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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."
... I wonder if this is an easy way of coming down on net neutrality, under the guise of being "rational".
Next month: Slashdot meters trolls posts. Only one per day, or you get charged $4/troll.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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?
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!)
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...
sometimes I'd rather see them charged with something more serious, like libel/slander. Or a rampaging bull. Or... ;)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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.
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?
How about software updates? I'm just curious if software sellers will be coerced into offering quality software on the original install disks, or mailed updates, instead of just expecting that every user will happily download 1/4 of their monthly cap just to keep software current.
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
So now they will need to monitor the amount of bandwidth you use, set up a database to keep track of it, change their billing software so it can deal with variable billing, and verify that the customer actually paid the (variable) correct amount. All to collect a few bucks from a few customers.
There's a reason the phone companies go to unlimited calling plans. It means they save big bucks on the hardware and software needed to keep track of your usage. Those systems are not cheap and they eat into the computing power that could be used for routing calls. So instead they jack up your bill by the average amount you would spend, and let you go to town. They still get the money, but they don't have to maintain (as much of) a billing system.
AT&T will try this for a while, realize it's a losing proposition that annoys their customers, and go back to the way it was.
(This assumes rational behavior, of course. That is definitely not a given)
If you could sustain 1Mbyte per sec that's not a bad rate. One would think that if the system was overloaded, you would fall below that. So what technical purpose can such a limit have? It doesn't seem like it has anything to do with demand management. Realistically its for creating tiered pricing structures - that's the only purpose for which it makes any sense.
Squirrel!
...or charged with a couple hundred thousand volts across their testicles?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
One upside to a unilateral application of bandwidth billing by the ISPs: The implications for Botnets and other malware.
- It provides a financial incentive to users to get their machines cleaned out and keep them that way.
- It provides an easily measurable cost of the traffic imposed by malware, which can then be used in prosecutions against those who deploy and use it.
Which brings up other issues:
- Will AT&T bill for incoming packets? Even those not solicited?
- If you're charged for all incoming packets how do you STOP somebody's botnet from sending you packets? DDoS attacks could become Distributed Denial of Funds...
- Will they charge for ICMP packets?
- How about the packets they use to communicate with and control their modem (which don't even get to the customer's interface)?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If you don't qualify for the faster packages there should be no higher then the next level bill. as if you only qualify for 768k and you do 80GB of usage ($80) over instead of the $5- $20 more for the higher levels. They should make it line max with prices levels for how much download that you want. As well having roll over like there cell phone plan has.
charged with a couple hundred thousand volts across their testicles?
I'm a female troll, you insensitive clod!
At least it's in the right order of magnitude.
Really fair pricing would be like some electric companies: A small "account charge," say, $3/month, and a per-GB or even per-MB fee with no minimum.
If ISPs did this, the "fair" price would probably be somewhere between $1 and $5 for the "account charge" and between $0.05 and $0.50/GB for traffic. A 60GB user might pay $35, a 240GB user might pay $125. It would break the economic model for things like "Netflix online" unless they used really tight compression, but face it, sometimes a plastic disc or a dedicated video-on-demand cable channel really is more efficient than the public internet.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This download quota system is standard practice in Australia. They typically fall into 2 categories - fixed monthly cost (when the quota is reached, your speed is throttled back to dial-up) and uncapped (charged $X for downloads exceeding the quota).
Many plans also count traffic in both directions toward your quota, so the uploads generated by P2P software can result in a significant reduction in your download traffic.
The uncapped charges can be EXTREMELY nasty - for example the Telstra BigPond plans charge (http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/bc/isp-1/telstra-bigpond.htm) 150 per Gigabyte after exceeding a quote of 200 Meg. So $1 per Gigabyte after a quota of 250 Gig doesn't sounds all that bad!
I wonder if I could sue my town or state in so limiting my internet choices through government granted monopoly. Given that all of the major players (who get the government granted monopolies) all seem to be moving towards usage caps it would be nice if it was easier for competitors to enter the market. Particularly with download and upload speeds comparable to cable and without the lag of satellite services.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Seriously, billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded subsidies and all I got was this lousy duopoly.
