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AT&T Caps Are A Giant Con And An Attack On Cord-Cutters (dslreports.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Following a report from DSLReports that ATT would be imposing usage caps on the company's U-Verse broadband customers, ATT has announced it would now be following Comcast's lead by "allowing" users to pay $30 more a month if they wanted to avoid usage caps entirely. However, ATT has taken it to a new level by "allowing" users to graciously avoid the $30 fee -- if they subscribe to DirecTV or U-Verse TV service. These data caps allow ISPs like ATT and Comcast to cash in on internet video and make cord-cutting less viable by making streaming more expensive. And now, ATT is using caps to force users to subscribe to traditional TV if they want their broadband connection to work like it used to.
Everyone hates them. Go in with tanks and disband the treasonous bastards.
I say this as an AT&T cellular customer, who is lucky enough to live in a building with its own "ISP" (the condo association itself) that provides high-speed fiber and thus unaffected by this.
Fuck AT&T
I will never use them as my ISP wherever I live if I can possibly avoid it, and guess what: I've already cut the cord.
Sianara, fuckers.
... It used to upload your local username as well as your network name to their systems.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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They charged me an extra ~$100 one month and ~$50 another. Just charged my card and left me wondering wtf happened until I called them.
Everyone hates them. Go in with snowspeeders and trip the ten-storey bastards.
Why not just allow some other company to also run underground cables in my neighborhood and to my house?
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
$MY_CURRENT_CABLE_PROVIDER is the worst. I thought $MY_PREVIOUS_CABLE_COMPANY was the worst for years, but then I moved from $MY_PREVIOUS_REGION to $MY_CURRENT_REGION and sometimes I actually feel like I owe $MY_PREVIOUS_CABLE_COMPANY an apology.
Sonic.net is doing this in San Francisco. Unfortunately, I live literally 50 feet outside the neighborhood they're running fiber to right now. I'm thinking of moving just to get out from under AT&T. I've never had to suffer through such a consumer-unfriendly ISP before. The only alternative where I live is Comcast so I'm screwed either way.
This is all definitely making me happy I'm on Verizon FIOS. It is expensive... but I get full bi-directional 75 Mbps that is rock solid and with zero caps. I've had it for almost 2 years now and I can't list even one complaint (ok, it is pricey... but you get what you pay for!)
Why not just allow some other company to also run underground cables in my neighborhood and to my house?
As long as it can provide all the insurance necessary and pass authorizations that it can properly co-exist with everyone else on the poles, in many jurisdictions you can.
Now. Who's going to pay for all that capital you're about to spend several dozens to hundreds of millions on, depending your jurisdiction?
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Just logged into my ATT account and this is what it says:
Starting May 23, we are increasing the U–verse Internet data allowance for many customers. After a grace period, and as our agreement provides, there's a $10 charge for each 50GB of data you use over the allowance. Want unlimited data? You can:
Bundle your U-verse Internet service with DIRECTV or U-verse TV. This gives you an
unlimited Internet data allowance ($30 value) for no additional charge.
Purchase an unlimited allowance for your Internet service for $30. This option doesn’t
require a TV bundle.
Is it because of their service "agreements"?
Is it because of "contributions" to state politicians to craft loopholes?
I'd happily give more to the EFF as this seems like something they'd take to court or lobby against, but they can't be the only ones doing it. Especially given the long and cozy relationship the major telcom companies have had in capitals. Who else can we get in contact with to voice concerns that doesn't end up labeling us as "Chicken Littles" or Boy who cried wolf"?
FCC, you are supposed to protect and look out for the public good rather than be beholden to the corporations. I can't imagine a more appropriate use of your authority to ban this type of crap.
Seems pretty clear to me, you pay $30 and get unlimited internet. Seems pretty clear and non-donnish to me.
Paying for something you are not getting would be a con.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Several types of predators migrate alongside their prey. You go where the meat is.
If ATT could find a way to keep charging you for not using their wares, don't you think they would?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
So, do you live in a place where another company is free to run a sewer line to your house so you can subscribe to their service?
Or do you think maybe the final infrastructure which comes into peoples houses shouldn't be the property of a corporation?
