

AT&T to Put 5gb Data Usage Cap on iPhone - dkasper
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9CFS57G0&show_article=1

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gxs
I hope users that are peeved enough realize that this constitutes AT&T
breaking their contract. This in turn for the user means that they can cancel
their AT&T account without paying an early cancellation fee or, in my
experience, the carrier will allow you to remain on your plan without the
limitation (i.e., leaving the original agreement in tact.)

Note: the user has to approach AT&T the right way, and not give up when the
rep says no the first few times. This has worked for me several times, usually
after a txt msg rate hike.

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gkefalas
If you've been following this story throughout the day, it's been pretty
amusing to see each blogger or news site try to exaggerate what was said more
and more. AT&T's CEO made an offhand comment (that may be a trial balloon, may
not) that AT&T is going to try and educate consumers about their usage and, if
that doesn't help, they'll consider a tiered pricing model. How does that
become "AT&T to put a cap on iPhone usage"?

Not to say that I wouldn't drop AT&T like a disease if they _did_...

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cmelbye
I usually stand up for AT&T, but this is just idiotic. Their executives are
morons that honestly need to be replaced. They need to quit spending money on
marketing their crappy network and use that money to fix their crappy network.

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KWD
I'm still waiting to see an Apple response to this. It would seem to have an
impact on buying video through iTunes.

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cmelbye
Exactly what I was thinking. Downloading just a few videos from iTunes over 3G
would use up a quota very quickly.

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patrickgzill
Do they have the ability in the contract, to arbitrarily cap you? Assume I
have an iPhone and for the last 6 months have been using 5.7GB per month; now
I use it and get either capped or charged more... I would not be happy.

And FWIW, 5GB/month of data transfer, were you to buy it at any major
datacenter, is about 10-30 cents' worth of bandwidth.

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jrockway
I am pretty sure you are paying for the traffic from your phone to the cell
tower, not the traffic from the cell tower to the Internet.

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stumm
This title doesn't match what the article says at all. The article claims the
cap is already in place:

> Right now, the carrier has a monthly usage cap of 5 gigabytes on its data
> plans, the same as other carriers.

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timdorr
Those are data plans for laptops, not phones.

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pkulak
Sorry, guys, but streaming your tv to your phone over a cellular network all
month costs way more than 30 dollars and ATT would be retarded not to try to
rein you in. Anyone who gets this enraged and self reightous over something so
obvious really comes off as pompous and petty.

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melvinram
Related Post: When The World Gives You Lemons, Sell Lemonade
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=987138>

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weaksauce
Not to be too pedantic but gb != GB. The g is unambiguous(though wrong) but
the b could be bit or byte depending on the capitalization. 1Gb networking is
much slower than 1GB. (.125GB vs. 1Gb)

It's one of my pet peeves so sorry about the digression.

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blasdel
As far as I know there are only two situations where b commonly refers to
bits: individual raw DRAM / Flash chip packages, and network channel
bandwidth. Otherwise it rather unambiguously refers to bytes.

On the other hand the G is actually ambiguous -- is it 10^9 or 2^30?