THL phish sticks
Which brings up other issues:
- Will AT&T bill for incoming packets? Even those not solicited?
- If you're charged for all incoming packets how do you STOP somebody's botnet from sending you packets? DDoS attacks could become Distributed Denial of Funds...
- Will they charge for ICMP packets?
- How about the packets they use to communicate with and control their modem (which don't even get to the customer's interface)?
From extensive research on the behavior of modern ISP's, I can answer all of your questions with 100% certainty, including the one you didn't type out:
- Yes, Hell yes.
- You can't.
- They will.
- Of course.
- Lube will cost extra.
Speaker wire is the reason "unlimited" will never exist in pure form. The same people who purchase $8,000 speaker wires are quite convinced that even if they were capped at 1TB/hour for their holographic porn, it would still be a curly hair shy of the real thing.
I'd have no problem with capped download if the cap decayed at a sensible exponential rate, the same way that gmail's free storage ticks ever upward. If the cap doubled every two years (corresponding to a 40% annual cost reduction in the cost of carrying traffic, which I'm certain the optical portions of the backbone achieve), then ten years from now, the current monthly cap would have evolved into the daily cap. At that rate, you're already watching a three hour HD movie every day of your life, or multibooting every Linux distro that every existed at the same time onto your 256 core processor.
Depending on the cost of your speaker wire, this might or might not suffice.
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.
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.
You must be knew hear.
10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2...1... HAPPY KNEW HEAR!
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?
Will the users have the option to choose between paying for the extra bandwidth or cutting off or slowing the data link when the cap is exceeded?
Some users prefer to know that in no event they are going to pay more and would prefer a dead datalink to an unexpected bill.
Actually many of these users prefer this because they don't trust the ISPs to do correct billing: there are many stories of companies around the world, both private and state-owned, that send massive bills at random just to collect more revenue whenever their stock price goes down and want to show better results for the next quarter investor's report.
This thing happens regularly around the world with water utilities, power utilities, telephone operators, mobile phone companies, and Internet providers, primarily in countries where political corruption is high and the law doesn't work.
I don't know whether such things happen in the US, but in other countries it is as regular as rain in the winter and many users specifically try to find fixed-price plans in order not to let providers do this to them.
So, if a company wants to attract those users who are cautious, then it should offer an option to either switch off the datalink until the next month or slow it down to 64 or 128kbps when the cap is exceeded, until again next month (or other billing period).
This isn't a jab at you per se... more just me laughing at the Slashdot "downloading Linux distros" cliche. People say that 50%+ of internet traffic is warez and mp3s, etc. Frankly, I'm amazed there's enough bandwidth for that, with an army of Slashdotters downloading a hundred Linux distros a day each.
The Internet is out there waiting for us to use it. The ISPs are trying to stifle our use of it.
I use legal services on the Internet to consume media.
Tivo
Hulu
Netflix instant
Xbox Live
gaming both PC and Xbox
downloading Linux updates
amazon unbox
itunes
amazon mp3
pandora radio
revision3 TV
Steam store
EA online store
I use all of these services and depending on the month, usage may be more than 250GB.
Not only is it not consumer friendly, but it's a step in the wrong direction.
This should set off alarms at apple, amazon, netflix, nbc, microsoft, and other media conglomerates.
If we don't have the transfer available, we can't consume these services.
They're using their grammar skills there.
If a person can generate his own electricity and sell it back to the electric company. We should get the same deal when we upload to the internet. Fair is fair.
What?
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/
$1/GB charge if I go over 150 GB, then $1/GB discount if I go under.
You could just adjust your filters in the preferences. Why force your choice on me?
I think all of this is a prelude to the ISP's trying to squeeze extra revenue from content providers, by setting up 'partnership' deals where the bandwidth cap doesn't apply to the partnered content providers.
E.g. Amazon pays the ISP some amount of money per month for the privilege of getting truly unlimited bandwidth to the customers.