It's time to stop pretending that infrastructure which we've paid for, and which has rights of way on public and private property should be treated as the exclusive property of some asshole corporation like AT&T.
That's just idiotically subsidizing AT&T to remain a monopoly, while saying if people don't want monopolies they can build their own infrastructure.
Like the water, sewer, and electricity coming into your home ... the network needs to be considered part of the municipal infrastructure.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
You mean "Who's going to pay for all that capital you're about to spend several dozens to hundreds of millions on, when Google Fiber has demonstrated that the competitors WILL cut costs and improve services in order to try and drive you out of the market?"
I certainly wouldn't loan anyone money to do this unless they've got enough cash reserve to outlast the Comcasts and AT&Ts that are already established.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Assume 50 Mbit/sec, symmetric bandwidth, dynamic IP address, no caps on upload/download?
What would it take to actually operate this network?
If you had 100,000 customers in a given metro area, what would you need for uplink capacity at the head end? My probably-has-an-error calculation at 5% average utilization is 250 Gbit/sec, 50 Gbit/sec at 1% (my 1 day average over 3 months is .55 Mbit).
What would 50 or 250 Gbit/sec of Internet uplink capacity cost if you had to go out and source it commercially?
I hate all these caps but I'm kind of curious what exactly it would cost to operate the kind of Internet connectivity everybody really wants.
I 'cut the cord' years ago, too -- and put an antenna on the roof. AT&T and Comcast both can go fuck themselves sideways with a rusty chainsaw; they can't 'tax' my usage of OTA broadcast television.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Why not just allow some other company to also run underground cables in my neighborhood and to my house?
Because 10 different companies running their own wires all over town is impractical and just a bad idea. The phone and cable oligopolies get huge amounts of taxpayer-financed subsidies. Force them to open up their networks and things will change over night. Prices will go down, speeds will go up and bullshit like data caps will disappear. We've already wired the entire country -- twice (first phone, then cable) -- there's no need to run more wires. Open up the networks we already have and that we have already paid for, several times over.
FUCK ATAT.
/and fuck AT&T for charging Grandma $3.95/month for touch-tone dialing for the past 40 years.
Analog/pulse dialing is slow as shit. ATDT for touch-tone is where it's at.
They provide two levels of service, to get the better service you either pay more money or also purchase a separate service from them.
What part of this is the outrage? This is just how buying things works.
When some companies had caps on "unlimited" plan, that was obvious bullshit. (I hit the cap with Comcast a couple of times, they told me that bandwidth wasn't the aspect of the service that was unlimited)
What's all the whining about here, though?
sic transit gloria mundi
To be honest, with the way things are going and how shitty NF streaming is anyway...
I wouldn't have a problem going back to just DVD/Blu-Ray.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The $30 is for just the unlimited service, no TV.
I pay somewhat more to Comcast myself than I could, just because I want only internet and no TV.
Comcast also has a cap but I've never hit that, even though I regularly stream video and download a number of multi-GB files a month for development purposes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When a new provider comes into your area, remember this. Don't hem and haw over paying a few more bucks per month if you need to. You need to PUNISH the existing providers. They've taken advantage of you for years.
I 100% agree! It is time we start demanding the networks financed with our tax dollars are opened! Free the Internet! Stop these scamming companies from data capping our access. This is a total violation of net neutrality just to make a profit.
I keep reading this trying to find logic some place.
There are options out there for community broadband. Tie this broadband into a POP (Tier III or better provider). Poof, you can stop complaining & go w/ roll your own. If you are the one stuck running a gateway for a large community, congratulations you will soon understand first hand what headaches are involved w/ a large user base on an OC48. Yes AT&T is a bunch of scum sucking low lives, but they also try not to lose money. When large pipes are offered, they are figured to be used 30% of the time (or less) meaning everyone shares from the same pipe, if everyone is using the more than they figureed,,,, like any good (or evil) company they will change the house rules so that they aren't losing money.
Stay with it. I'm sure it will come to you.
If it doesn't, ask your teacher for some help. That's what they're there for.
Seriously, we've got the same stagnant pile of shit that the US has when it comes to service providers. About the only difference here is that we get to pick which company we want to bend us over, and we are free to jump from one to the next. But we've had data caps for at least a decade now, and the base prices are HUGELY inflated (as evident in provinces like Manitoba and Saskatchewan - which both have their own independent providers... and service with the big 3 cost significantly less).
