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."
Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just don't put it in the fine print (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"? (Score:5, Insightful)
The best part is they will probably raise their rates, since all that extra monitoring to bring you quality service costs money don'tchyaknow :-\
Lack of competition (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally I'm supportive of published caps. We know hidden ones have existed for some time. It's far better if you know you're buying 20GB of bandwidth or 100GB and it's fair if those using 100GB aren't subsidised by those using 20.
Don't whine that you bought an unlimited connection for $30/month and you should get to use it without penalty. I do agree connections should never have been sold as unlimited (indeed this addresses that very point) but you're an idiot if you think current networks to the home in the US can deliver that sort of bandwidth at that sort of cost.
The problem in the US is the lack of competition. This should allow prices to be driven down. Our parents and grandparents should be able to buy uber cheap 2GB/month packages.
Look at the UK where almost everyone with a phone line can pick from dozens of DSL providers. Competition helps keep prices in check. More expensive providers offer better customer service etc.
But there's so little competition in the US market that there's serious potential for this to be almost all negative.
What makes even less sense is the varying of both bandwidth and capacity. If you're metering the connection, there's no reason at all that everyone shouldn't get the fastest connection available. That's also how it works in the UK.
What's the point of artificially slowing down data for those on the 20GB tariff who in fact are paying more per byte for the data?
They should do it right (Score:5, Insightful)
When your bandwidth cap is exceeded your ports are all shut except 80. Your web browser can only get AT&T's page. You have options to (a) pay for another XXX GB of transfer or (b) upgrade your plan.
It ain't all that hard to do this. Making people pay a dollar-per-gigabyte without giving them notice that they've exceeded their limit is clearly not informing the user.
Tag this story lawsuitwaitingtohappen, whatcanpossiblygowrong, goodluckwiththat, monopoly, luserunfriendly and !cool.
Re:Just don't put it in the fine print (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm fine with schemes like this provided the ISP makes it perfectly clear and obvious when you sign up what your download limitations are and the costs of running over. This allows consumers to make an educated choice about which provider they want to use. Unfortunately, I see this being shoved in the fine print while still advertising "unlimited" internet access. I mean, we are dealing with telecom companies here. I know my bill is a surprise about every other month after all the "taxes and fees" are tacked on to the advertised base price...
That's all well and good in markets where customers actually have a choice. In the markets where the options are Cable Company A or dial-up, the heavy internet-usage customers lose out and end up paying the exorbitant price of $1 per gigabyte.
Re:Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not shape?
Because $1 per Gb is a lot less than it costs in Australia, which depending on the plan/carrier, still charges up to $10,000 per additional Gb...
Shaping/Policing is just a way of making people upgrade their accounts without the original infraction costing them the earth. It's a lot fairer, but it still leaves you unable to do a lot with your connection one it cuts in.
Actually, in the long run, just about all content will be accessible by net, but some will require serious bandwidth. Having caps works with the net as it is today, but it stifles innovation because it also limits what is commercially viable on the Internet and people adjust their usage to meet costs and available bandwidth levels and the carriers find it helps manage their bandwidth requirements, so they stop adding new capacity and find other ways to make their existing infrastructure go further.
Youtube? Myspace? Never would have happened in Australia. We're still working on models that were in place when modems were the dominant technology.
And a typical cap is around 5gb over here - Far less than the 250 Gb mentioned... Not enough to watch online movies even casually. 20Gb is considered a "Big" plan over here and pretty much no one can afford 250Gb for non professional (commercial) use.
Because the caps are so small, there is no business driver to keep upgrading infrastructure...
It's the same old story that we've seen forever. If a resource is essentially free and limitless, you can only make it commercially viable by restricting it's supply by some means. Music, Water, Electricity, Freedom, you name it. The less it's available, the more it costs you. Information is no different.
The reason they don't create new dams or build new ecologically friendly power stations isn't because they can't - it's because it's more commercially viable to retain limited availability of these resources.
GrpA
p.s. Most ISPs in Australia that "Shape" don't actually Shape - they Police - ie, drop packets that exceed the burst rate of the connection. That causes a much lower throughput than shaping does.
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not shape rather than charge extra though?
Because then they wouldn't have as much revenue. If their bandwidth really were limited, they would shape to reduce congestion. But they've got plenty, so they impose an artificial limit and charge you extra for going over it.
$1/GB seems a bit excessive (Score:2, Insightful)
At least it's in the right order of magnitude.
