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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.
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?
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
What's the average Netflix data rate?
On Xbox 360, 1.8 GB per movie (source).
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
False dichotomy.
There is a third answer: The people who supply the pipes keep up with the current state of the art. They are not doing so. They are not reinvesting in their infrastructure and the result is lesser quality and rationing.
Frankly, what the telecoms charge for overages on caps is highway robbery. It has been demonstrated that it's simply cheaper to send a SSD via snail mail and *destroy the drive* after than it is to go over the ridiculous caps that are appearing in Canada. And we're starting to see this in the US as TFA indicates.
We here in the US threw tons of money at the broadband providers during the Clinton administration and all they did was give it out to their shareholders. They continue to refuse to reinvest, and prefer to kill the goose for short term gain. We are falling behind Europe and Asia in terms of broadband, and will soon be a backwater similar to Africa if the telecoms get their way.
This is what you get when you utterly refuse to regulate once the telecoms become regional monopolies or duopolies. There is no more competition, so the raping of the customer goes on.
--
BM
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.
You don't think that Verizon will soon announce that they are bringing out a generous, industry-leading 151 GB cap?
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.
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!
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
Except, unlike water, gas, and other "utilities," it costs nothing to transmit.
There's people working on the servers and cables, but they aren't upgrading anything. Some customer support lines, yeah. But how much per GB do you think it really costs them to send it?
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
I also recall that living in NZ. But I do notice a difference here - in NZ, the caps were much lower than that (IIRC mine was 10Gb), but the way they were implemented, you'd simply be throttled down for the remainder of the month, to something like 256kbps (with a normal speed of say 2Mbps). So you'd never get in a situation where you are without Internet connectivity, or get a runaway bill. Whereas TFS sounds like they'll be charging for going above the cap.
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
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.
Because it is about allocation.
If infrastructure costs x dollars and i have y users, I can charge x/y per customer
If y=10 and one of my users uses as much as the other nine, should I countinue to charge x/y? Or should I go with x/u where u is usage.
Which is the more "fair" way of allocating this cost?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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.