On Monday, AT&T Customers Enter Era of Broadband Caps

theodp writes "The Age of Broadband Caps begins Monday, with AT&T imposing a 150 GB cap on DSL subscribers and 250 GB for UVerse users, and keeping the meter running after that. The move comes as AT&T's 16+ million customers are increasingly turning to online video such as Hulu and Netflix on-demand streaming service instead of paying for cable. With AT&T's Man in the White House, some fear there's a 'digital dirt road' in America's future. Already, the enforcement of data caps in Canada has prompted Netflix to default to lower-quality streaming video to shield its users from overage fees."

Comments

Truth in advertising?

[hawguy]

Maybe the FTC should force them to add a "Not suitable for streaming" disclaimer to all of their advertisements unless their cap can support high quality streaming (2.3GB/hour) for as many hours that a typical household watches TV (6.75 hours/day), which would mean a cap of 465GB/Month.

Marginal pricing is good economics.

[imcdowell]

Having a bandwidth cap per se is not a bad thing from a societal perspective; if there really is a marginal cost to carrying a GB of data you'll only get the socially optimal result if you price bandwidth at that marginal cost. From that perspective the Netflix degradation referenced in the article could be a good thing; if individuals value the higher video quality less than the price of transmitting it, the right outcome for society is for them to see lower quality video at lower cost.

Of course, the marginal price for a GB of data these days is near zero -- (one site pegged it at $.03). AT&T has a fine idea, they're just pricing it 150x too high. The fact that they're able to do so screams market failure/monopoly to me.

Re:Marginal pricing is good economics.

[ritcereal]

The claim that your denying your neighbor from bandwidth is complete FUD. If you are provided a service (lets say 10 mb down / 5 mb up) and you consume said service and it degrades your neighbor's service, is that YOUR fault? No. It is entirely your service providers fault for providing service in such a way that a single customer affects another customer.

In the real world, you alone do not deprive bandwidth from another user (even in cable with shared medium environments it is rare, and if it does happen it is STILL the ISP's fault not the customers).

With that said, the real issue is that the ISPs don't want to pony up and order additional capacity to their providers, peers, or even within their own network. They've all increased subscriber counts, data rates, and expected to spend little to nothing on improving the network? That's crap. ISP's are just trying to convince us that we are the cause of congestion because we watch too much You Tube and Netfix while they neglect maintaining and improving the network. It is ok to oversell, every business does it, but if you neglect your own service to the point that customers service is being denied because you refused to invest in your own network, how could this be the consumers fault?

Clearly the internet market in the United States is flawed. It's ok, the free market is clearly worse than the guaranteed monopolies we have with our telecoms.

Re:Vote with your Wallet

[Osgeld]

oh thank you, I have never thought of that before, lets see here in my area there is

#1) ATT
#2) Comcast

well fuck me, that showed them

Re:What is so bad about it?

[phantomfive]

Oh, and since you didn't give an idea of what kind regulation to use to fix this, here's mine:

We need to separate the service providers from the people who are building the infrastructure. That way, people who are building infrastructure will be competing against those who are building infrastructure, and they will have no way to differentiate themselves except on price and capacity. This will have the effect of driving up the capacity and driving down the cost.