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

Sweden

[Securityemo]

I sit here, 90 miles above the polar circle in the northernmost city in Sweden, and I pay ~52 USD a month for an unlimited 100/10 (guaranteed minimum 60) connection from an RJ-45 jack in my apartment wall. It's an ordinary apartment, nothing special about it, this is something that is generally available. Bask in my smugness, etc.

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.

Re:Truth in advertising?

[hawguy]

Sure, I understand how oversubscription works, but don't say that your service is great for video streaming when I'd hit your cap in 15 days if I tried to replace my normal TV viewing with streaming.

I really don't care what the economics of being an ISP are - if they can't support the use they are claiming it's for, then they shouldn't be making that claim. It's not like they didn't know years ago that video streaming was on the upswing and would become a dominant use of bandwidth so surely they've had time to come up with advertising collateral that accurately describes what their product can do.

It's like a car manufacturer advertising that their latest pickup is great for heavy construction use... then in the fine print they note "Warranty invalid if used for heavy construction use".

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: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:Marginal pricing is good economics.

[FSWKU]

It all boils down to greed. First, they pocket the money given to them for building out their infrastructure. Now, they see Netflix/Hulu/etc becoming more popular than their overpriced VOD services.

My guess is they ultimately want to start raising their overage fees. The reasoning (internally, of course) will be something along the lines of, "Fine...you want to shrink our profits by choosing the better & cheaper streaming alternatives? Well now you're going to be paying us more in overages than you save by not giving us your money in the first place!"

Now in public, they will try to spin this as a win for "fairness" and being able to provide "quality services that customers demand" or some other such bullshit...

And this is why I'd love to see more companies providing nothing but a connection to the internet. No phone companies, no cable companies, no other vested interests trying to stifle what you do on your connection because it competes with the other offerings they want to shove down your throat.