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."

Comments

Re:So how much data is that

[BalorTFL]

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.)

New Entrants?

[maz2331]

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?

Re:Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"?

[GrpA]

  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

Re:Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"?

[cibyr]

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).