Really fair pricing would be like some electric companies: A small "account charge," say, $3/month, and a per-GB or even per-MB fee with no minimum.
If ISPs did this, the "fair" price would probably be somewhere between $1 and $5 for the "account charge" and between $0.05 and $0.50/GB for traffic. A 60GB user might pay $35, a 240GB user might pay $125. It would break the economic model for things like "Netflix online" unless they used really tight compression, but face it, sometimes a plastic disc or a dedicated video-on-demand cable channel really is more efficient than the public internet.
Re:Software updates (Score:5, Insightful)
You *poor dears*. Really. I can manage to make it through every month on 40GB... But then Americans aren't typically known for exercising restraint, are they?
You wasteful slob! I managed to make it through most of my life in the 1970s and 80s on less than 40GB total! But then people from whatever country you are from aren't typically known for exercising restraint, are they?
But seriously, bandwidth isn't a finite resource like food or water or oil. There's no reason to restrict ourselves to the stone-age because a handful of media-corporations wish to control the flow of information while raking in boatloads of cash. Your attitude only helps them.
ADSL Quotas - Standard Practice in Australia (Score:2, Insightful)
Many plans also count traffic in both directions toward your quota, so the uploads generated by P2P software can result in a significant reduction in your download traffic.
The uncapped charges can be EXTREMELY nasty - for example the Telstra BigPond plans charge (http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/bc/isp-1/telstra-bigpond.htm [whirlpool.net.au]) 150 per Gigabyte after exceeding a quote of 200 Meg. So $1 per Gigabyte after a quota of 250 Gig doesn't sounds all that bad!
Re:Jews did 9/11. (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, can't we just get rid of anonymous posting? Let logged-in users check the checkbox and post 'anonymously', but keep ramifications for people's actions. It would solve this BS troll problem once and for all, since persistent trollers could eventually end up with such negative karma that they couldn't post for a month.
Everyone wins.
Re:Software updates (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Just don't put it in the fine print (Score:4, Insightful)
Most customers have no idea what 50GB or 150GB monthly caps would mean. I definitely wouldn't expect my mom to be able to make an educated choice about usage caps.
Hell, I'm good with PCs and I don't know how much bandwidth I would need in a month. How many people would really know how much bandwidth they use when you consider flash advertisements, youtube, etc.?
Re:Cost effectiveness (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:5, Insightful)
True. But they won't meter all traffic the same way. Movies on "ATT Movies" won't count against the tier. They will partner with lets say Amazon for unmetered music downloads. In all practicality,, this is the end of net-neutrality.
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing to do with net neutrality as long as you meter all traffic the same way.
The next step is clearly going to be "free" downloads from paying partners.
Unless there is a radical change in direction, I give it no more than 2 years before we see the first such offering.
$1/gigabyte is just too prohibitive in a market where netflix and others are offering pseudo-HDTV movie downloads to anyone with a game console, the time is coming.
Re:Just don't put it in the fine print (Score:3, Insightful)
Most customers have no idea what 50GB or 150GB monthly caps would mean. I definitely wouldn't expect my mom to be able to make an educated choice about usage caps.
Hell, I'm good with PCs and I don't know how much bandwidth I would need in a month. How many people would really know how much bandwidth they use when you consider flash advertisements, youtube, etc.?
I've used exactly 98.01 GB in the past month.
That's with 4 Debian servers, 2 XP , 1 2K, 1 Debian desktops, an old NT4 fax server, and a pile of customer machines, many of which had the full gamut of Windows updates done. Although I've got service packs on my fileserver, so only the hotfixes get downloaded every time.
This is also with a completely unsecured wireless hotspot. Yes, the wireless is firewalled off from anything on my network, but I have no idea who's used it besides me. Although the wireless network has seen 47.09 GB of traffic over the past month, but at least some of that has been internal traffic directed at an anonymous read-only fileserver or internal VPN server.
I'm guessing, based on other subnet's traffic, that probably around 30-35 GB of that is wireless traffic to the Internet.
All you need to figure out your bandwidth usage is a router software such as pfSense. Even if you only swap it in for a couple of months just to get an idea of bandwidth usage, then go back to your Linksys POS, at least you'll know roughly what you'll be using.
Although with the amount of bandwidth I use, and the security configuration of my network, there isn't a chance in hell that a consumer level router would work for me, so I'll stick with my antique Compaq P-266 running pfSense.
