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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."
Great: do you have _any idea_ what the infrastructure costs of something like that are? Backup fiber, alternative, bandwidth peering costs? And getting the Tier 1 or even Tier 3 providers to give you a feed, with the 'business lunches' that their VP's are fed, pack in their wallets, or suck up their noses?
I've had to deal with some of the bandwidth salespeople of mid-size and larger ISP's, and they're worse than retirement home salesmen. They tell you to "dream" a lot, but don't want to talk about the details of how their disaster recovery works, how many fibers they'll actually install, or about where they keep coming up with this "5 9's" number, since it's obvious from the news reports that they can't even make 98% claims for the last 3 years.
The costs of having a commercial ISP deal with that for me is like the cost of paying a mechanic to change my oil: it's well worth the price to keep my hands clean.