Slashdot Mirror
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."
(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.."
What's the average Netflix data rate?
On Xbox 360, 1.8 GB per movie (source).
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.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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.