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AT&T To Introduce Broadband Caps
rekenner writes "In the upcoming weeks, AT&T customers are going to start receiving notices that their broadband services are going to have a monthly cap, starting in May. DSL users will have a cap of 150 GB per month, while U-Verse users will have a more 'generous' cap of 250 GB per month. However, unlike other caps, it won't be until your third month of overage, on the life of the account, that you'll be charged an overage. Thanks, I guess."
What's the average Netflix data rate? That couldn't have anything to do with this now could it ...
the consumer gets screwed.
"Caps" are the worst way of doing business, designed to cover the fact that they engaged in blatant false advertising.
I noticed yesterday that I had been downloading about 3 GiB yesterday. I was mostly just listening to last.fm through rhythmbox. So if I used that much every day (on average), I would use about 30*3=90 GiB a month. That's a tad too close to the cap, I think.
what about Directv VOD data / other data.
As AT&T and Directv have deals and there is roomer of AT&T buying Directv?
Why did AT&T bother to put fiber all over town for it's customers' if they don't want us to use the bandwidth? They are Ma Bell, do they really have a shortage of bandwidth?
As availability of multimedia increases, what was once an unusually excessive user (subsidised by everyone else) becomes a regular user. Now I hope we all agree that words like "unlimited" are false advertising, but what should be in its place? The two obvious possibilities are capping - with possible charge for overage - and shaping. Or both. What do geeks want to see? What do you perceive the wider Internet using community wants to see?
Would hate to still be on DSL.
Other ISPs have talked about doing this often... I hope this is not the beginning of the whole industry making this shift.
(150 gigabytes) / (31 days) = 58.7240143 kBps
(250 gigabytes) / (31 days) = 97.8733572 kBps
That's some bs.
"I like it when the red water comes out.."
I just don't understand why americans tolerate ISPs enforcing ridiculous caps. From a swedish perspective it seems kind of backwards, I don't really know of any ISPs here that have caps and it really seems like a concept take from the early days of consumer broadband (mid-to-late 90s there were a few swedish ISPs that tried the whole thing with caps but they were pretty much forced into obscurity since most ISPs didn't cap).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I recently switched to Comcast Business Class to avoid the bandwidth caps since my family and I use Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services quite often. I actually almost switched to U-Verse because they offered a better cable deal and unlimited bandwidth... Guess not any more!
~ Mooga
I just want truth in advertising.
If they are setting a cap then the equivalent bandwidth rate to the cap must be presented more/in larger print than the peak or line bandwidth.
250GB/month = 250*100*8/(30*24*60*60) = 771Kb/sec
Then let the different services fight over the prominent number the capped bandwidth number.
Having a 20Mb/sec connection is not that usefull if you can't use it most of the time.
What's the average Netflix data rate?
On Xbox 360, 1.8 GB per movie (source).
Just as I'm dumping them. They keep raising their rates, while making their service suck more and more. Great business plan AT&T!
Interesting way things are going. Internet companies are slowly forcing us to host everything we "own" in the "cloud", while ISP's are slowly enforcing usage caps. At some point we won't have enough bandwidth to bandwidth to access anything.
I have no problem with caps as long as they are well advertised and your usage is plainly knowable real-time. I am not sure why we think you should be able to consume as much as you want for no addition fee. My mom likely uses 1GB or less a month... why should she get charged the same as me who uses 100GB easily? Granted, it shouldn't be linear... but I put more load on the system, I should pay more.
On the liberal side, I think we should mandate competition in every market and a minimum 1Mb line for all Americans.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Hate to disabuse you, but nothing will get cheaper or faster because of this.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
That's hardly the only pricing model for hosting.
Others include a minimum guaranteed always-on bandwidth (for example 4 Mbps) with a capped "burst bandwidth" and simply paying a fixed amount for guaranteed bandwidth.
But hey, don't let me stop your attempts at trolling and/or astroturfing for the ISPs...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I suppose that's better than having a cap but refusing to admit it, or refusing to give any indication of what the cap might actually be.
Technoli
The two obvious possibilities are capping - with possible charge for overage - and shaping. Or both. What do geeks want to see?
I, and several other geeks whose Slashdot comments I've read, appear to want home Internet service providers to take a third option. Route revenue from subscribers into long-term investment in the network to improve the capacity of the service rather than paying short-term dividends to shareholders. This goes double for those parts of the country where the typical home connection has a 5 to 10 GB per month cap because cable and DSL aren't available.
If pricing were based on actual usage, ISPs wouldn't be able to rake in large profits from people barely using their connections.
It's because the economic model is different from say water or gas. No physical resources are consumed. The impact on the service provider is the network capacity you're consuming. This is nothing more than a do-nothing way to rustle up more income from users.
