Slashdot Mirror
AT&T Begins a Trial To Cap, Meter Internet Usage
An anonymous reader writes "On the heels of Comcast's decision to implement a 250-GB monthly cap, and Time Warner Cable's exploration of caps and overage fees, DSL Reports notes that AT&T is launching a metered billing trial of their own in Reno, Nevada. According to a filing with the FCC (PDF), AT&T's existing tiers, which range from 768 kbps to 6 Mbps, would see caps ranging from 20 GB to 150 GB per month. Users who exceed those caps would pay an additional $1 per gigabyte, per month."
They do realize that they are getting up to the point in cost that they will be driving people *back* DVDs and other media, right? Blue-Ray suddenly sounds like a deal for movies.
And driving away customers to a better paying deal is not a good thing in any market, much less a harsh modern market in the post-speculator market of today.
Idiots. They should be making sure they are making a reasonable profit without shoving off your potential customers.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
Was in the age of Dial-Up. I remember that there were a few ISPs back in the mid '90s that charged $20/month for a limited amount of time online...somewhere between 30 to 50 hours per month. But when other ISPs offered unlimited time online for the same price (or $25 to $30 per month), it was a no-brainer.
Of course, this was also back when even a mid-size municipal city (80,000+ population) could have three or four local ISPs to choose from.
Now, if you live in a place like Minneapolis, your only choices are Comcast or Qwest. If both decide to switch to a capped bandwidth, you're screwed.
that's nothing. Rogers has a 60gig limit here in Canada.
If they work anything like those in Australia, then they wont be advertised as unlimited, but the actual cap will be in small print. Still, most ISPs here give you tools to monitor your usage, so hopefully the same will be implemented in the US. Why not shape rather than charge extra though?
Hey, for all you American's, this is almost like saying "Welcome to Australia mate!" except your internet is probably still cheaper than ours. On the upside at least our ISP's now generally advertise just how much data you get with your plan - and generally if you go over, you don't get billed, but it gets throttled to a 64kb line.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
At 1Mbyte per sec, its 250000 seconds worth, or about 30 days worth.
Nice try, but you're off by, oh, an order or two of magnitude...
At 1Mbyte/sec, you're looking at less than 3 days until you hit the 250GB cap.
At the same rate, it would be less than 6 hours until the 20GB cap would be hit (although presumably plans with that much bandwidth would have higher caps.)
Hell, I wish that Gmail's free storage grew at a sensible exponential rate. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure it grows at a logarithmic rate...
Now, take your current Internet access bill and multiply it by 1000. So stop complaining.
(Yes, yes, get off my lawn, too.)
2,592,000 seconds hath September, April, June, and November.
A "slow" DSL connection of 1 million bits/sec would chew up 2.592 trillion bits, or 324 billion bytes, a bit above the 250GB cap of one ISP and a bit over twice that of another.
That's American trillions and billions and millions for you Brits out there.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I noticed that here in Pittsburgh, we have a relatively new entrant into the DSL space (Cavtel) who are offering the maximum possible speeds(up to 8 Mb/s, depending on line quality) with no caps and no tiers and they advertise a price lower than Verizon's 3 Mb/s service. Basically, they set themselves up as a CLEC and have access to the last-mile copper and their own backbone (probably transit) links.
I wonder if the caps will make it profitable for more of this type of activity to take place? Could we see some alternative DSL providers open up shop?
That's correct, although it's written as 1c per Kilobyte in the contract.
People would freak out if they saw "0.5 Gb Included, $10,000 per Gb" in the contract, so it's written as "500Mb included, 1c per kb thereafter"
Yes, there are actually plans like that in Australia...
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
Excuse we while I wipe the dripping sarcasm off your post =) On a serious note, I intend to pursue the muni broadband idea with my local town, as they already tried to do it once and got smacked by Comcast.
No, not even sort of. There actually is a metric arse ton of idle fiber between Australia, Asia, and other parts of the world. Nobody is clamouring to lay more because it's actually not needed, at least not any time soon.
This page (below) gives a total fiber capacity of four terabits per second, and 4Gbps via satellite to the outside world.
http://www.business.nsw.gov.au/investment/infrastructure/
The figures they use are on the anal side of conservative for fiber, and probably only true of satellite if their hands are utterly tied - it's expensive, they don't pay for what they aren't using, so no guarantee it'll be available when it's suddenly needed. The telcos are rather secretive when it comes to the specifics of their infrastructure at the best of times, they do have quite a bit more than what they claim. (Ex DSD drone, this kind of thing was important to my work for a while)
Of course, but it's largely a factor of our geography. Data doesn't magically get from A to B and when you are as far away from pretty much everything (including the other side of the same country) the economics are inevitably different to places that are more centrally located and/or have high population densities of their own.
That's bullshit. The population density of Australia's capital cities is way higher than that of America. People point at Australia's low population density and say "that's why we have slow internets!", but they fail to notice that most of our country is desert, and most of our population is clustered in a few cities (more than half of our population lives in just 4 cities).
It's not exactly rocket surgery.
About 8 years ago, I had Time Warner (Road Runner) service in San Diego. I got about 800KBps download speeds for about $50 a month.
Then I moved to another area and had Cox High-Speed Internet for 6 years. I got about 800KBps for about $50 a month.
Now I'm back in Time Warner's area, and I get about 800KBps for about $50 a month.
The best word I can think of to describe broadband in my region is "stagnant." :-/
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Because the local ISPs will throw money at city councils to have them kill the projects.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
I buy tons transit from Cogent and Hurricane Electric at dirt cheap prices (less than $10/Mb) for my business. On top of that, I can get to a POP such as Equinix in downtown Chicago or Elk Grove Village by leasing excess capacity on the Illinois Tollway's fiber loops, which they rent out at nominal charges.
I've done my homework.