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."

Comments

Wow - it's cheaper (less than half that) in Canada

[Rikardon]

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 too

[kawika]

Comcast has been offering a premium service for a few months now:

http://comcast.comcastonline.com/memberservices/ Ad ditionalProducts/serviceupgrades.asp

They don't seem to promote it though.

Re:I can't believe some of you would complain...

[forkboy]

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.

Re:Power users?

[Enigma2175]

so they buy a hub, because it's cheaper, and then all your lan data gets thrown to the cable modem, which dutifully passes it on to the upstream gateway, which then deals with (and disgards) it.

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.

no servers

[phriedom]

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.