If the content providers are smart, they will all band together to 'educate' consumers about this, and setup a website with information about competing ISPs which are available with truly unlimited bandwidth. Maybe if they are *really* smart, they'll all cooperate with Google to build out a competing network to cut out the ISP's in the middle who are trying to put the thumbscrews on them.
Some of the claims here are just outright insanity, honestly you Americans really are a spoilt spoilt group of people, sometimes this makes us foreigners feel envy and other times it's a pure and utter facepalm.
250gb might drive people back to DVD and bluray!
These caps may stop people getting software patches!
etc.
What the hell are you people TALKING about, people are not going to take you seriously if you're going to make such crazy statements.
I could format a PC right now and download a copy of XP or Vista. (on a spare machine)
Then download firefox, nero, azureus, hardware drivers, anti-virus packages, anti-spyware packages, benchmarking tools, mirc, winamp, skype, itunes AND all of the Windows patches, including service pack 3 for XP then download all the updates / definitions for those packages.
Then download a linux iso of my choice, then install that on another partition then install all relevant apps for that AND updates.
Then I could download about 5 popular brand new video games and patches AND cracks (should I be so inclined) for them and I still would be very very unlikely to use HALF of that amount of data for all that.
I could youtube it up for an hour a day, stream some radio, constantly check news sites as I do, re-install steam and re-download the 30gb of games I have on steam I'd STILL not be hitting that cap.
Then I could download some popular movies (again, should I be so inclined) let's say 5 new movies in 700mb format, plus all my favourite TV shows (let's say 6 shows, 4 episodes for the month, 24x350mb) etc
I STILL WOULD NOT BE HITTING THE CAP.
I could do this every single god damned month with a 250gb cap for goodness sakes, do you people re-install and re-download everything, every month?
Let alone the fact that I shouldn't be pirating the movies, shouldn't be pirating the TV shows, shouldn't be pirating the games, even with over the top crazy bandwidth usage, (legitimate) I'd have a hell of a time hitting more than 150gb a month.
Now before you hit the reply button I want to make several things clear.
1, caps suck, I totally and utterly agree, ideally it would be unlimited for everyone
2, putting a cap in place and NOT providing a metering tool is bullshit! if you're going to cap users, damnwell let them see their usage (the Aussie ISP's can do it)
3, if you're going to charge extra per gb, there needs to be a clear notification to the user when they are close (again, Aussie ISP's can do this) furthermore this needs to be made clear to the client before switching their connection to this 'plan'
I don't like caps but some of the claims you people make are bonkers, absoloutely bonkers, I live with a 25gb 'peak' and 40gb 'offpeak' plan in Australia and that's a recent change, I was on 10peak/20offpeak for 2 years before this.
25/40 is restrictive, yes but it's not un-usable, not in the slightest, I'd be very comfortable to be honest with the same 65gb just in a single block rather than peak / offpeak and yes I download pretty much all I want (TV shows especially, TV over here blows)
What does suck is if you're a bunch of guys in a share house, say a nice uperclass pad with well paid guys in there, all geeks, say 4 of you, then 250gb could start to be a problem.
What you do need is the ISP's to offer upgrades to the plans, or better notice about switching users on these plans, metering tools, ways to inform the customer the limit is close, you need competition and alternatives.
I can fathom a share house of completely legitimate internet use of complete geeks (not meant as an insult) using maybe 500gb in a month but that's a very very rare instance and in that case surely 4 geeks putting a bit of coin in together could afford some kind of business plan which offers substantially more (we have those here)
Ultimately the point of my post is that some of you pulling a bleeding heart over 250gb are really just making yourselves look ridiculous, seriously people.
We've got people over here gett
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time.
And I thought you were just saving bytes to avoid the cap.
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.
it's funny as hell to see so many people talking seriously about how many gigs / months you can download, or about municipal fiber. i live in romania, and i bet 99% of you don't know where that is. the lowest plan comes with unlimited internet, 100 mbps metropolitan download, tv, and a phone with unlimited calls in the same network, all for about 15 euros. competition is a beautiful thing, isn't it? the only competition americans get is how companies get to screw you harder.
funny pics