Even if you're a low volume user, you probably still expect that one big file a month you download to get to you quickly.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Here's the thing, ATT will be capping the bandwidth of "Internet" usage. This is separate from the usage of the streaming HDTV signal that ATT provides to U-verse customers. One could run the TV streaming 24x7 and record 4 shows at once and run many times the bandwidth cap and there's no cap or additional fees. The issue lies in what you do with your computers. They are basically coming out and admitting that it's not a bandwidth issue, it's a services issues. ATT wants to own parts of what you do such as cloud gaming services and video streaming services. When you use their services they can be exempted from the caps, thus crushing competition like Netflix or Hulu. This isn't about bandwidth or caps or infrastructure, It's about greed and it's about net neutrality. Does anyone find it coincidental that this comes the week after the FCC net neutrality rules got struck down?
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
I just don't understand why americans tolerate ISPs enforcing ridiculous caps.
Because most of them don't have the financial capital to start their own ISP to compete with the ones enforcing ridiculous caps. Heck, many areas are lucky to have 5 GB/mo because the alternative to satellite and WiMAX is dial-up.
... and for everything happening server side, forcing you to consume bandwidth for things that used to be handled on your computer directly.
I have a 3 mbs DSL line with AT&T. Doing the math tells me I could download a max of 32.4 gigs a day
(3000 Bits Per Second / 8 (to get Bytes per second)) * 3600 (seconds in an hour) * 24 (hours in a day) = 32,400,000
I could theoretically reach my limit in 5 days. That would be just a little over a terabyte a month if I downloaded 24x7 every day @ 3 mbs. I don't use the 150 gigs now, but ask me again in a year or two since my usage is steadily going up year after year.
We tolerate this mostly because of the magical "I" word, infrastructure. It was only recently that mobile providers were told to open up their towers to other carriers, allowing local service providers like MetroPCS and whatnot to participate in what used to be dominated by ATT, Verizon and T-mobile. A big push for that came thanks to Google'lobbying, and right now the people that own the phone and cable lines are still making that exact same argument as was made for the cellphone towers, and they're winning.
However, I posted earlier that this might be just the impetus necessary for companies like google to once again come to the rescue.
http://news.cnet.com/Google-lobbies-for-open-wireless-networks/2100-1039_3-6190863.html
I am gone.
My 90-year-old grandmother uses more bandwidth than that, videoconferencing with the kids. It took ten hours calling the incompetents at AT&T's 888 number -- most of waiting on hold, half the calls, eventually dropped-- to get the DSL line in.
What happened to the era when there were local offices and someone responsible?
It's a good first step toward metered service.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Usage caps do absolutely nothing to limit the amount of data your customers use. ISPs problems arise when a large portion of their customers use their cap at the same time... usually around 6-8pm. The rest of the day the ISP is idle for the most part. The people hitting caps like this are doing so because they are using their connection 24hrs/day. ALL ISPs in the US throttle peer to peer traffic, even if they don't admit it. So these people are already slowed way down during this peak period. So why are they doing it? New fees, plain and simple. It's the equivalent of credit card overages.
It simply makes no sense imposing data caps these days. Think about how much more data you use than you did just a few years ago - Streaming services (Netflix, Hulu), digital distribution (Steam, D2D, Amazon), general content, etc.
Time Warner tried this in Austin a couple years ago and it backfired on them. They lost a load of customers. I actually switched to U-verse because of it. They ended scrapping the whole idea. This is their chance to shine and announce: "no data limits" "we miss you come back and enjoy all the Internet" As far as the whole "98% of users won't be impacted by this change" BS... I'm going to call BS on that and go a little further. Even if people don't hit the cap, they like having the unlimited option available. Example: If my hard drive crashes, I have over 300GB of games to download from steam. And that's only the ones I'm currently playing!
Call them and complain (be firm but be nice). I called and got disconnected the first round after a 5 minute hold. The second time when the automated system asked why I was calling I said "I'm pissed off!" I was immediately connected to a rep! The rep said he didn't know anything about it. His supervisor said the same thing.
And if they still go through with this crap - switch. Vote with your wallet folks!
And we're still fighting to have the caps abolished and have the CRTC actually step in and
do something about this BS. Of course, some places in the states will fold, and at some
point the world will follow. Just as with the copyright laws, etc.
In the land of the free, you're going to have free speech, but after X amount you're going to
get a warning and then after 3 warnings (gee, that sounds sooo familiar) you're going to have
to pay for it at extortion rates. If you want to see/read more, feel free:
http://openmedia.ca/meter
-T.
What's this got to do with Net Neutrality? It's throttling back traffic and charging for overage - it's a Business Model - not entirely unlike how they charge for Long Distance.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The second my contract expires, AT&T can kiss my money goodbye. /refuse/ to have a data cap.
