AT&T's Metered Billing Off By Up To 4,700% 250
jfruhlinger writes "Metered billing for home Internet service may be the way of the future. But shouldn't we have the right to expect that the meters will at least be accurate? As AT&T moves its DSL and fiber customers to plans where they'll have to pay for overages, some users have noticed that the company's assessment of how much data is being used can be wildly inaccurate."
Violates State Bureau(s) of Standards (Score:2, Interesting)
I can see a 50-state lawsuit coming out of this. Wonder how ATT feels about taking on 50 government all at the same time.
Bastards.
- It reminds me how they tried to charge me extra for my 80s-era 1200 baud modem (i.e. ~1 kbit/s). I was paying for "unlimited phone calls" rather than per-call billing, but they said my 16-hour per day usage was excessive and tried to charge me an extra "data fee". I threw the letter in the trash.
Later-on we got phone company choice, and I switched away from ATT.
Re:What do you expect from SBC? (Score:5, Interesting)
what AT&T of old being gone? sorry but I disagree back in 1996 we had worldnet dialup and they pulled this exact same shit. One day I came home to a mad dad who thought I had downloaded the internet cause he got a 300 dialup bill for going over his limit
but dad you signed up for unlimited Internet, have you changed plans? well of course not they just up and decided to start capping bandwidth and showed us what we had used in a month with their metering technology (excel bar graph) which got them another prompt call of "how the fuck do you download 1.8gig on a 28.8 modem with a 4 hour disconnect in under a month genius?"
To me it just sounds just like the good ole days
Unwanted traffic (Score:4, Interesting)
Like someone on the comments section of the article said.. what about if someone is ping flooding you, DDoS'ing, or otherwise sending traffic your way... here's a very true story about a similar situation my friend had with Nextel:
Years ago my friend had Nextel, and I sent him a text bomb (basically I just stuck his cell # into the TO field as many times as I could on a single text message and hit "send". After it sent, I went into the sent messages and just kept hitting "resend".)
So he received around 100 or so messages. I didn't know his nextel plan didn't include texting, and he'd be charge $0.25 per message. That's about $20 bucks out of his pocket FOR NOTHING.
He called Nextel and explained.. and got no where. So he bitched.. still got no where. After 2 hours on the phone trying different people and supervisors bitching about "how can you charge me 25 cents a message for messages A> I don't want, and B> I can't stop/block from coming in?!
Their solution was "well we can block all text messages".. at that point he told them to go f' themselves if they can't run their damn network correctly and understand how you could cause someone you disliked to have a HUGE phone bill, and told them right then and there he was leaving their messed up network. He promptly switched and ported his number.
But it just goes to show they DON'T take those situations into account, or just don't CARE about those situations.. which either way is a very sad thing indeed.
I hate these companies so much (Score:5, Interesting)
Where I live I have two choices, AT&T and Comcast. It's like trying to pick a side to root for on the Ostfront in WWII. Can we root against them both?
I've gone through a six month period of terrible service with the AT&T fuckers. Service keeps dropping out, problem isn't on my end. Their fucking Indians don't have any clue what's going on with the service techs over here, nobody updates the account info properly, nobody gives a damn. And while we're at it, why do I have to type in my phone number for them to route it properly if they're just going to ask me what it is when I get there?
The problem is that there's no fucking free market. There is no competition. There's a duopoly with each choice being craptastic. The next pro-business cheerleader who goes teary-eyed about the marketplace of choice is getting my fist in his gob.
"The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that."
-- Larry Kudlow, CNBC host and failed human being
My router's traffic shows 10-15% lower than AT& (Score:4, Interesting)
If I'm paying for PPPoE and ATM overhead, I'm gonna be pissed.
AT&T must be measuring bits at the DSLAM, if what they're reporting is anywhere close to being accurate. If a 150GB "cap" includes the approx. .5% PPPoE and 10+% ATM overhead, what I'm seeing means that my 150GB cap is in reality closer to 135GB.
Sucks.
Re:How is this different? (Score:2, Interesting)
Real Life Metering Inaccuracy. (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:One more reason to not do metering. (Score:4, Interesting)
increased usage *does* cost them more via increased electricity usage
Let's go ahead and measure the actual increased electrical usage caused by increased transfer rates and make that the usage charge then. But when it turns out to be something like one cent per 100GB, we might realize that the cost of metering exceeds the metering charge.
It is impractical, if not impossible, to buy phone lines that are so big that every user can use the network at 100% and not saturate the link. It would sit there 90% unused.
It's a good thing they don't actually have to do that. All they have to do is build enough capacity for the expected usage of actual customers -- which is what they have to do either way. The only thing metering even has the potential to do is to suppress demand by charging artificially high prices -- which is a bad thing, because we like demand for bandwidth. It spurs demand for services, which provides incentive for innovation, creates jobs, etc.
it finances the upgrades
The ISPs already have more than enough money to finance the upgrades. But nobody is forcing them to actually make the upgrades, so they instead use the money to buy each other and line their pockets. Metered billing would provide them with more money, but how would it give them any incentive to make more upgrades? Especially if it causes usage to go down?
it causes them to think twice about downloading every fucking Buffy episode in 4000k resolution.
Which is half the problem. It causes services like Netflix and YouTube to have fewer customers, which stifles innovation and encourages consolidation in that sector.