FUCK ADT.
I think they still require a POTS landline for monitoring purposes.
Ends corporate greed like nothing you ever seen.
True story: I used to get DSL service in San Francisco from a CLEC, Earthlink, because I already hated AT&T back then.
One day, my service goes down. Modem lights blinking. I put in a repair request, and the service person tells me that she can verify there is indeed a problem with my line, and someone will take care of it. I go to work. I come home from work and there's a message on my voicemail telling me the problem has been successfully resolved. The lights on my modem are still blinking. Still no service.
I call back and say I still have no service. They say according to their systems, I do. I say I don't. They say the problem must be with my interior wiring. I say, how is there going to be a problem with the interior wiring when nothing has even moved? One day, service; the next day, none. It has to be Earthlink's problem, so could they please send someone out to take a look?
They said no. I said, what? "No. We will not roll a truck, sorry. But if you like, I could quote you a price on our satellite internet service."
It went back and forth like this over a couple more calls, them not budging, until finally I get someone at second-tier tech support. He goes, "You wouldn't happen to have a pair of alligator clips?" Flabbergasted, I said, "Um. You mean a length of phone cable with the ends stripped and a pair of alligator clips attached to the ends? Uh, yes. Yes, I do." He advised me that if I had a power outlet available, I could take my DSL modem out to the phone box on the side of the house and use the alligator clips to find my line. Depending on whether the modem loops up from the box or not, I'd know where the problem is.
So I did. I went out to the box, and sure enough, the modem looped up. And that's how I discovered where the problem was. Because the lines inside the box -- my nice little pair of wires with the Earthlink tag attached to them -- had been cut. Clearly snipped in half with wire cutters.
And that's when I remembered. A few days before my DSL went out, a new neighbor moved in upstairs. What do you do when you move into a new place? You order phone service. They had probably called AT&T to have a new line set up -- maybe even DSL -- and when the AT&T tech came out to the house, he saw my non-AT&T DSL line and he cut it, likely knowing Earthlink wouldn't do a damn thing about it and I'd be forced to switch back to AT&T. (Later, someone explained to me that AT&T's field techs are union and Earthlink's were not. I can't vouch for that but it's another theory.)
So that was my situation. Either I could go with AT&T, which I had already got fed up from dealing with for both home service and business networking. Or I could go with Earthlink, who were obviously competing in a totally hostile market and clearly didn't give a flying fuck about my business, so much so that when they told me they wouldn't repair my line, they helpfully added, "And because you've been a customer for nearly two years now, you won't have to pay any fees for early cancellation."
So I went with Comcast. Fuck DSL, fuck 'em all. And you know what? I know they suck and I've heard all the stories, but for the most part, Comcast hasn't given me any trouble ever since. It's been 10 years now, too.
Breakfast served all day!
Send me a paper bill, in the mail, and I'll pay it.
They'd gladly do that in exchange for a $5 per month paper billing surcharge.
FUCK ADT.
I think they still require a POTS landline for monitoring purposes
Well, the "T" in ADT is for telegraph.
I have cut both cords at home. I get neither Internet nor TV service at the house. I watch TV only over the air now. I just go to the library (where I am now) when I want to spend an hour goofing off on the Internet.
It's nice because I now have no temptation to waste hours of my day on stupid shit on the Internet. It takes effort to go the library, so I am more prone to do useful things and less prone to cat videos.
The rest of my time I am free to do things that people used to do, like socialize in person, do things outside, play with my kids, and so on.
It is liberating to be limited in the amount of time spent wasted on the Internet.
What was the duration of the contract you signed? (If there's no ETF, there's no real duration.) When it expired, Comcast signed you up for a new contract that included a monthly data transfer quota, and you indicated your agreement by continuing to receive service.
I did DSL Support for MindSpring/Earthlink in the 1999-2001 timeframe, and in general we leased lines from the ILECs in the areas. It was always a challenge because we were basically middlemen between our customers and the ILECs, so we'd always get stuck with the phone companies saying everything was fine, and our customers saying they weren't. Some ILECs were better than others - QWEST was completely useless; BellSouth could be ok depending on specific tech and the phase of the moon; AT&T was a mixed bag depending on geographic area.