I don't have a lot of other options, I'll probably have to get some random satellite internet provider, but I
Granted, I have no idea how much data I use (it's probably well below the 150 GB threshold), but the principle of a data cap is ludicrous.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
As a condition of its purchase of Alltel, Verizon was forced to sell all its accounts in certain parts of the midwest. Maybe that's one of the reasons why they want the limits in place by May.
Between April and June AT&T is picking up all the accounts Verizon and Alltel had in this area of Minnesota (in areas where Verizon and Alltel territories overlapped when Verizon bought the smaller carrier).
It might be coincidental, but it provides me an opportunity to rant, either way. Forcing Verizon to sell the accounts to AT&T is just BS!, especially since we chose Verizon for its coverage where our customers are, and because AT&T in our area has a reputation for poor customer service and spotty network coverage (many dropped calls).
It does seem like something AT&T would do, however--to put some limits in place before they pick up more Verizon customers, including those with active data plans.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Actually, in providers world there is no such term as cap, we operate bandwidth not plain MB. And if your watch through tier 1\2 providers advertising, only price is MBps. Easy explanation that AT&T overselling theirs bandwidth, and too greedy to buy more from other tier 1 ISP, or get upgrade on their own equipment. All that makes there advertising complete bullshit.
Why don't they just charge more? If the network is starting to reach its limits, then why not charge more for a top tier package, take the extra money raised and invest it into making their network better?
That's what you'd get with 512 kb/s.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Clarification is nice, especially in this case -- I had assumed around 30 GB/month was a reasonable amount. Now AT&T is telling me 150 GB is reasonable -- 5x more!
Furthermore, their overage rate $0.20/GB (in 50 GB chunks) is quite reasonable.
Some people will whine these are starting rates, and AT&T can change them. Certainly, but then they have to deal with their own precedents set internally. Somebody looks really bad if they have to raise alot, and they will fight.
If I remember correctly, in certain areas Comcast tried to implement bandwidth caps and the feds stepped in and stopped it because they couldn't prove that it cost them more money to maintain their network when everything was unlimited vs capped.
So, with the bandwidth cap in place, I for one will be sure to turn off all the internet connected devices in my home.
No 'smart energy' monitor panel for sure since it's always speaking to the power company, no more monitoring my DVR when outside my house.... and all the new internet aware appliances that were promised will now go to the wayside.
This kills my ability to run any type of support business from my home office since my remote support options will now eat up bandwidth.
All voip and Skype solutions are going to have to be watched closely.
No more offsite backups sent over the wire either.....
How much is 150 GB? How many hours of youtube or typical game playing will it take to use that up? How many windows updates will it take? If they want to limit traffic, they should provide some tools to help customers gain more control over their data usage. For example, lots of advertisers make heavy use of video on popular websites. I don't want stuff like that eating into my monthly cap, and I would like some tool or option to block that type of traffic.
AT&T U-Verse traffic is not included in the cap.
AT&T not counting their U-Verse video traffic is effectively the same as Comcast not counting their video bandwidth too. It doesn't matter if the service provider delivers their own video content via IP multicast (U-Verse), RF (Comcast) or discs strapped to trained pigeons.
Any download cap by any ISP who also provides video service is anti-competitive.
Putting moderation advice in your
AT&T Invests In Onlive and now this will KILL IT
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Invests-In-Onlive-Streaming-Gaming-104736
This gives me yet another reason to say "never again" to AT&T--as if I really needed more reasons. Their service sucks, their customer service sucks, and their billing service is criminal. I can only hope that one of these days some of those assholes will start ending up in jail over their crooked billing practices.
...I honestly don't mind this one. I mean, almost all of AT&T's DSL customers get only 1.5Mb/s or 3Mb/s down (I get the latter). IF I was watching an 80 minute movie on Netflix, that is approximately, at the very very most, 1440000KiB (about 1.37GiB). I'm not going to watch the equivalent (or close to the equivalent) of 100 80-minute movies streaming in a month, no way. I still wish that they wouldn't use caps, but this one I can deal with. If I was constantly using Bittorrent, though... not so much.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Sad but not unexpected move from the Death Star. Move to a territory with FIOS and (preferably) another large cable company if you're a big time leacher like a I am. Still even with 30/30 FIOS I doubt I hit 250 Gigs a month, though I would need to check my Newsbin to be sure.
1) Many of us don't. My ISP has no caps. I could use AT&T if I wanted but I don't, and this is just one more reason. You make it sound universal which only says you've done no homework on the topic. Some ISPs have hard caps meaning you get charged overage after a certain amount. Some have soft caps, meaning they will just yell at you if you run torrents all the time but there's no specific limit. Some have no caps at all. Also can depend on the particular package you sign up for.
2) You think this is an America only problem? Talk to an Aussie some time, see how things are over there.
AT&T is highly anti-competitive, master of bundling and back-room deals.
