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AT&T Begins Capping Broadband Users (dslreports.com)
Karl Bode, reporting for DSLReports (edited for clarity): Just a reminder to AT&T customers: the company's usage caps on U-Verse broadband connections is now in effect. When AT&T originally announced broadband caps on fixed-line connections back in 2011, it capped DSL customers at 150 GB per month and U-Verse customers at 250 GB per month. But while the DSL customer cap was enforced (by and large because AT&T wants these users to migrate to wireless anyway), AT&T didn't enforce caps for its U-Verse customers. Until now, anyway. Back in March AT&T announced it would begin enforcing usage caps on all connections starting May 23. As of today, U-Verse customers face different caps depending on their speed tier. AT&T says customers on U-Verse tiers with speeds between 768 Kbps and 6 Mbps will now face a 300 GB cap; customers on U-Verse tiers of speeds between 12 Mbps and 75Mbps will see a 600 GB cap, and customers on speeds between 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps will see a cap of 1 terabyte. Users who exceed these caps in any given month will automatically have to pay for 50 GB of additional data for $10 each.
Stay away.
The helpful folks at AT&T would like to remind you that they have a great Uverse cable package too....should your HBO Now/Sling/Hulu accounts be causing you to go over their new broadband caps.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Do I have to post FUCK AT&T on a Slashdot forum. FUCK AT&T until there are no cells left in the organism.
In Seattle I have multiple providers of 1Gbps service that I can choose from with low rates. My guess is it is the proximity to Microsoft and the progressive city council that has helped make this happen. Data caps stink!
and a customer bites the dust. and another gone, and another gone....
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Why we let them do this. You know, we could pass a law and make them stop.
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AT&T doesn't impose caps on Uverse users who subscribe to their TV service. They're not starved for bandwidth it seems. They just don't want to lose revenue due to cord cutting.
..then they wouldn't NEED datacaps. But it's cheaper/more profitable for them to have a shitty, overbooked network and charge people for 'overages'.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I've got 18 Mbps ATT DSL, and I don't think that I could hit that cap anyway given that their service is so unreliable. My connection goes down at least once almost every evening... (Granted, it usually comes back 5-10 minutes later, but still.)
The helpful folks at AT&T would like to remind you that they have a great Uverse cable package too....should your HBO Now/Sling/Hulu accounts be causing you to go over their new broadband caps.
I logged into my account, and as a Uverse internet-only customer in Houston, I am now under a cap. I'm not sure how they can unilaterally do this without revisiting the contract.
Predictably, I have an option in my account now to "add TV to get unlimited data".
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Instead of capping them, AT&T could just limit their usage.
Have gnu, will travel.
They are altering the deal. Pray they don't alter it any further
So are business plans still exempt? $50/mo gets 12/1mbps uverse business here without phone.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Too much of what I do at home relies on an internet connection and AT&T is the only company that can be bothered to supply one.
More than one entity supplies a home, including landlords located in cities that aren't beholden to AT&T.
datacaps are a flagrant violation of the FCC's net neutrality legislation. why isnt anyone contesting this?
Good people go to bed earlier.
I'm not sure how they can unilaterally do this without revisiting the contract.
If you're on month-to-month service, as opposed to a 12- or 24-month commitment, the provider alters the contract by sending the new terms to you along with your bill. If you pay it without canceling service, you accept the offer of continued service.
Where forced to make TV cap free as they can't not count IPTV data. And if they did change for tv data then comcast will have a field day with that.
In practice, that is a pretty high cap. I rarely hit 10% of that...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I thought net neutrality meant no preferential treatment to a particular source of traffic. Data caps apply equally to all sources of traffic. To which provision of the legislation do you refer?
I am so glad that I left AT&T, the mobile company, because of the same kind of bullshit that they are pulling here. It looks like the other half of their business is not much different. T-Mobile's service isn't the best, by any stretch, but at this point I'm content to continue paying [less] for their business practices.
All of the carriers, except possibly Sprint, are raking in profits faster than they put it into the bank, while they continue to have the cartel attitude to screw the customer with fees (every time Verizon or AT&T introduces or raises a fee, then the other follows).
Want to upgrade your device? Oh, that will be $30. Oh, you're on an enterprise account? That should be waived. Please contact customer service to have it removed, because we hope you don't and then we can keep the fee. Please, bring your own phone so we can charge you money for doing it!