It's not like it'll use a significant amount of power, though, and for the most part, the CPU usage sits around 10-30%, with only occasional spikes up to 65 or so. Never seen it go over 70%, so it's certainly not slowing my connection down.
Might be worth looking into if you have an old junker sitting around, and you're really interested in what your bandwidth usage is.
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:5, Insightful)
So why don't we get together and start municipal fiber projects in our respective towns? I mean, municipalities can get cheap bonds to build out the infrastructure, and than let companies sell internet access over the fiber (similar to how Speakeasy/Covad can sell ILEC DSL lines). Are we not tired of this bullshit yet?
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you think they are going to meter their partners (aka : people who pay them money), you should share what you're smoking. Barring regulation forcing them to meter everything, this is a direct path to the end of net neutrality.
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:5, Insightful)
What are they getting payed for? (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean seriously, you pay your ISP to constantly upgrade their equipment. It doesn't cost much to run it so much of the money should go to upgrades. If they don't manage to be able to do that, they should go out of business.
I mean it's not like you have to dig up the road and lay new fibers. You can use wavelength multiplexing to get more and more data onto those.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexing [wikipedia.org]
If nothing is done, the US will fall even further behind the rest of the world when it comes to internet access.
Furthermore, there is a lot you can do against this by yourself. Of course you probably cannot change your ISP in most regions as they often have local monopolies, but what you can do is to build your own networks. There's software around like OLSRd which you can install onto computers or routers. It implements a meshed routing protocoll. Essentially you turn your wireless network cards into ad-hoc mode. Assign IP-Addresses and start OLDRd. This programm (availiable for preety much all OSes, even Windows) negotiates routes with all the other nodes it can reach. This way you can easily build up large networks which configure themselves automatically. If a node fails, and there is still another way, the network will find it.
This way you can build an additional network, free of any greedy big ISPs. You can use it wherever you want for whatever you want.
http://www.olsr.org/ [olsr.org]
Re:Software updates (Score:2, Insightful)
Deep breath. Those of us who don't live in the US have lived with bandwidth caps forever and we've survived. We download software updates. Some of us even download quite a few movies.
I've got a premium $50/month 10 Mb connection with a 60 GB cap. 250 GB? You guys are spoiled.
Re:Jews did 9/11. (Score:3, Insightful)
You could just adjust your filters in the preferences. Why force your choice on me?
I expect the ISP's are dreaming of 'partnerships' (Score:3, Insightful)
I think all of this is a prelude to the ISP's trying to squeeze extra revenue from content providers, by setting up 'partnership' deals where the bandwidth cap doesn't apply to the partnered content providers.
E.g. Amazon pays the ISP some amount of money per month for the privilege of getting truly unlimited bandwidth to the customers.
If the content providers are smart, they will all band together to 'educate' consumers about this, and setup a website with information about competing ISPs which are available with truly unlimited bandwidth. Maybe if they are *really* smart, they'll all cooperate with Google to build out a competing network to cut out the ISP's in the middle who are trying to put the thumbscrews on them.
Re:Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"? (Score:5, Insightful)
What "Australia" are you living in?
5gig would be an entry level account, not a "typical" one. 20 gig would be a low end one.
I have a 50 gig plan [tpg.com.au] from TPG. I haven't paid more for internet for as long as I can remember and year after year my bandwidth cap has increased in a way that has been more than sufficient for increased usage.
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.
It isn't (entirely) a lack of imagination or drive to find a better alternative to "models that were in place when modems were the dominant technology." It's a reflection of physical reality.
I think that is fundamentally incorrect. The tiered cap approach means that demand increases justify infrastructure purchases with extra income.
Re:So how much data is that (Score:1, Insightful)
"Realistically its for creating tiered pricing structures - that's the only purpose for which it makes any sense."
It's also for stifling any competition to the 'content' and high-bandwidth services the telco/cable provider might choose to provide: Go to Netflix for a movie, you pay through the nose. Go to ATT's pay-for-movie source, you get 'free' bandwidth for it.
How far would YouTube, Google Maps, or Google Earth have gotten if we all had absurdly low caps? Would Netflix even *have* an online business model if people have to pay more to the ISP just to access them in a meaningful way?
How many new services (MMORPGs, graphically interactive anything) that are bandwidth-intensive will be foregone because the creators see a significant percentage of their potential audience walled off by arbitrary caps?
