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."

Comments

And once again...

[Moryath]

the consumer gets screwed.

"Caps" are the worst way of doing business, designed to cover the fact that they engaged in blatant false advertising.

Re:And once again...

[Shompol]

Let's say the advertised speed is 15 Mbps = 15 megabits per second.

150,000,000,000 GB * 8 (bits/Byte) / 15,000,000 (bits/s) / 60 (sec/min) / 60 (min/hour) / 30 (days/month)= 0.74 hours a day

Thus, you can only use the advertised speed for no more than 45 minutes a day, given you do not use the internet at all during the remaining 23.26 hours.

allowed rate

[sneilan]

(150 gigabytes) / (31 days) = 58.7240143 kBps
(250 gigabytes) / (31 days) = 97.8733572 kBps
That's some bs.

Lucky Me!

[Mooga]

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!

1.8 GB per movie

[tepples]

What's the average Netflix data rate?

On Xbox 360, 1.8 GB per movie (source).

Re:Why do you tolerate this?

[Colonel Korn]

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).

Even major cities in American typically have only 2-3 available internet service providers, and they tend to implement very similar metering policies at roughly the same time, so there's no easy alternative.

Re:What's average Netflix datarate?

[Anonymous Coward]

I rewatched 41 episodes of BSG this week in Netflix 'HD' (lol) and my total usage for 14 days is 65664MB.

Re:What's average Netflix datarate?

[Amouth]

From TFA: "and that AT&T U-Verse TV service won't count towards the GB cap"

so UVERSE is NOT included in the cap.. this is them using their monopoly to disadvantage competition this is ripe for an antitrust suit..

I'm waiting till i get their letter and the in flyer that still says "unlimited" and get them to put a definition on it and make a daily task to bitch and moan that if they are capping they can't advertise it as unlimited.