It's so frustrating because AT&T is not a capitalist company -- they are not seriously competing. Both AT&T and Verizon are at the same place that they were years ago, except with better technology doing things for them (like building penetration for AT&T). I have not seen a new area get covered by AT&T in years. The only thing they seem to do is to keep the towers running with relevant hardware (a good thing), and that's it. Then they sit on the profits and moan that they need to charge users for using the service they're paying for.
Let's think about it: a 1 TB data limit for a 1 GB connection. I can only assume that they are using Apple math for binary values, but to be as fair as possible, you could theoretically use your data cap in 1024 seconds, or just over 17 minutes. That makes sense?
Why don't they just invest in some infrastructure and bring their customers into the twentieth century.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
To give you guys some perspective, if you have a 20mbps connection a 600GB cap, that's approximately 60 or 70 hours, or about 3 day's worth. If you only use that connection speed during your 9-5 workday, that's still only about 8 days, or a little over a week. I understand that Slashdot and code merges don't eat that much, but any kind of streaming or video would do a connection like this in in about two or maybe three weeks if you're careful. Imagine if we had three major companies who made cars, all of which come with a driving cap of 200 miles and cost $50 for every 50 miles after. That's what we live in.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
I received this email last month.
"You recently received an e-mail incorrectly stating that beginning on May 23, 2016, there's a $10 charge for each 50GB of data you use over your U-verse® Internet allowance amount.
To clarify: beginning on May 23, 2016, you will automatically receive an unlimited home Internet data allowance (a $30 value) at no additional charge as a benefit of purchasing a bundle of U-verse Internet and U-verse TV services."
I hope that Google Fiber spreads like the plague and gives AT&T a run for their money.
Yeah, because so many customers have said, "We want to have our data capped for a better internet experience".
[Disclaimer: I am (or was) a moderately satisfied UVerse customer]
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
So if I exceed my monthly limit they need to charge me for the additional data, because their equipment has to work harder/more?
If I don't use all of my allotment or stop at the cap, is AT&T powering downing equipment to save money until my next billing cycle?
The answer to both of these is "No."
If they need to charge you more it's for 2 reasons (if not both), either they are greedy and have monopolistic powers or they have oversold their networks.
I've said it plenty, these networks work on how fast data moves NOT how much.
Every week or so it would go out for a day.
Finally, i got so sick of it, I called the supported number every time it happened. I played their silly ass game of plugging the computer directly to the service (they would change my password so I could just tell them I did) and of course, it would fail. They would apologize and send out a tech - while demanding that someone be home. The tech would show up a day or so later.
Sometimes the tech wouldn't show up.
Usually, the connection came back by the time the tech came out.
Didn't matter. I kept calling.
Finally, the local tech boss just gave me his card and said call him direct when the problem occurred.
I also found out in areas such as mine where there's no competition or only one other more evil ISP (Comcast) they let their equipment basically rot.
I don't even have that Uverse shit yet. I have a 1.5 Mbps/.25Mbps connection and paying $49/mo for it.
It's pretty annoying to see that we're at the bottom of the industrialized World in terms of service but at the top for fees.
I'm sure they do the typical things and include a notice in your bill of things changing and you do technically have a chance to cancel the plan with no penalty if you don't like the conditions. Just don't be surprised if you are under contract that their automated system adds the ETF to your bill and you have to call in multiple times to get it removed but lets be honest. That doesn't really matter because you either have no other options or one other option that is just as bad so you aren't likely to be canceling anyway. You just have to accept it and die a little inside.
AT&T don't forget to blame the FCC. It's a great opportunity!
> I'm not sure how they can unilaterally do this without revisiting the contract.
You mean what's already been in the contract since 2011? Just because they're enforcing it now doesn't mean the contract has changed.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
i received a notice modifying my terms on 18 mb uverse a few weeks ago telling me the cap was being removed... thanks google
You're always been under a cap with AT&T internet, they just rarely enforced it. However now they have *increased* the cap for most people while also saying that they will enforce it. I don't really see the problem here.
It's called Uverse because U vill be verse off.
I don't exactly live in the sticks, just very far from any AT&T CO. The best DSL I could get form them was 1.5 (really 1.25) down. And I put up with it for a long time, because I really don't do much online. I have all the bandwith I need in the form of a good blu-ray player and 1.25 is good enough for basic-to-moderately complex web sites.