Telcos and cable have always tried to stifle innovation in favor of their entrenched monopolies, status quo, and their own service offerings. It goes back to the original CarterFone court case where Ma Bell tried to block out any sort of modem/data traffic from their network that didn't use telco-supplied equipment and data service. It also goes back to the goverenment forcing telcos to finally allow people to connect personally owned phones rather than just 'renting' telco supplied ones.
It's a pure anti-competitive power and money grab. They know they can get away with it, so they will do it.
The pay-by-byte model may suit the telco/cable magnates just fine, but it will certainly kill the continued growth of the net in ways we have yet to fully appreciate.
I'd really like to see Google or some other content provider start launching some lawsuits.
Re:60gigs in Canada (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes,
Let's all compare the price of bandwidth technology and services to South Africa, which is clearly similar in terms of technology, development, architecture, services, service density, e-tailers, and so forth. Makes a whole lot of sense. Maybe in 10-15 years time when you've got used to unlimited broadband and cable and your ISPs start throttling your traffic, dropping packets, killing connections, imposing caps and raising prices someone from another developing nation can ask you to cry them a river.
Back to the US: It's ridiculous that the ISPs can't/won't upgrade their infrastructure to cope with rising demand for bandwidth and instead degrade service and (likely) increase prices. $1/GB is unreasonable. I hope the government investigates the cost to industry growth and development in terms of limiting the adoption of services like Netflix online and other high bandwidth services. Of course, some of these ISPs have a vested interested in making services like Netflix less likely to succeed, just as they had an interest in shutting down their usenet services completely unrelated to protecting children.
In the interest of protecting competition and consumer choice I'd like to see regulation preventing these kind of caps and/or charges in areas where two or fewer ISPs constitute a regional monopoly on internet services.
Re:So how much data is that (Score:1, Insightful)
I think what the poster ment to say was 1Mbit/sec, at that rate it's more like 24 days, which is closer to the mark.
Some of the complaints here are laughable. (Score:2, Insightful)
Some of the claims here are just outright insanity, honestly you Americans really are a spoilt spoilt group of people, sometimes this makes us foreigners feel envy and other times it's a pure and utter facepalm.
250gb might drive people back to DVD and bluray!
These caps may stop people getting software patches!
etc.
What the hell are you people TALKING about, people are not going to take you seriously if you're going to make such crazy statements.
I could format a PC right now and download a copy of XP or Vista. (on a spare machine)
Then download firefox, nero, azureus, hardware drivers, anti-virus packages, anti-spyware packages, benchmarking tools, mirc, winamp, skype, itunes AND all of the Windows patches, including service pack 3 for XP then download all the updates / definitions for those packages.
Then download a linux iso of my choice, then install that on another partition then install all relevant apps for that AND updates.
Then I could download about 5 popular brand new video games and patches AND cracks (should I be so inclined) for them and I still would be very very unlikely to use HALF of that amount of data for all that.
I could youtube it up for an hour a day, stream some radio, constantly check news sites as I do, re-install steam and re-download the 30gb of games I have on steam I'd STILL not be hitting that cap.
Then I could download some popular movies (again, should I be so inclined) let's say 5 new movies in 700mb format, plus all my favourite TV shows (let's say 6 shows, 4 episodes for the month, 24x350mb) etc
I STILL WOULD NOT BE HITTING THE CAP.
I could do this every single god damned month with a 250gb cap for goodness sakes, do you people re-install and re-download everything, every month?
Let alone the fact that I shouldn't be pirating the movies, shouldn't be pirating the TV shows, shouldn't be pirating the games, even with over the top crazy bandwidth usage, (legitimate) I'd have a hell of a time hitting more than 150gb a month.
Now before you hit the reply button I want to make several things clear.
1, caps suck, I totally and utterly agree, ideally it would be unlimited for everyone
2, putting a cap in place and NOT providing a metering tool is bullshit! if you're going to cap users, damnwell let them see their usage (the Aussie ISP's can do it)
3, if you're going to charge extra per gb, there needs to be a clear notification to the user when they are close (again, Aussie ISP's can do this) furthermore this needs to be made clear to the client before switching their connection to this 'plan'
I don't like caps but some of the claims you people make are bonkers, absoloutely bonkers, I live with a 25gb 'peak' and 40gb 'offpeak' plan in Australia and that's a recent change, I was on 10peak/20offpeak for 2 years before this.