As far as evil corporate empires go, I would rank them tied with Walmart, Haliburton, SAIC, Exxon-Mobile, and Blackwater Worldwide.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
And those services would be what? Comcast? Cellular?
I remember when I lived in Australia for a period of time and had to deal with this.
I don't want to go through that ever again...
Where are our riots and crazy people throwing Molotov cocktails at AT&T buildings?
I've had a 60GB cap in Canada for years now!
Its time your internet sucks as well!
Any company that offers "unlimited" and then charges extra for people using what the company deems to be "too much" should be forced to offer a rebate to those who don't use enough. So, top 2% of users pay extra $10, bottom 2% get $10 rebate.
That's for SD. Quoteth the article: "For high definition movies, the average encoding bitrate is around 3200Kbps and one user would transfer about 3GB of data."
You can see (and change) Netflix's chosen bitrate by pressing ctrl+alt+shift+s in the Silverlight window.
fwiw, my available bitrates:
500, 1000, 1500, 2600, 3800
Whether or not there should be caps at all is certainly a valid point, but hear me out. I really wish other companies would state what their caps are, rather than imposing arbitrary secret limits you don't know about until you hit them. At least if you know what the cap is, you can a.) hold them to their promise, even if it is rather unimpressive b.) compare providers more accurately b.) budget accordingly Just a thought.
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
... this is your get-out-of-jail-free card, since they are unilaterally changing the terms of your current contract.
If you have multiple providers in your area, this is a really good time to research your alternatives.
If you have alternatives, call AT&T up and tell them you want to switch. They are likely to be more accommodating than usual when they realize they aren't going to get their penalty money.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
150 GB seems pretty generous. In months where I don't download any ISO images, my usage is around 3-4 GB/mo. That includes youtube watching, some gaming, general web browsing, and some Netflix streaming by my wife. I would imagine that 95% of AT&T's users will be in zero danger of ever hitting the 150 GB cap.
For perspective, I have the fastest DSL service available in my area at 6 Mbit/s. That's 600 KB/s. To hit 150 GB/mo my connection would have to be saturated for 69 hours. I sleep ~8 hours a night and work ~8 hours a day. In order to hit the 150 GB cap my connection would need to be saturated approximately one quarter of the time I'm at home and awake.
Alternately, one can look at it this way. My non-movie usage will probably never be above 10 GB/mo. That leaves 140 GB/mo for watching HD video. Assume the HD video completely saturates my paltry 6 Mbit/s connection. So a cap of 150 GB gives me my basic non-video web browsing/gaming plus 32 feature length (2 hour) movies per month.
Every day it seems, some slashdot post complains about bandwidth caps. Quit whining! 150 GB for $20/mo is pretty good if you ask me! ;)
- We don't pay for electricity by how many amperes we can pull down the lines
- We don't pay for water by how fast it comes out the faucet
- We don't pay for natural gas by how quickly we can burn it
- We don't pay for cell phone minutes by how fast we can talk
- We don't pay for gasoline by how fast our car goes (unless you buy the high octane stuff
I could go on... the point is, paying for data by speed is an outdated model. It's easy to provide speed, except perhaps at peak hours. It's not easy to provide a huge pile of data to a tiny minority of your subscribers, and still keep minimum quality levels for everyone else, despite all of them paying the same amount for the service. It's also not fair. I'm no fan of the phone companies (and even less of the cable co's), but if 1% of their users cause 90% of the traffic, then that 1% -should- pay more! And I should pay less!
Here's "how it should be" (tm)
- Users should be guaranteed a -minimum- speed (not these meaningless maximums they currently sell at)
- Users should pay by the gigabyte.
This makes the most sense--those who download huge amounts of stuff can pay $50/mo for it. The rest of us normal people who maybe stream an hour a day average, and download nothing much more than their email and some web surfing should have an option to pay for a cheaper account. We have ATT dsl and $20/mo is a decent deal, though our connection is a bit on the slow side (1 Mbps max... and apparently a 150 GB cap coming soon) but I would happily pay $10/mo for a guaranteed 1 Mbps line and 50 GB/month. Most months I'd use a fraction of that, buy we're currently watching 24 over netflix, and, well...
Perhaps I'm a curmudgeon, but if a netflix movie averages 1.5 GB, you'd have to watch 3 movies a day to hit a 150 GB limit. That's 6 hours of TV a day. If you're watching 6 hrs of TV a day, you're what's wrong with this country. Get off the couch! /rant
"Oh THAT'S what net neutrality was all about," said the teabagger, ignorantly.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
U-Verse TV is paid for per month per box anyway. I don't know of any provider that meters TV service; do you?
Since most U-Verse subscribers are only using a small fraction of their U-Verse DSL line's speed (mine shows a 36Mbps line speed, but I only pay for 3Mbps Internet service), I'm not sure why we would expect the TV service to be metered. It's not like Comcast bills their users for how much of the cable RF bandwidth the video signals are using.
