On Monday, AT&T Customers Enter Era of Broadband Caps

theodp writes "The Age of Broadband Caps begins Monday, with AT&T imposing a 150 GB cap on DSL subscribers and 250 GB for UVerse users, and keeping the meter running after that. The move comes as AT&T's 16+ million customers are increasingly turning to online video such as Hulu and Netflix on-demand streaming service instead of paying for cable. With AT&T's Man in the White House, some fear there's a 'digital dirt road' in America's future. Already, the enforcement of data caps in Canada has prompted Netflix to default to lower-quality streaming video to shield its users from overage fees."

Sweden

[Securityemo]

I sit here, 90 miles above the polar circle in the northernmost city in Sweden, and I pay ~52 USD a month for an unlimited 100/10 (guaranteed minimum 60) connection from an RJ-45 jack in my apartment wall. It's an ordinary apartment, nothing special about it, this is something that is generally available. Bask in my smugness, etc.

Re:Sweden

[Edsj]

And not so far from Sweden, baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) have unilimited 50,100 and even 200Mbps for a cool $40. These countries are not even the richest but somewhat think that this is an investment for their future as they can create a new type of industry with all that bandwith avaliable, helping their economies.

If only it didn't suck!

[Whip]

The caps wouldn't be that bad if the service didn't *utterly* suck.

The gateway they give you is the only thing that works with the service (you can't use your own hardware, or at least nobody has found a way to). It won't do any kind of bridge mode. It won't talk to more than one IP per MAC address, so you can't put a router behind it (unless that router is doing NAT for *everything*). It randomly drops connections, especially long lived ones -- I can't make local backups of my server in a remote datacenter anymore, because the connection will almost never stay alive long enough to transfer the whole ~400MB. Sometimes it starts blocking random incoming connections, even to static, un-natted, unfirewalled addresses -- one day I can't get to my webserver from the outside world for a few hours... the next I can't ssh into my home server ("unknown inbound session stopped" ... of course it's unknown, it's the first packet of a new connection, you piece of garbage). It supports logging to syslog, but outputs a constant stream of useless messages so thick that it's almost useless.

Recently I've started to notice having periodic problems downloading content (like the slashdot style sheet!) from akamai-based sites, which a little bit of goggling shows to be an ongoing U-Verse problem since 2008.

The support sucks massively. If you call with basically any problem beyond "my internet is down" they will forward you on to their "advanced" support department, who has a fee of $39 (might be $29... don't remember)... which they'll charge you even if all they do is tell you that they can't help you and you need to call regular support.

Netflix, on my 24Mbit downlink, varies from "great quality" to "OMG you can barely do SD quality"... many other people report this as well. Some days the performance is great, some days the performance is just absolutely miserable. I'd try to see if there was some common network path causing problems, but they basically disable traceroute for all of their internal nodes (I'm guessing they just stop them from sending TTL exceeded datagrams completely).

You can't switch back to ADSL -- they wouldn't even let me get U-Verse service unless they disconnected my ADSL at the same time. But it is "no longer available" so now I'm stuck with this garbage.

I'd gladly take a usage cap if it meant any of this crap would get better. I'm somehow doubting it, since not a bit of it seems like it's related to network saturation... just lousy service. And my only other choice in this area (AFAIK) is Comcast, who also has caps, along with their own set of problems...

I'd say "welcome back to the 90s" ... but my network worked a lot better back then. So I guess... welcome to the future!

Re:Sweden

[Anonymous Coward]

That is quite untrue. I once did 3 terabytes in month myself and absolutely nothing happened. When the northern European ISPs say unlimited they mean it.

Also they don't undersize their core network capacity. It generally can handle the traffic. If it slows down they will enable more fibers and buy more hardware.

Re:Truth in advertising?

[hawguy]

Sure, I understand how oversubscription works, but don't say that your service is great for video streaming when I'd hit your cap in 15 days if I tried to replace my normal TV viewing with streaming.

I really don't care what the economics of being an ISP are - if they can't support the use they are claiming it's for, then they shouldn't be making that claim. It's not like they didn't know years ago that video streaming was on the upswing and would become a dominant use of bandwidth so surely they've had time to come up with advertising collateral that accurately describes what their product can do.

It's like a car manufacturer advertising that their latest pickup is great for heavy construction use... then in the fine print they note "Warranty invalid if used for heavy construction use".

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Switch to Sonic.net

[Animats]

If you're in Northern California, you have the option of switching to Sonic.net. [sonic.net] Sonic is an independent ISP which has grandfathered rights to lease AT&T DSL lines at favorable rates. They back-haul your DSL link to Santa Rosa, CA, and then connect to the Internet via Cable and Wireless.They have no usage cap and no intention of adding one. Sonic has been slightly more expensive than AT&T until recently. But if you're faced with AT&T's bandwidth cap, they can now be cheaper.

Sonic just sells a data pipe. They don't sell any content over their DSL lines, so they have no incentive to force you into some "entertainment package". (They do resell DirectTV, but that's via a satellite dish and is mostly a sideline for their rural customers.

There's no "packet inspection" nonsense with Sonic. No caching. No funny DNS rerouting. No custom browser. They just pipe through the bits you send and receive. You pay for bandwidth (and it's not "up to 6 mbps", it's "3.0mbsp to 6.0 mbps download, 512kbps to 768kbps upload."). My own line at in that tier measures at about 4.1mbps.

They also have 20mbps and 40mbps services, but they're available only in limited areas.

Sonic also has better policies than AT&T. "Sonic.net, Inc. functions as a common carrier and does not censor." They don't require arbitration; you can go to Small Claims Court if you have to.

Re:Can anyone confirm this for UVerse?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, can someone show some proof that doesn't come from a blog that this actually applies to UVerse customers? I'd like something on AT&T's site, if possible...

Here you go...

Go to AT&T Broadband Usage Policy [att.com], go to the Data Calculator page, click the "AT&T High Speed Internet Data Calculator" (will popup a window), take a look at the choices in "Select Your Service" dropbox (upper right corner of popup window). That shows "AT&T High Speed Internet 150GB" and "U-verse High Speed Internet 250GB" as selections.

I'd say that is a fairly authoritative source for the 250 GB cap.