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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."
At least they should be required by law to use sarcastic air quotes when they say "Unlimited." I don't buy their attempts to redefine "Unlimited", either. That's pretty much my definition of "Consumer fraud".
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm fine with schemes like this provided the ISP makes it perfectly clear and obvious when you sign up what your download limitations are and the costs of running over. This allows consumers to make an educated choice about which provider they want to use. Unfortunately, I see this being shoved in the fine print while still advertising "unlimited" internet access. I mean, we are dealing with telecom companies here. I know my bill is a surprise about every other month after all the "taxes and fees" are tacked on to the advertised base price...
Personally I'm supportive of published caps. We know hidden ones have existed for some time. It's far better if you know you're buying 20GB of bandwidth or 100GB and it's fair if those using 100GB aren't subsidised by those using 20.
Don't whine that you bought an unlimited connection for $30/month and you should get to use it without penalty. I do agree connections should never have been sold as unlimited (indeed this addresses that very point) but you're an idiot if you think current networks to the home in the US can deliver that sort of bandwidth at that sort of cost.
The problem in the US is the lack of competition. This should allow prices to be driven down. Our parents and grandparents should be able to buy uber cheap 2GB/month packages.
Look at the UK where almost everyone with a phone line can pick from dozens of DSL providers. Competition helps keep prices in check. More expensive providers offer better customer service etc.
But there's so little competition in the US market that there's serious potential for this to be almost all negative.
What makes even less sense is the varying of both bandwidth and capacity. If you're metering the connection, there's no reason at all that everyone shouldn't get the fastest connection available. That's also how it works in the UK.
What's the point of artificially slowing down data for those on the 20GB tariff who in fact are paying more per byte for the data?
When your bandwidth cap is exceeded your ports are all shut except 80. Your web browser can only get AT&T's page. You have options to (a) pay for another XXX GB of transfer or (b) upgrade your plan.
It ain't all that hard to do this. Making people pay a dollar-per-gigabyte without giving them notice that they've exceeded their limit is clearly not informing the user.
Tag this story lawsuitwaitingtohappen, whatcanpossiblygowrong, goodluckwiththat, monopoly, luserunfriendly and !cool.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Nothing to do with net neutrality as long as you meter all traffic the same way.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
You *poor dears*. Really. I can manage to make it through every month on 40GB... But then Americans aren't typically known for exercising restraint, are they?
You wasteful slob! I managed to make it through most of my life in the 1970s and 80s on less than 40GB total! But then people from whatever country you are from aren't typically known for exercising restraint, are they?
But seriously, bandwidth isn't a finite resource like food or water or oil. There's no reason to restrict ourselves to the stone-age because a handful of media-corporations wish to control the flow of information while raking in boatloads of cash. Your attitude only helps them.
Honestly, can't we just get rid of anonymous posting? Let logged-in users check the checkbox and post 'anonymously', but keep ramifications for people's actions. It would solve this BS troll problem once and for all, since persistent trollers could eventually end up with such negative karma that they couldn't post for a month.
Everyone wins.
You make one big wrong assumption here. You assume the software modifications will go as planned and nothing will be wrong with it and therefore it'll be a one-time cost. First off, I've worked for an ISP that drastically changed the way they track usage and manage ports and it went horrible. It caused so many people to get false AUP captures that it was a fucking nightmare for me as a tech support person answering the phones. Was shut off after a while. Also, you assume that the software, once installed, will not need to be maintained. There is always a cost over time in new software because you need people to maintain and upgrade/service it. That means an increase in the staffing they have on hand, or outsourcing the support to the company that provides the software. Either way, that's extra periodic cost, not a one-time deal.
True. But they won't meter all traffic the same way. Movies on "ATT Movies" won't count against the tier. They will partner with lets say Amazon for unmetered music downloads. In all practicality,, this is the end of net-neutrality.
Nothing to do with net neutrality as long as you meter all traffic the same way.
The next step is clearly going to be "free" downloads from paying partners.
Unless there is a radical change in direction, I give it no more than 2 years before we see the first such offering.
