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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."
The way AT&T is measuring it also adds in the protocol overhead, which can be 10% or more. They measure it at the DSLAM, not the customer modem. For instance they show me uploading 10 GB and downloading 97 GB this month. The only uploads I have did for the entire month is some emails that might contain a picture or two, nothing with a large file attachment and I do not use any P2P software that would be uploading. The previous month the overhead that they measured was enough to put me over their 150 GB limit for DSL.
They need to improve their online usage tool too. It is only updated weekly until you go over their limit so you really don't have a precise way to measure daily usage, other than my router which doesn't match what they say I use.