U-Verse TV service is however limited - no matter how many boxes I rent (I have two, I think you can go up to eight), I can only have three HD streams coming into the house at one time (plus a couple more SD streams). I have seen the DVR recording 5 shows simultaneously, but that's the absolute limit, so technically there is a cap on the TV service.
Putting moderation advice in your
How does one do that on a console? Specifically, the Xbox 360?
Wow. We use Cox Business Internet and for some reason I can't recall I thought there were no caps. Just goes to show - looks to me like the very best service available already has a 250 GB per month cap! So once again - this is really no news LOL.
The telecoms should be allowed to implement caps only if they are required to advertise their speed as the maximum data rate that would be sustainable under the cap. You're not really getting 10Mbps if you can't get 10Mb for every second.
So for example, there are 2,592,000 seconds in a month(60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 30 days).
If the cap is 150GB the company should not be legally allowed to advertise their connection as anything greater than 150GB/2,592,000.
150GB = 150,000MB = 150,000,000kB = 1,200,000Mb = 1,200,000,000kb
1,200,000,000kb/2,592,000 seconds = 462.962kbps
Blazing fast broadband.
150GB converted to popular torrent media formats CD Rip: About 100MB - ~1500 per month Standard DVD Rip: About 700MB - ~215 per month Netflix Movie: About 1400MB ~ 107 per month Blu-Ray Rip: About 4000MB - ~37 per month
So right now, many users will not come anywhere near using 250GB per month. But what will happen in a few years? Remember when a T1 (1.5 MB) was a "big pipe?" Maybe we should rise up against the status quo infrastructure and get some peer-to-peer networking in place again. We used to do it with UUNET and TrailBlazer modems across phone lines to share usenet groups. Now we have WiFi devices. Now there are more of us in more places. Think about it. What could we do if we pooled that 250GB per person per month and did some of our own localized storing and forwarding? Create some side roads off the Internet super highway.
I'd be surprised if this were not already going on in universities. Come on you college kids of the 2010's! Pick up where those of us in college during the '70's left off!
It's not entirely surprising that they would treat internal network traffic differently. U-Verse traffic travels on AT&T's internal network. Anything going to or coming from the internet at large needs to go through their pipes to the outside world.
Incidentally, I was recently at a presentation by Shaw Cable in Canada, and apparently streaming data (netflix, youtube, etc.) is currently only 15% of their network traffic, with 45% being peer to peer (all sorts, including vpn, skype, etc.) and 36% being web/email. They also said that they have seen a 60% increase in overall traffic since July 2010, and it's spread more or less proportionally across all data types.
But it's not likely that it will be.
AT&T is using the Enron bullshit bandwidth model. If you are fortunate enough to fill the pipe AT&T sells you, then you must pay.
Using netflix on at&t dsl this year, I;ve seen one movie in HD...for about 5 seconds. Most netflix movies register about 50% on the quality bar with a 6Mbps pipe. More than enough bandwidth to receive HD. Speed test show ma bell failure.
This is just like charging more for long distance.
If you use U-Verse TV/PPV, you stay local, on their network, they don't have to pay anyone else.
You use netflix, they have to send it to a peer, which is roughly the same to making a long distance call.
I realize most people get free long distance now, but its not really difficult to understand that it costs AT&T less to provide you service that stays exclusively on their network than it does to send it through a peer.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
"We just don't have a choice."
Your choice is to vote in someone that will regulate the industry. We have the same problem in Canada...in most places there's one cable company and one phone company and they don't really compete against each other in any meaningful way--they both offer similar options and similar caps.
You don't care because you're not a high usage subscriber. The people with U-verse (such as myself) that download a lot of media might have to cut back on our TV/movie/game time. That is, of course, unless we want to subscribe to the U-verse television service *COUGH anti-competitive COUGH*.
I recently switched to Comcast Business Class to avoid the bandwidth caps
I've read stories about someone trying to get Comcast Business Class Internet in a home office, but Comcast initially refused to set up a Business Class account because the customer also had residential cable television at the same address. Comcast requires separate accounts for residential and business services, and it appears a lot of front-line call center representatives don't know how to set up two accounts. And if you have Business Class Internet, you also lose the approx. $15/mo discount on cable TV for also having Internet on the same account.
AT&T says this is an alternative to throttling, but in N California the reality is that they are already throttling bandwidth to DSL subscribers to give preferential treatment to Uverse customers. My 3 mbits/sec (best I can get) service is capped at 1.5 mbits/sec for much of the day.
but given what i went through TW will never get another cent from me as long as i live.
Time Warner is no longer in the cable operator business; it spun off TWC as a separate company in March 2009, just as it had spun off Warner Music Group a few years earlier. Do you boycott TWC or all three (TW, TWC, WMG)?