"Sync at the NID" came to be the big bad word we all hated, because not everyone was capable of it (elderly, etc), and not all NIDs had test jacks. If you were lucky the customer could run an extension cord, unplug the house wiring, and plug the modem into the test jack to test it. If you weren't, you'd spend sometimes days arguing with the ILEC about it. Sometimes we outright lied and told them there was no sync at the NID so they'd at least do something if it was a case where the customer simply wasn't able (Probably at least once a week I talked to an elderly person who simply wasn't able to get all the required bits out to the phone box and deal with it). By the time I got out, regulatory stuff was getting real bad and most of the ILECs were getting pissier about supporting us with anything. May have been about when you had that problem. Towards the end we'd have ILECs literally refusing to roll trucks if we hadn't crossed every t and dotted every i.
I pay so much more for utility-utilities than I do for Internet access and telephone service. So. Much. More.
So to everyone out there suggesting that we kick out evilcorp and replace with utility -- not sure why that is automatic cause for savings.
They no longer require POTS.
Sonic.net finally came to my neighborhood in San Jose, CA. So an AT&T guy runs the wire from the neighborhood box. Another crawls under my house and gives me an AT&T modem but with Sonic no caps!
Why not just allow some other company to also run underground cables in my neighborhood and to my house?
Why bother with the extra cost? As other commenters have pointed out, do you have multiple water/sewers connects? Multiple natural gas lines? Multiple electrical cables?
I'm okay with perhaps having a duplication of effort with cable and co-ax, and perhaps sometime in the future we'll see dual-fibre, but have "x" companies building plant seems wasteful. Force a spin off of the ISO Layer 1/2, structured as a non-profit/co-op/muni-owned corporation, and let anyone be a Layer 3 provider.
Forced access is kind-of working up here in Canada, but the access fees that 'independents' have to pay to the incumbents is stifling things a bit.
Gigabit speeds for $50 / month and no data caps. I feel sorry for people who live in places where laws prevent municipal run internet. It's the only way these companies will learn.
ATT will raise the price of the TV component, once the initial contract expires. If you want to get revenge, buy the unlimited data, and then have it download crap 24 hours a day.
If the FTC had even the slightest clue about how to do it's job, they would have blocked this sort of bundling as a condition of the buy-out.
665: The mark on the forehead of Satan's slightly less evil brother, Stan.
I probably would have thermited the box and ended up with a prison record.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
One time AT&T failed to turn off my service when requested. I made a payment to keep it current and reached out again. They said that they saw my request and they didn't know why it hadn't been shut off (being as that I'd moved to a place they didn't service). This person told me that I'd be issued a refund for the month I didn't use but had payed for. The next month I received another bill. I called, and said that I should ignore the bill and that my refund should arrive shortly. This happened 3 times before they sent me to collections. It took the threat of taking them to court to get them to fix it all. As a result, I'll never do business with them again.
I am so glad that most Australian ISPs are not like that. I have used 127gb of data already this month and I still have 22 days remaining. If I were to go to mobile data then I would be facing these kinds of issues though - the current government was trying to convince Australians at one point that fixed broadband was obsolete and we should all be using mobile data (yay, only $6 a GB charged in 10mb lots...)
Ahhhh now see. I can relate a similar experience but with Comcast instead of AT&T.
My neighbors house was purchased by a new family who wasted no time cutting the cable in half with a shovel while planting new trees in their back yard. They give Comcast a ring and they roll a tech out to fix it for them.
To " fix " it, the tech removed my cable line from it's connection on the pedestal and hooked up the neighbors instead. Leaving my entire home quite dead. Internet, Alarm System, Television, etc. Didn't even bother to check to see if the connection was an active customer or not, just disconnected it. :|
Called up Comcast and told them what happened. Told them my service was out BECAUSE one of their technicians disconnected my line. They told me it would be TWO MONTHS before they could send a tech out to fix it :|
As the pedestal resides in my back yard, my solution was far more efficient. I moved the neighbors connection to their original post on the pedestal and reconnected my service back up. Then filed a Complaint on the tech for being incompetent. ( Not that it would do anything, but whatever )
Seriously though, TWO MONTHS to get a tech back out for an outage your tech caused in the first place ? WTF.
