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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.
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.
Why we let them do this. You know, we could pass a law and make them stop.
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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?
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, possibly far enough away they need to find a different job and new social circle?
Isn't that a little bit overkill?
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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."
Good point. The only cap policy that I think would be reasonable would be to set all the slower connections to something more generous like 600 GB and the top tier connections to 1 TB, then implement a policy to increase the caps by 15% per year (doubling time = 4.96 years). The exact year over year cap growth would have to be based on a scientific study of the per-user increase in fixed line broadband Internet yearly data consumption in the US.
Caps should be in place to prevent abuse, not to artificially punish regular users doing a reasonable amount of work / activity. I always like the public water analogy.
Now granted, public water is metered instead of a flat rate, but let's say hypothetically that it were flat rate.
If you turn on all the sinks and showers in your house and just leave them on 24/7, you're going to get a call from the water provider, no matter who it is, whether you're on a flat rate plan or metered. Even if you're paying for the water on a per-volume basis, even if that makes them a significant amount of money, they'd rather you *not* use their resource to the point of exhaustion, because it impacts other customers.
If, on the other hand, you happen to be a pool enthusiast and have a gigantic pool filling your backyard, and invite neighbors and friends over to dirty up your pool and have to frequently drain and re-fill it, you could end up using many times more water than your neighbors. But you're doing it for what is nominally a legitimate *purpose* - you aren't just running it down the drain because you can; you're doing it for entertainment/social purposes. You're also probably using water at a much slower rate than the guy who leaves all his faucets and showers on 24/7.
If caps are low enough that the pool enthusiast can face punitive fees or risk being disconnected from the water supply, that's *broken*. The only guy they should be catching in their net is overt resource *abusers* (whether intentional or accidental; maybe they have a virus that is pegging their connection as part of a DDoS botnet).