They are milking their cash cow. Pharmaceuticals do this with drugs as they head off-patent, jacking up the price until they lose their monopoly to generics. It is good in a way, as others will be able to more easily justify a competitive business model. However, the change can seem glacial, like the shift from oil to alternative energy. Companies like Clear should be able to make hay from this. Their bandwidth offers actual throughput equal to DSL. The problem with wireless is that their reliability is not equal to DSL, as shared wireless bandwidth quality can vary more than wired should. I've been using AT&T DSL for about three years, costing almost $50 with basic phone service that we never use. This might be just enough to dump them for Clear or something else.
So I know it's uncool to RTFA, but AT&T is not in fact implementing a hard cap like Comcast wherein they cut you off completely after you exceed it. Instead, they just charge $10 per 50 GB that you go over. Yes it sucks from a Net Neutrality standpoint that they aren't including U-Verse traffic in the "cap," but at the end of the day really all that's happening is that ISPs are moving to a business model more like the phone companies have been using for decades.
I was just doing that, researching the possibility of switching. Unfortunately every other provider in my area has one or both of the following issues:
Notorious horribly terribad service
Existing bandwidth caps that are lower than the proposed 150 GB's a month
Not that I think my household uses anywhere near the cap. I'd just like to drop their service on principle.
Step 1: Oversell your infrastructure and hope everyone doesn't use the network at the same time
Step 2: Profit!
Step 3: When people complain their service is slow, institute caps and overage charges to discourage them from using the service they're paying for.
Step 4: More Profit!
Don't worry, the market will regulate itself...
I'm a heavy hulu, netflix and Sony store (from ps3) user and Just verified my usage statistics on my outband dd-wrt router. Most days I'm under 4Gb. 4*30 puts me at 120Gb per month. This is me. But I suspect lot of people have similar usage.
AT&T DSL can't deliver better than 768 kb/s to my house (nor can they deliver anything to most of my neighbors). If I could sustain that 24×7 for 30 days, (and if I've done the arithmetic correctly) it would amount to roughly 200 GB. Thus 150 GB monthly cap for me has no real effect. But if I had a real plan, I'd be pretty peeved.
Supposedly AT&T U*verse can deliver more modern rates in my neighborhood, but, despite sending me about 10 advertisements a week and occasionally sending a sales droid to my door, they refuse to sell it to me. Really. I've tried to sign up twice.
I switched to Comcast for 2.5× the price of DSL. They manage to deliver decent bandwidth whenever the service is actually up. Streaming an entire Netflix movie without significant stalls is still a pie-in-the-sky dream.
Competition? Yes, please. I live in Silicon Valley. Please send me some competition. Cell phone coverage would be nice as well.
Im using my ISP as a example which is a cable connection.
They offer different package prices based on your speed, not your bandwidth you can use monthly.
So someone who surfs the net, plays some games, watches youtube videos and such is fine because the cheapest package is perfect for them. They can download as much as they want, but technically they are limited because they have a slower speed. Me personally I pay for the medium speed package because Ill be playing a game online on one computer, downloading a movie on the other and streaming a tv show at the same time and the medium package is more than enough for me but I can still download all I want, but if I try and download more than 2 movies while doing all that then my speed suffers pretty bad so I have the option of getting more speed but I dont need it because I just manage what I do when so I dont have issues.
Here's hoping someone actually reads this... I had an idea that could work, depending how much it catches on. Basically a few people would try to get a grassroots campaign going where people from all around block at&t connections in their p2p clients, seedboxes, w/e. Maybe if some anonymous shit-kickers picked it up, it could spread like said shit kicked into a fan, creating a lovely pattern for AT&T to clean up off of their carpets, furniture and walls.
Can you just imagine how fucking fast AT&T would get their asses kicked by their users, according to TFS 45% on ppl on using p2p. The angry calls canceling service wherever people have any semblance of a choice will be endless, with many heads rolling(I hope..)
We seriously cannot let this catch on and spread, its too dangerous, I rarely ever download even half that much, but I just like being able to know I could if I had to or wanted to. And friends, I think you deserve that freedom too.
GET THOSE AT&T CORPORATE FACISTS. This is the shit they pull instead of upgrading their network and providing revolutionary services that would draw people in to the true power of the internet, fuck them and their stupid shit. I bet they bigger bonuses or something stupid like that, arrogant cocksuckers.
I love how AT&T cell service is a joke and no one will have it, or any of their services, everyone seems to hate at&t around here. Thank The Lord that even regular people see those sanctimonious dicks for what they are. God protect Japan and four loko.
go to Belgium where most isp cap your monthly usage rate at 20 to 30gb a month...
combined with one of the most expensive service in europe ( you ll get DSL service at 3-4mb down and 256/512k up at 50 euros a month) and you ll see that you really have nothing to complain about
most isp then charge an additional 5euros per 5gb of traffic (even if u use only 10mb)
How much is 150 GB?
