

AT&T To Impose Caps, Overages - mvs
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Exclusive-ATT-To-Impose-150GB-DSL-Cap-Overages-113149

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radicaldreamer
Switch to Sonic.net if you use AT&T in the bay area:
[http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/03/23/drilling-through-the-
ca...](http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/03/23/drilling-through-the-caps/)

~~~
rdl
sonic.net is amazing, especially if you get the two line bonded Fusion
service. We've got it at Sunfire, and get 25/4 for $130/mo business; I got it
at a friend's house too, for $70/mo. Instant response from customer service,
actual clue on their part, great network peering and transit, etc. I like
having Comcast Business Internet as diversity/backup/etc., but if I only had
one, it'd be the Sonic.

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tshtf
Unlike the overage charges for mobile telephony, the charges for exceeding
your monthly bandwidth aren't that unreasonable:

 _Overages will be $10 for every 50GB over the 150 GB or 250GB limit they
travel._

That's $0.20/GB, which is about twice as much that you'll pay for bandwidth on
Amazon's EC2.

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jmtame
i can't imagine anyone is actually excited about this. i'd prefer not to have
formal rules here, with the exception that AT&T can punish their top 0.05%
users by bandwidth usage. they want to turn the internet into a giant cable tv
package because they know that as soon as they offer speeds fast enough,
people will drop their tv subscription. i worry that traffic discrimination
will come next.

do we have any solid numbers on how much this costs AT&T? i want to say it's a
violation of network neutrality principles, but this could probably be argued
on a much simpler basis that AT&T isn't attempting to save money at this
point, seems like they're just price gouging now. SMS text messages are a good
example here.

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forwardslash
This is the same thing that has been happening in Canada for a while now with
the exact same rhetoric: "it will only affect a small proportion of customers,
roughly 2 percent of all subscribers", "[we are] looking at usage caps and
usage based billing as a way to rein in heavy data users" [1].

[1]<http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20058933-266.html>

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hvs
It's official: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20058933-266.html>

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aphistic
That's fine, I'm calling them and telling them to cancel my 200 channel HDTV
plan with DVR so I can pay for the overages on bandwidth I'll get by watching
my TV shows on Hulu and Netflix. I think I'll even end up spending less per
month!

I hope they realize their plan for pushing users toward paying for their TV
service is backfiring. (At least that's what I see this as)

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jbooth
Fine by me, get what you pay for. Just don't distort the market by charging
other people to put bytes onto my paid for pipe.

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karamazov
Many users only have ready access to one broadband provider. If that provider
happens to be AT&T, they're now SOL.

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absconditus
How is a 150 GB cap a burden for most people?

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jordanb
Will the bandwith caps also apply to video and VOIP data streamed over the
same connection by AT&T's UVerse service? Or will those uses of the network be
exempt?

The above question borders on the rhetorical because, while it's not addressed
in the article, I think we already all know the answer.

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jseifer
Does anyone know whether this will impact business accounts? I haven't been
able to find any information on that.

