haven't thought of yet. But as long as AT&T imposes artificial bandwidth caps, that won't happen.
As bad as tiered pricing are upstream caps. That means that two cable modem users can only communicate with each other at ISDN speeds. There goes any useful peer-to-peer connectivity applications. Don't you all remember back when you used Napster, you'd always sort downloads by modem type, and skip anything lower than a T1? Downloading from one of your fellow cable modem users would have taken 8 times as long as downloading from someone with a leased line - but we can't all have leased lines, can we?
Tiered pricing is fine if it's due to technical constraints. If cable lines in San Francisco and Boston, for example, are higher-quality than lines elsewhere, there would be nothing wrong with offering faster service. But AT&T cannot justify offering service slower than what the cable lines allow; doing that will do much to halt the pace of network innovation. Shame on all providers who offer anything less than network capacity, in both directions.
They have 3 tiers:
29.95 - 256 Kb/s
39.95 - 768 Kb/s
49.95 - 1.5 Mb/s (I am currently getting anywhere between 1 and 2.5 Mbits/s)
also look at dyndns.org to get a hostname for your dynamically assigned ip address. it works really well for me.
-- john
I think it is very good. I am in one of the cities in which this service was rolled out, and I just tested my speed. Just as the article says, it is 1.5 Mb downstream and 256 kb upstream. However, the last time I checked it, it was only 128 kb upstream. As a result of this change, I got my upstream speed doubled for no cost :-). Of course, when I originally got the service both upstream and downstream were uncapped and I could get around 2Mb/6Mb, respectively. I am still mad about that, but this change mitigates it somewhat. At least they realize there are users who use their bandwidth, and are offereing a service for them. The one thing I am concerned about is the limits they might place on their "standard" service. Are they going to have a global byte cap like they recently put on the news servers? And if you complain about it, they can always say "We do have a plan available for high-bandwidth users" and force you to use the higher bandwidth plan. I have not yet received any communications from AT&T on this matter, hopefully they will send me something that gives me some more information on the limits and benefits of the different service levels.
Enigma
What they're offering is NOT better than a full T1. Sure, it might be faster on the download side, but the advantage of a T1 is that you have equal bandwidth upstream, as well as a block of static IPs to have your way with....not to mention no restrictions on use. (barring legality of course)
Of course, a T1 is still around $800 per month and this is $80, so obviously this is the better choice for the home user with a limited budget.
Just don't say it's better than a T1....it's a far cry from it.
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I don't think that is the case with AT&T, at least with my service. The cable modem acts as a bridge, it should only pass traffic that is destined for the MAC address of my default gateway (and broadcasts). I don't have my network set up in that way, but if I did I don't think it would cause much more data to be pushed up my cable. Maybe the NetBIOS(except AT&T explicitly blocks NetBIOS) broadcasts from the Windows machines and ARP requests, but the bandwidth consumed would be negligible.
Enigma
Sorry no. It took some searching, but I found their Acceptable Use Policy and:
"Examples of prohibited programs and equipment include, but are not limited to, mail, ftp, http, file sharing, game, newsgroup, proxy, IRC servers, multi-user interactive forums and Wi-Fi devices;"
so you are not allowed to run any servers, nor an open WAP node. I have no personal experience with them so I don't know if they even try to enforce this restriction, but it is there and they could. They want you to pay the business rate even if you aren't making money on it.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
I'm on Time Warner Cable, and they prohibit servers
What TWC are you on? This is what they say about servers. They say keep it secure and don't behave like an idiot. They also do basic scanning for things like open relays.
Look at the top of the bandwidth food chain and you'll see why things cost so much. Teleco's have their lines locked down and can pretty much extort however much they feel like, especially when busineses are now at the point where the internet and networks are essential to compete. Along with the high cost for the proper infrastructure hardware to keep things running smoothly and allow for growth. It's a very slow moving animal but it constantly creeps forward.
Very true
All traffic coming in one side of a bridge will be sent out the other side.
This is only true for a simple bridge. I don't think any vendors currently provide simple bridges, since it is quite easy to incorporate the logic necessary to not forward every packet. From a bridge FAQ I found:
# Learning Bridges The simple bridges described above re-transmit every packet whether this is necessary or not. A learning bridge examines the source field of every packet it sees on each port and builds up a picture of which addresses are connected to which ports. This means that it will NOT re-transmit a packet if it knows that the destination address is connected to the same port as the bridge saw the packet on.
AFAIK, my cable modem (and all DOCSIS compliant cable modems) act in this manner.
But, all that applies to normal bridges. Your cable modem may actually be a router,
It is not a router, it does not use layer 3 (ip) addressing, it uses layer 2 (MAC) addressing. From the DOCSIS specification for external modems (section 2.1):
"The cable modem MUST be capable of filtering all broadcast traffic from the local LAN, with the exception of DHCP"
And from section 3.1.1.2.1:
"The cable modem MUST perform MAC bridging in accordance with ISO/IEC 10038 (ANSI/IEEE Std 802.1D)"
From the 802.1d specification section 7.1::
"The principal elements of bridge operation are:
a) Relay and filtering of frames (emphasis mine)
It would seem all DOCSIS 1.1 compliant cable modems are in fact learning bridges, and do not forward LAN traffic to the RF side of the modem. DSL "routers" often can act as a bridge or a router (or a combination 'brouter'), but I have never seen a cable modem that had those capabilites, all the equipment I encountered in @Home tech support was layer 2 bridging equipment. Of course, I certainly have not seen all possible equipment so YMMV.
Enigma