AT&T Begins a Trial To Cap, Meter Internet Usage 421
An anonymous reader writes "On the heels of Comcast's decision to implement a 250-GB monthly cap, and Time Warner Cable's exploration of caps and overage fees, DSL Reports notes that AT&T is launching a metered billing trial of their own in Reno, Nevada. According to a filing with the FCC (PDF), AT&T's existing tiers, which range from 768 kbps to 6 Mbps, would see caps ranging from 20 GB to 150 GB per month. Users who exceed those caps would pay an additional $1 per gigabyte, per month."
$1 per GB? (Score:4, Informative)
And driving away customers to a better paying deal is not a good thing in any market, much less a harsh modern market in the post-speculator market of today.
Idiots. They should be making sure they are making a reasonable profit without shoving off your potential customers.
The last time providers tried this... (Score:4, Informative)
Was in the age of Dial-Up. I remember that there were a few ISPs back in the mid '90s that charged $20/month for a limited amount of time online...somewhere between 30 to 50 hours per month. But when other ISPs offered unlimited time online for the same price (or $25 to $30 per month), it was a no-brainer.
Of course, this was also back when even a mid-size municipal city (80,000+ population) could have three or four local ISPs to choose from.
Now, if you live in a place like Minneapolis, your only choices are Comcast or Qwest. If both decide to switch to a capped bandwidth, you're screwed.
60gigs in Canada (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So how much data is that (Score:5, Informative)
At 1Mbyte per sec, its 250000 seconds worth, or about 30 days worth.
Nice try, but you're off by, oh, an order or two of magnitude...
At 1Mbyte/sec, you're looking at less than 3 days until you hit the 250GB cap.
At the same rate, it would be less than 6 hours until the 20GB cap would be hit (although presumably plans with that much bandwidth would have higher caps.)
Re:speaker wire (Score:2, Informative)
Hell, I wish that Gmail's free storage grew at a sensible exponential rate. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure it grows at a logarithmic rate...
It's still 1000x cheaper (Score:2, Informative)
Now, take your current Internet access bill and multiply it by 1000. So stop complaining.
(Yes, yes, get off my lawn, too.)
Methinks you meant 1Mbit/sec, and 2.6Msec (Score:2, Informative)
2,592,000 seconds hath September, April, June, and November.
A "slow" DSL connection of 1 million bits/sec would chew up 2.592 trillion bits, or 324 billion bytes, a bit above the 250GB cap of one ISP and a bit over twice that of another.
That's American trillions and billions and millions for you Brits out there.
New Entrants? (Score:5, Informative)
I noticed that here in Pittsburgh, we have a relatively new entrant into the DSL space (Cavtel) who are offering the maximum possible speeds(up to 8 Mb/s, depending on line quality) with no caps and no tiers and they advertise a price lower than Verizon's 3 Mb/s service. Basically, they set themselves up as a CLEC and have access to the last-mile copper and their own backbone (probably transit) links.
I wonder if the caps will make it profitable for more of this type of activity to take place? Could we see some alternative DSL providers open up shop?
Re:Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"? (Score:5, Informative)
That's correct, although it's written as 1c per Kilobyte in the contract.
People would freak out if they saw "0.5 Gb Included, $10,000 per Gb" in the contract, so it's written as "500Mb included, 1c per kb thereafter"
Yes, there are actually plans like that in Australia...
GrpA
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:3, Informative)
Excuse we while I wipe the dripping sarcasm off your post =) On a serious note, I intend to pursue the muni broadband idea with my local town, as they already tried to do it once and got smacked by Comcast.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"? (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, but it's largely a factor of our geography. Data doesn't magically get from A to B and when you are as far away from pretty much everything (including the other side of the same country) the economics are inevitably different to places that are more centrally located and/or have high population densities of their own.
That's bullshit. The population density of Australia's capital cities is way higher than that of America. People point at Australia's low population density and say "that's why we have slow internets!", but they fail to notice that most of our country is desert, and most of our population is clustered in a few cities (more than half of our population lives in just 4 cities).
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:3, Informative)
About 8 years ago, I had Time Warner (Road Runner) service in San Diego. I got about 800KBps download speeds for about $50 a month.
Then I moved to another area and had Cox High-Speed Internet for 6 years. I got about 800KBps for about $50 a month.
Now I'm back in Time Warner's area, and I get about 800KBps for about $50 a month.
The best word I can think of to describe broadband in my region is "stagnant." :-/
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:3, Informative)
Because the local ISPs will throw money at city councils to have them kill the projects.
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:3, Informative)
I buy tons transit from Cogent and Hurricane Electric at dirt cheap prices (less than $10/Mb) for my business. On top of that, I can get to a POP such as Equinix in downtown Chicago or Elk Grove Village by leasing excess capacity on the Illinois Tollway's fiber loops, which they rent out at nominal charges.
I've done my homework.