I asked about better speeds. Repeatedly. No can do. No UVerse for me, not at any price. And having had DirecTV back in the late 90's I wasn't keen on repeating the experience.
So when my AT&T "modem" broke last year, that was the final straw. I told them to kill not only DSL, but my landline as well. I went to Comcast for internet, since I've had them since the late 90's for TV. Much as I loathe them and their business practices, I've found their internet to be fast-ish and reliable.
The only thing from AT&T I kept was the mobile. I've had Sprint and Verizon too, but I've had AT&T the longest, and it gives me the best overall service as far as mobile goes.
But aside from all that, there seems to be something funny going on:
1. Netflix just became the sole online distributor of Disney and related (Lucas, Marvel, Pixar).
2. Comcast has elevated their internet cap to 1TB (I don't know if that applies to internet-only plans)
3. AT&T drops UVerse for TV (yes, folks, from now own AT&T TV is ONLY DirecTV) and decides to enforce limits for internet-only users.
Coincidence? I don't believe in that, but.. convenient convergence sure seems plausible!
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to say here. That people unhappy with their ISP should pack up all their things and move to a different city
If you work from home, and the best Internet connection available in your city makes it impossible to do your job, then Thanshin seems to believe moving is warranted, as do sglewis100, Zero__Kelvin, allquixotic, Bengie, FlyHelicopters, and several Anonymous Cowards.
possibly far enough away they need to find a different job
If you work from home, you can take your job with you.
and new social circle?
New in-person social circle, same social media social circle.
These are OUR PIPES, and don't you forget it!
(combining an actual quote from a broadband exec with, Road House)
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
$10 per 50GBytes?
That's $0.02/MByte
If you have the temerity to take your AT&T phone across the border to Canada, they will charge you $2.00/MByte. 100X more.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I got a letter in the last week or two saying they were removing the cap on my 1GB/sec Uverse fiber account. It was 1TB/month on paper but there was no way for them to monitor or enforce it (as I was told repeatedly).
Maybe the fact that Google is digging up everyone's yard installing fiber has something to do with it.
Nothing more than an exercise of a monopoly, protecting its cash cow--leveraging that monopoly, possibly illegally, to squeeze more money out of customers at the threat of making the services they're paying for useless.
I can burn 150 GB just watching netflix. What a joke.
Who did what now?
unless you're willing to risk your job.
Which could be rephrased as "unless you're willing to search for jobs in the city where you want to live."
If you see home Internet as an essential utility, and the best home Internet offer in your city is as intolerable as the leaded water in Flint, Michigan, then your city is intolerable. If your city is intolerable, than any job available only in your city is likewise intolerable.
Whenever I get close to the cap I just upload some really large files to roll the odometer back.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Instead of just throwing your hands up and declaring defeat. Of course, if you're AT&T and you're making bank off selling a limited resource then that's the last thing you'd want. It's almost as if unfettered capitalism can create perverse incentives
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Whats the US contract law on the matter? All I really know is that in Scandinavia, altering the deal isn't legal. The deal basically gets refreshes, and the new terms can be denied in favor of the old.
I have exactly one provider, CenturyLink, $60 a month for DSL 7/1 service, no cable available. CenturyLink bought the local phone company and mothballed all the work they were doing to improve service, to include laying residential fiber and now says no to any upgrades in the foreseeable future.
Granted I live on the Eastern Plains but it just shows what competition can do to prices and service. Since the military stationed me here moving is not an option.
but i ended up cancelling the deal when i found out that AT$T was the only broadband available there.
Shame, otherwise it was a pretty good deal.
I don't really see the problem here.
I see a local monopoly using my internet service to try and force me to buy their television service. I guess that isn't a problem for you.
Still part of the oligopoly , still price fixing, still stealing from the consumer, still greedy as ever, all while taxpayers front the bill of billions of dollars in subsidies to build their company. This is the same company the government broke up only 10x worse.
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Less power/cpu/ram + IO use vs. DNS/routers/addons/antivirus (slows you) + less security issues/complexity. Compliments firewalls (w/ layered drivers blocking less used IP addys vs. hosts blocking more used domains) & DNS (lightens dns load). Gets data via 10 security sites.