25/40 is restrictive, yes but it's not un-usable, not in the slightest, I'd be very comfortable to be honest with the same 65gb just in a single block rather than peak / offpeak and yes I download pretty much all I want (TV shows especially, TV over here blows)
What does suck is if you're a bunch of guys in a share house, say a nice uperclass pad with well paid guys in there, all geeks, say 4 of you, then 250gb could start to be a problem.
What you do need is the ISP's to offer upgrades to the plans, or better notice about switching users on these plans, metering tools, ways to inform the customer the limit is close, you need competition and alternatives.
I can fathom a share house of completely legitimate internet use of complete geeks (not meant as an insult) using maybe 500gb in a month but that's a very very rare instance and in that case surely 4 geeks putting a bit of coin in together could afford some kind of business plan which offers substantially more (we have those here)
Ultimately the point of my post is that some of you pulling a bleeding heart over 250gb are really just making yourselves look ridiculous, seriously people.
We've got people over here gett
Re:Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not consumer fraud, it's misleading, but it's not fraud.
No, it's fraud. Unlimited, meaning no limit is applied. A cap is a limit. They would be directly claiming something that is not true in order to inflate the perceived value of a product or service.
Markets require a strict enforcement of truth in order to function effectively. Had ISPs been jumped on for their lies earlier in the game, nobody would dare to implement caps now.
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:4, Insightful)
Then you against net-neutrality. The whole point of non-neutrality is to force sites like hulu and itunes to pay Comcast and ATT. This is what the caps will end up producing as they continue to slide the caps downward.
Adjusted Cap based on Connection...... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Some of the complaints here are laughable. (Score:2, Insightful)
not that I think it should be an unlimited data plan, the infrastructure can't handle that... but I'm just saying, it's not as hard as you think, especially when you can stream HD these days...
Conspiracy? (Score:1, Insightful)
Is this the telcos solution to voip? Meter the internet until it's cheaper to download through USPS? Cheaper to make long distance calls by carrier pigeon?
If an ISP already controls the speed, that connection should be able to be saturated 24/7/365 without a cap.
Otherwise it's just, "Get our new 500TBps connection with speed-rape (latency 50s), and browse up to 50MB of the internet per month!".
Re:Some of the complaints here are laughable. (Score:3, Insightful)
You see, a good portion of the world doesn't have to deal with internet access relying on expensive undersea cables. We have the capability to create a much better infrastructure, with a lot more bandwidth. Being complacent about your bandwidth needs will allow ISPs to empty your wallet and stifle future innovation. A lot of new internet delivered products (hulu, netflix, HD movies) depend on serious amounts of bandwidth being available. 10 gb/month is not going to cut it if we want progress. 250 gb/month is fine for now, but it won't be in five years. If you are going to keep these ISPs on their toes you have to start bitching and moaning immediately!
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:4, Insightful)
Giving stuff for free to kill the competition is classic form of anti-competitive behaviour. It is not to the customer's benefit, any more than putting cheese into a mousetrap is to the mouse's benefit.
"Net neutrality" means that the network does not prioritize traffic based on its source or destination. And AT&T doesn't need to outright block itunes.com; it is quite simple to make it slightly slower or have traffic to and from it count against some limit traffic to AT&T's own competing site doesn't count against to give AT&T's site an unfair advantage.
It is also doable without anti-competitive behaviour: simply have multiple possible connection speeds available, so grandma can pick the slowest.
The issue here is not about charging per megabyte transferred; it's about charging per megabyte transferred from some IP addresses and not others.
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:3, Insightful)
HELLO?? No, "normal content" is not "filtered/slowed/capped"-- it's BILLED TO YOU AT A DEAR COST. Gasoline isn't slowed or capped either but you have to pay for it by the gallon.
All they're doing is replacing the "degrading traffic that hasn't been paid for by both sides of the pipe" with "charging a lot of money for said traffic, after a token traffic 'allowance' which we could adjust at our discretion at any time without your consent."
These limits appear high now, but they're planning for the future:
1. Nothing says these limits won't shrink. Maybe 250 becomes 25 but it's ok because we provide A LIBRARY OF 150 FREE ON-DEMAND MOVIES FROM COMCAST STRAIGHT TO YOUR PC! FREE!!!
2. Think about HD.
3. Think about how much bandwidth you use today versus 10 years ago. I'll bet you never thought you could bump up against 10x what you used then. But many people did.