$1/gigabyte is just too prohibitive in a market where netflix and others are offering pseudo-HDTV movie downloads to anyone with a game console, the time is coming.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
So why don't we get together and start municipal fiber projects in our respective towns? I mean, municipalities can get cheap bonds to build out the infrastructure, and than let companies sell internet access over the fiber (similar to how Speakeasy/Covad can sell ILEC DSL lines). Are we not tired of this bullshit yet?
And if you think they are going to meter their partners (aka : people who pay them money), you should share what you're smoking. Barring regulation forcing them to meter everything, this is a direct path to the end of net neutrality.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Yeah but that's communism and evil and prevents competition.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
I mean seriously, you pay your ISP to constantly upgrade their equipment. It doesn't cost much to run it so much of the money should go to upgrades. If they don't manage to be able to do that, they should go out of business.
I mean it's not like you have to dig up the road and lay new fibers. You can use wavelength multiplexing to get more and more data onto those.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexing
If nothing is done, the US will fall even further behind the rest of the world when it comes to internet access.
Furthermore, there is a lot you can do against this by yourself. Of course you probably cannot change your ISP in most regions as they often have local monopolies, but what you can do is to build your own networks. There's software around like OLSRd which you can install onto computers or routers. It implements a meshed routing protocoll. Essentially you turn your wireless network cards into ad-hoc mode. Assign IP-Addresses and start OLDRd. This programm (availiable for preety much all OSes, even Windows) negotiates routes with all the other nodes it can reach. This way you can easily build up large networks which configure themselves automatically. If a node fails, and there is still another way, the network will find it.
This way you can build an additional network, free of any greedy big ISPs. You can use it wherever you want for whatever you want.
http://www.olsr.org/
Yes,
Let's all compare the price of bandwidth technology and services to South Africa, which is clearly similar in terms of technology, development, architecture, services, service density, e-tailers, and so forth. Makes a whole lot of sense. Maybe in 10-15 years time when you've got used to unlimited broadband and cable and your ISPs start throttling your traffic, dropping packets, killing connections, imposing caps and raising prices someone from another developing nation can ask you to cry them a river.
Back to the US: It's ridiculous that the ISPs can't/won't upgrade their infrastructure to cope with rising demand for bandwidth and instead degrade service and (likely) increase prices. $1/GB is unreasonable. I hope the government investigates the cost to industry growth and development in terms of limiting the adoption of services like Netflix online and other high bandwidth services. Of course, some of these ISPs have a vested interested in making services like Netflix less likely to succeed, just as they had an interest in shutting down their usenet services completely unrelated to protecting children.
In the interest of protecting competition and consumer choice I'd like to see regulation preventing these kind of caps and/or charges in areas where two or fewer ISPs constitute a regional monopoly on internet services.
Then you against net-neutrality. The whole point of non-neutrality is to force sites like hulu and itunes to pay Comcast and ATT. This is what the caps will end up producing as they continue to slide the caps downward.
I particularly like "caps ranging from 20 to 150 gigabytes per month, depending on which service speed tier a customer signs up for (AT&T offers DSL tiers ranging from 768kbps to 6Mbps)." If they were really doing caps to keep the internet faster for everyone because they cannot handle the traffic they would cap everyone at 150 GB. But no, they are shrinking the cap based on your connection. They want more people to hit to hit the cap so they can charge a premium. Otherwise people might just buy the less expensive connections so that they never hit their cap. I mean if they are capping me at 150 then I don't need 6 Mbps per month, I'm more likely to hit the cap, I would buy a slower link. But to stop me from doing that they are nice enough to lower the cap on slower connections to make sure I hit it. This is hardly fair.
Giving stuff for free to kill the competition is classic form of anti-competitive behaviour. It is not to the customer's benefit, any more than putting cheese into a mousetrap is to the mouse's benefit.
"Net neutrality" means that the network does not prioritize traffic based on its source or destination. And AT&T doesn't need to outright block itunes.com; it is quite simple to make it slightly slower or have traffic to and from it count against some limit traffic to AT&T's own competing site doesn't count against to give AT&T's site an unfair advantage.
It is also doable without anti-competitive behaviour: simply have multiple possible connection speeds available, so grandma can pick the slowest.
The issue here is not about charging per megabyte transferred; it's about charging per megabyte transferred from some IP addresses and not others.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.