Days of unlimited American bandwidth over?

[FdmNews 0]

 

Ladies and gentlemen, the days of unlimited broadband may be numbered in the United States, and we're not talking wireless this time -- AT&T says it will implement a 150GB monthly cap on landline DSL customers and a 250GB cap on subscribers to U-Verse high speed internet starting on May 2nd. AT&T will also charge overage fees of $10 for every additional 50GB of data, with two grace periods to start out -- in other words, the third month you go over the cap is when you'll get charged. DSLReports says it has confirmation from AT&T that these rates are legitimate, and that letters will go out to customers starting March 18th.

 

How does AT&T defend the move? The company explains it will only impact two percent of consumers who use "a disproportionate amount of bandwidth," and poses the caps as an alternative to throttling transfer speeds or disconnecting excessive users from the service completely. Customers will be able to check their usage with an online tool, and get notifications when they reach 65 percent, 90 percent and 100 percent of their monthly rates.

 

We just spoke with AT&T representative Seth Bloom and confirmed the whole thing -- rates are exactly as described above, and the company will actually begin notifying customers this week. He also told us that those customers who don't yet have access to the bandwidth usage tool won't get charged until they do, and that AT&T U-Verse TV service won't count towards the GB cap.

 

Update: What prompted this change to begin with? That's what we just asked AT&T. Read the company's statement after the break.

Continue reading AT&T will cap DSL and U-Verse internet, impose overage fees (update)

 

AT&T will cap DSL and U-Verse internet, impose overage fees (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 13 Mar 2011 19:05:00 EDT.

 

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[gogoblender 3,077]

You can fight this guys!

 

Bell tried to pull the same thing on all Canadian IPS's here a month ago. But about half a million Canadians signed a petition to stop this type of billing

 

Stop the Meter

 

 

so that small isp's in canada could remain business and compete against Goliaths who hate smaller companies having terrific deals which undermines pricing that big companies are trying to protect.

 

Fight the system!

 

 

gogo

 

 

 

[Dragon Brother 619]

I didnt realise this was such a contentious topic in america. Down in Australia we havent had unlimited since dialup, providers have only ever offered tiered levels of data which has only in the last 12 months or so lead to unlimited off peak (the time between midnight and 8am or example) or plans which provide in excess of 1 terabyte (1000GB) of data a month.

[locolagarto 15]

I happen to be a AT&T U-verse customer at the moment. I have no idea what my monthly usage is? My television service also runs off the same line, so I assume that is not included in the 250GB? This will be interesting to see what happens.

[masteff 64]

I actually see 150GB as a reasonable number. Some googling finds different numbers but let's take a 2-hour HD movie from netflix @ 1.7GB of data. That's 88 HD movies a month. On an busy month, I only watch 10 netflix movies.

 

With all the net neutrality noise right now, I foresee a number of internet service taking action so the highest users foot their own bill. Online storage provider Mozy recently switched from unlimited to tiered pricing because of a small percent of users taking up 100's of GB with movies and other media files.

 

Hmmm, has anyone playing Mythos beta or who plays games on Steam tried running a data usage monitor? I wonder what usage looks like w/ all that content coming via the net.