Moral of this story: It isn't just AT&T that sucks. They all do in one form or another.
If you have any AT&T cellular service and there home internet, you can get unlimited throughput on UVerse simply by having one of the AT&T microcells installed in your home. Thankfully(?), despite being next to downtown in a major city, my home cell reception sucks so we installed a microcell. Once that is configured, your cell phone calls and data go through your home internet connection, but that same usage is counted against your cellular minutes and data plan. As such, AT&T cannot count that toward you Uverse caps without getting into sticky double dipping issues. For instance, if you try going to the Uverse data cap monitoring site you simply get a message telling you it is not running. Over the years since the data cap was put in place for AT&T have have done restores of 2 3TB hard drives from backblaze (each taking about 3 weeks to download) and my bill amount never changed.
I would have turned the neighbor in to the authorities for not calling a utility marking service before they put spade to dirt.
Where I live, it's as much as a $10,000 fine per day for disruptions caused by excavation performed without calling the marking service. (RS MO 319.010 through 319.050, fines are detailed in 319.045.1) The marking service doesn't charge a fee, and they provide both a toll-free number (1-800-dig-rite) and a speed number (811). There's constant TV commercials about this service, so there's zero excuse not to call.
And the shitty response of the cable company's technician could get them considered as partially culpable too. The state's public utility commission would probably love to get their hands on a case like that. Nothing screams "needs more regulation, because fuck Comcast" like stories like yours do.
I had a similar situation when I lived in an apartment building. I had TV through dish network using the communal satellite dish on the roof of the building. It seemed like everytime somebody new moved in and got TV through Charter they would unhook the satellite feed into the junction box. Those idiots never bothered to hook the connection back up and I had to have the satellite company that serviced the building reconnect it on multiple occasions.
Because competition and capital expenditures are unique to this industry. Good thing you're not in finance.
Is that you, KETTLE?
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
You want to charge somebody 10,000 dollars a day, for accidentally cutting the cable tv to their own house? Overreact much?
Really? Personally I *love* credit cards for bills. I can build nice updates/reports regularly to see if anything seems unusual, and if somebody has decided to charge me when they weren't supposed to, I pay one bill (the CC) regularly instead of a dozen, and it's easy enough to charge-back if somebody does screw up the billing and isn't willing to fix it.
Keep in mind that in every market where Google introduced competition, the incumbent monopoly immediately cut prices and improved services, indicating that they've had this capability for some time but did not need to exercise it without competition. Assuming they didn't just cut their CEO a massive bonus check every quarter, they likely have significant cash reserves to cover the expense of a protracted battle: AT&T ended 2015 with 5 Billion in cash and short term investments, up from 2014, Comcast ended 2015 with 2.4 Billion well down from 2014.
Sadly Alphabet is grouping Google Fiber with all of their "other bets" like Nest and that failed robotics project they dumped. "Other Bets" operating loss was 3.5 Billion dollars last year, but there's no way to know how much of that was Google Fiber.
Do you invest Billions of dollars in companies planning to lose it? Do you have some other explanation for why "this time it's different"?
Good thing you are, then. Someone's gotta tell people not to ask what happens after the next quarterly report, those pump and dump scams don't pump themselves.
Myspace
Go to your wifi enabled cafe if you have the cash, or the library if you don't, and get out of the house and cut back on the internet. Cut the cable entirely. Let them find out how much a wire in the ground is worth when there's nobody willing to pay them to make it valuable. And the advertisers and sales sites will scream holy murder too. They demand people look at their sites to make a sale.
Cut back on the internet. We're CUSTOMERS, not consumers, and we CAN choose whether we partake or not.
It's time we reminded the businesses that without customers, they're holding on to an expensive white elephant of inventory that nobody wants to buy.
Was replaced by a company that spent hundreds of millions of dollars and years of time digging up roads?
Cut prices to burn the billions of dollars of cash on hand in an effort to starve its competition out?
I'm not seeing the relevance here.
That's because you don't understand competition. How reasonable is it that someone who does not understand competition should decide how market actors compete?