About 150 hours of 480p video, or about half that for 720p. By "game playing" do you mean something like OnLive or a more typical online game that runs on your local PC and sends and receives updated positions of game critters with the server?
How many windows updates will it take?
Patch Tuesday is only once a month, and most updates are far smaller than the 0.1 GB of a Windows XP Service Pack.
For example, lots of advertisers make heavy use of video on popular websites. I don't want stuff like that eating into my monthly cap, and I would like some tool or option to block that type of traffic.
Flashblock works on both Firefox and Chrome. I whitelist YouTube, Dailymotion, YTMND, Newgrounds, Homestar Runner, Weebl's Stuff, and other sites that routinely use SWF for things other than advertisements, but just about everything else is click to play.
Just finished wiring up my cable YESTERDAY motherfuckers!
No reason to complain about the caps though: their internet is so goddamn slow you'd have to download 24/7 for the whole month to hit 150gb.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Hey I signed the Petition when they started put caps on here, eh?
Unless they just start with a flat rate they always have and then charge for usage after that.
Maybe $15 per 75GB or something? If you use 500GB, then you pay $90. If you use 150GB then it's $30. Or whatever it works out to.
Just so you have the confidence that you won't actually go over some limit and have your service interrupted.
i dont have them as my isp. but this is why i dumped comcast. but agreed they killed the fcc trying to prevent this from happning becouse it lets them charge the same price for less service and many times more for serivice you aruldy had. its always abought profit hear. if you have another dsl isp in the area when you recive this notic termenate service with them due to breach of contract so they cant charge you those fees for stopping service with them. then go to the other guys. i knoe this whont work for all being at@t in many aeras has chased anyone else out and bribed there way to keep them out. but this is what happons when you have a communest goverment. yep i said it.
I called in to protest and had 2 separate people tell me that this is not going to apply to uverse.
Whether or not that is true has yet to be seen.
I have not been presented with any evidence that this is the case but they seem to be good at lying about it at the retention level.
In the earlier days of DSL in Germany, some ISPs were stupid enough to try the same thing. Like AT&T will do, they stopped that after a short time, because people switched in masses, which is obviously the only consequence of such an attempt of cheating your customers. When will they ever learn?
I would encourage everyone to call and register their beef with AT&T. Personally. Over the phone.
The number is 1-800-288-2020.
I think if enough of us call and protest this change, they will back off.
i don't like em' mostly cause I don't need one more thing to worry about.
we have been living with a 250GB cap for some time here. I'm sure we don't watch as much netflix as some (but figure 1 to 2 movies a week (instant streaming) and maybe 1/2 to hour of hulu daily.) also downloads from technet and various other patches ...etc. One thing we have a minimum of is torrents (some linux .iso d/l's or whatever but not a whole lot). Additionally I stream radio for hours while working from home and also use the internet during this work time.
anyways also figure a 1hr or so daily of online gaming and still total usage per DD-WRT tracking feature
Feb 11' =48GB
Jan 11' =85GB
Dec 10' =60GB
Nov 10' =54GB
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
the Physical medium won't die after all...Blockbuster may be in for a comeback...Books On Paper (tm) may not die after all...which would ensure that somewhere in this man-awful, techno-lust encrusted world...there will still be a forest...somewhere...
So if I have 10% packet loss and incur a lot of transmissions, will that be counted in my cap? Hopefully they will only charge for data truly received at the application layer and not for the overhead. I also don't want to pay for SPAM or any random address pinging me, even if this is all just noise compared to my Netflix and Vonage use. If there must be a cap, let it be for usable data where I initiated the request. Hopefully this move triggers an invalidation of contracts with every town where they do business. Its time to bring in competition.
Its always puzzled me why they stopped doing this during the transition from dial-up to broadband. Now, I understand why. They were waiting for us to get addicted. Like a drug dealer, they gave us all we wanted for cheap for years. Now, its time to pay the piper for that pipe you've been using to smoke his stuff!
I live in a country that has a 'basic' plan that starts at 1GB, and considers 40GB to be a 'heavy' user.
150GB per month downloads? Luxury!
The average American knows close to nothing about computers or networking, so the ISPs have to run simple advertisements. The average emailing, web browsing person will not reach that 150 GB in a month. Featuring it prominently will just scare the average person. It is cheaper to just send out notices, and then bills, for the small percentage whom do exceed 150 GB/month.
You need a ~400 kbps connection running constantly for 30 days to reach 150 GB. For a supposedly cheaper, low grade residential service with speeds in the few mbps, that's not unreasonable.