Ads rob bandwidth, security (malvertising), privacy in tracking + anonymity.
Hosts add speed (hardcodes/adblocks), security (bad sites/poisoned dns), reliability (dns down), & anonymity (dns requestlogtrackers) natively. Hosts != blockable by ClarityRay (vs. souled-out to admen inferior wasteful redundant slow usermode browser addons)
Works vs. caps & HTTP PUSH ads w/ firewalls.
Avg. webpage = big as Doom http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... & ads = 40% of that size.
APK
P.S. - Safe https://www.virustotal.com/en/... (Verified by Malwarebytes' S. Burn "I've seen the code & it's safe" http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... )
Nobody except filesharers use their bandwidth that way.
duh, people who work from home and download daily builds
If you notice, paying the unlimited fee raises the broadband costs beyond the TV costs in most cases. So you can cut the cord all you want, they'll maintain their profit per customer regardless.
It wasn't over the data cap thing (a host of other issues with their service and billing), but it was a nice coincidence. Also coincidentally, Time Warner Cable is bumping their top tier internet package from 50mbps to 300mbps in our neighborhood this month for the same price (which is cheaper than Uverse's top tier 60mbps service).
are horrible, and because they never informed me of the cap (read lied). They also have such atrocious customer service that you have to schedule an entire day to deal with their phone system, another day to deal the trauma of it all.
I won't mention the service I am replacing AT&TT with but it is not what I wanted (anyone try getting a static IP lately without getting a business account?). The state of Internet in the USA is pathetic and sad and AT&T seems to be leading the charge. I actually had a better time and more luck dealing with the DMV and would have rather been waterboarded than have to deal with AT&T again. Yes waterboarded.
The feeling AT&T gives you is this. Imagine being sucked out to see in a really bad rip tide and having 200 life guards on duty on your beach see this happen. Now imagine you scream for help and the life guard who hears you tells you that would be more than happy to help you but first they need your social, your date of birth, billing address, and a bunch of other information. Now imagine you just want them to throw a life preserver in the water so you can swim back yourself. They ask you then what are your swimming needs, and capabilities, inform you that even though your needs are less they would like to up sell you to the jetski.
When you agree just to get help they transfer you to the jetski department that promises that the jetski has incredible capabilities a full tank of fuel and a convenient loading stair to help you out of the water. You agree and beg them to please just give you the jetski. They then transfer you to another department that tells you need sand. When you ask for a manager the manager says that there is another department that handles jetski complaints then cold transfers you to dead air.
You yell for help again and someone who speaks a very broken and strangely Indian sounding dialect who's name you don't quite believe is Peter, promises you that he will in fact help you and prevent you from being washed out to sea. You try to understand him but you can't so you yell to someone else for help and get the business department who wants to sell you water. You tell them you are about to drown, but they insist you need water, and that they can't help you unless you want their water. So frustrated you yell for help again, and finally you get someone to sell you a blow up life raft. You spend hours trying to get on it and get it set up but then half way through they pop it and tell you that you have been the life raft beyond the allotted time and if you want to still use the life raft you need top pay more money.
You explain to them that you were not told the life raft had a limit and they explain that they sent fliers out to everyone six months ago and it is not their fault you didn't read their junk mail.
So you ask for the lead life guard, someone who knows what is going on , someone that can traverse the complex chaos that is unfathomable unless you have experienced it. You get to a nice person, they try to help and they insist that you need and ACME Anvil so you can anchor yourself to the sea floor and not drift out anymore.
After many many hours (70+) of dealing with this defunct system you finally give up and call another "Life Guard " Company (not giving out names but it rhymes with Time Warner) and find that to get a static IP you need to pay them 125 dollars more and get Business Service. After haggling for over an hour you realize that you live in the USA which was once a great country at the forefront of science and technology but now is nothing more than an Oligarchy run by companies who are more interested in profit than product and service, more interested in draining money from those of us who don't have it, for services that can be honestly said to be required in this day and age.
They use you and throw you away and there is really nothing you can do about it. So I cancelled my Service, I kicked the shark, I drown now in mediocrity and substandard sub par Internet in a
I'd probably want to change my name and move to another city too.
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Networks are measured in maximum throughput over a given period of time, not total number bytes transferred to a given place.