It could be worse. In Canada a 60GB cap is typical. You can usually get more but you pay through the nose for this. 250GB seems pretty generous to us Canadians, that's the equivalent of 125 SD quality movies from Netflix or equivalent (assuming 2GB per movie) which is way more than most people would ever watch in a month. Honestly it is unrealistic to expect ISPs to give us more than 250GB of bandwidth in a month, few people need this unless they are doing illegal bittorrent downloads 24/7.
I don't get why Americans think they are so entilted to unlimited broadband.
The rest of the world has had caps since day one.
Once upon a time I remember bandwidth caps were 1gb or 3gb a month on BROADBAND (cable or adsl.)
Now its 10gb for entry level, and 20gb or 40gb for higher users.
Common all over the world my friend.
Your caps are VERY generous. I wouldn't be complaining.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
bandwidth caps coming to verizon, comcast, et al in 3.... 2.... 1....
But don't worry. It's not collusion. It's "conscience parallelism," and it's perfectly legal.
It has a 250 gB monthly cap.
Join the facebook group 'Stop AT&T from bandwidth capping' and help me protest this insanity!
Sam has one liberty, which he sacrifices for one security. Can you tell me what Sam has now?
As a AT&T customer this bothers the hell out of me. My options for internet are this.... 1. Dial Up 2. Satellite 3. DSL through AT&T (current connection) This is absolutely bull shit the service is already terrible as it is, and I really don't have any broadband choices now they are throwing out a cap on service. I hope they go out of business and lose customers.
FIGHT THIS NOW AND HARD. It's not about cost savings for these companies. In 2-3 years they'll offer unlimited again for 5x the cost.
Shouldn't they be guaranteeing an improvement in ping times? How about guaranteeing a 40ms ping to anywhere. Now that they've freed up all this bandwidth! I mean they aren't saying what will be improved in ANY way by this they're just taking and saying it's for our benefit, then not telling us what the benefit is!
Cool. Another reason not to use AT&T as my ISP. Fine with me since I avoid AT&T like scabies already.
Do we still think why this is not a utility and why each municipality should not their own fiber and rent it to these companies with policies banning such behavior. You build the network by a bond and rent it to the providers who want to use the service and thus repay the bond. Tax revenues start flowing in once the bond is paid and use that to build other value added services. That is of course if the municipalities flush with cash have the fiscal discipline to do so.
As it is with mobile, so it is with DSL/cable - the United States seems positively third-world when it comes to customer-friendly pricing and terms for these services.
This is speaking as an Australian where bandwidth is pretty expensive, but at least we have a fair bit of choice in terms of providers, and virtually no ISP has any of these crazy excess charges for exceeding your limit.
...wouldn't the cap being in place make it easier for them to tighten the grip over time? 150GB becomes 125GB becomes 110GB becomes 100GB?
uucp and modems would be better than a cap
can you hear me now thurd world united states?
time to get the passport gtfo and renounce citizenship, since citizenship only implies the right to pay taxes
let's all leave for some country where the politicians are less bought; bribed and staying out of the way or at least less powerful
Stop whining, we have always had caps in Australia so you'll just have to deal with it. Like the rest of us!
Too many people have web sites that are hosted for free because they are heavily laden with advertising. Charging for the capped data and providing free hosting that comes with gratuitous streaming video is a blatant tipoff, so obvious that senators and congresspeople should be able to see it. Right up there with telling me computers without crapware would have to cost more.
How does the content make it's way to each local data center? Do they rip it on site at each location or do they do so once and send it to the other locations? Do you think they use their own direct links, or do they use oh, the internet?
I've upgraded from 3Mbps to 6Mbps and I noticed that at both speeds I never get to the download and upload limits that I have purchased. I have tested using speedtest.net and other services, but I never get maximum speed. Can someone explain this? Are they short changing everyone?
George (gk4)
I just signed up for AT&T UVerse, and this was my signing bonus... Thanks AT&T!!! Talk about bait and switch. "Here, have 18Mbps internet speeds, but oops.. Just kidding, you can only use it for 45 minutes a day at that rate without going over your monthly limit." The least they could do is offer higher limits with the faster download speed packages.
I live in a little town in central us. I guess I'm lucky because several larger towns in the area don't have broadband. The point I'm getting at is that I don't have an ISP choice. It seems to me that a few years ago Bill Gates was taken to court for monopolistic tendencies. Here is the misconception of a monopoly, when there are other companies doing and charging the same things it is the norm and there for not a monopoly. When the monopoly laws were first introduced they were for the protection of the consumer not the norm. In a land locked area when there aren't any choices that's a monopoly. The only reason for a cap is for control, which is another trait of monopoly. And the only reason for control, in a company, is the bottom line. The bottom line is what the ISP companies project into the future to see if they will make a profit. By putting caps on usage now they can avoid investing in new infrastructure and show investors a handsome bottom line. Plus when there is a problem in the future they can say this is why we introduced the caps. These company's are becoming monopolistic and caps are just a symptom and not the problem.