Data caps measure each user's contribution to average throughput, which is (imperfectly) correlated to each user's contribution to peak throughput.
Data caps are a solution to the wrong problem.
Agreed. If the problem is peak throughput, the solution is to run the meter when the network is congested, that is, when the user's packets are passing through a segment at its maximum throughput. Satellite ISPs have the right idea: run the meter only during congested hours to encourage users to move their transfers away from times of maximum demand for throughput.
the "problem" they're really solving is that of people using the Internet the way it was intended--as a communications medium that doesn't really care if what's being communicated is voice, text, images, videos, etc.
That or the "problem" is one of using the Internet as a real-time communications medium, as opposed to an asynchronous application where usage can be shifted away from . People download multi-gigabyte HD movies and Steam games during prime time, contributing to dropped packets at times of maximum throughput, when they could be setting the computer to download them at 0-dark-thirty and not affecting the maximum.
The problem is that local governments were pressured into granting monopolies in order to get commercial enterprises into there communities. The government shouldn't have ever been able to grant such a monopoly in the first place. What we have as a result of these monopolies (telephone, cable, etc) is poor service and entities that refuse to invest in there continued development or upkeep. Those of us who have two options (ie ADSL or Cable) should consider ourselves lucky. That only happened because of technological limitations at the time cable television came into existence. If that hadn't happened we'd probably all be stuck in a monopoly situation and in the real world a good percentage of the population is. Now that these companies have been around forever they've got a first mover advantage. It becomes financially unsound for new entities to get into the business. What that means is the entrenched monopolies and duopolies can undercut newcomers on price. The reason for that is because older infrastructure investment costs have long been paid off. That'll prevent a newcomer from competing because the newcomer is going to have higher costs to install there lines that have to then be paid off which increases operational costs. Unless you can seriously out compete via your infrastructure you probably don't have a chance. Even if you do (say because the competition has slow old lines) your entrenched competition will still be able to outmanoeuvre you. They've got cash in the bank where you don't. They don't have to take out a loan to cover there investment. We essentially temporarily need regulation to even the playing field. Once we have that it can end once we've got a good amount of competition within the phone/tv/internet universe.
If you believe in competition and unregulated markets check out the Free State Project. It's all about individual liberties and freedom. The people and government should stay out of any activities where there isn't direct harm caused to other people. In other words you would be in favour of getting rid of laws banning drugs, drivers licenses, social security numbers, social security, 'think of the children' style legislation (ie public schools), taxes, marriage laws (legalizing gay marriage was good, but the government shouldn't be giving benefits to anybody- that's theft of other peoples labour), government sanctioned violence (foreign wars), borders (open the boarder, we should all be free to travel as we please), etc.
Is there any software out there that monitors how much data you've transferred and gives you the option to transfer random data (or public torrents) until you're within some percent of your configured cap within each configured time period? I know some torrent software will let you limit its usage, but it doesn't take into account total internet usage.
One metric for the cap sizes is a distribution of average usage. If we can bump more people towards the higher end, in theory future caps will be larger.
Have GigaPower in Cupertino, CA.
We're running about 500 GBytes data/month with a 1 Gbps fiber link, its quite fast for only $70/month (though promotion discount $29/month runs out soon). Several binge watching millennials keep it pretty soaked.
For extra $30/month they say they'll allow unlimited data, but doesn't look like any risk of needing that any time soon.
If you end up having to uncut the cable due to cost of overages with Netflix, Hulu, and the like, be sure you tell those services WHY you are leaving and encourage them to take the same course of action you are like complaining to the FCC and writing your congressman.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Aiming for sustained peak load simply means you statistically predict how much actual load you'll get for x customers at the busiest moments and you build for that +5% or +10% based on your datasource.
If an ISP lacks the finances at the moment to "build for that" throughout its service area, how else should it reduce peak load?
This isn't exactly rockey science, every self respecting engineer can do these calculations.
Engineers say one thing. Finance says another. An executive needs to balance the two, and it may come down to ordering the engineers to come up with a solution that reduces peak load. What such solution do you recommend?
I don't know why everyone is up in arms.... it's real easy. Cancel their service and go with something else. The more we (customers) cancel their service, the more they (Big Evil Corp.) have to listen. They listen or they go away. I've seen comments about "passing a law" to stop this... no law needed. Go to the provider who is not capping service.