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."

Re:Crappy

[TaoPhoenix]

That's just it, I haven't done the chart yet, but aren't most of the big names moving to bandwidth caps?

Does no one else notice that "move your stuff to the cloud" ... takes bandwdith?

Then in that corporate "never give ground" fashion, they'll just ratchet down the caps every 2 years or so.

We all need to go see that movie (Total Recall?) where someone cuts off the air. That's what we're headed to, Bit-Wise.

What is so bad about it?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Come on a 150GB download limit, that is okay. If you need your porn faster then 150GB per second then... wait, it is NOT per second? Oh well, 150GB per day is still... not per day either?

Oh dear. You poor Americans... thank god in mainland Europe we have evil state sponsored businesses and no free market so we have a lot of choice of ISP's. But who will I now download my porn from at 100mbit and no bandwidth limit? Oh wait, Japan! Country of un-limitted porn AND bandwidth and now thanks to Fukushima, tentacle porn without special effects!

But I know the perfect way to get the Americans to shit up and enjoy the AT&T dick going up their ass for the thousand time. Here is it. Are you ready for it? Brace yourself:

The way to fix this, is government regulation.

Whoa, see? All the complainers now switched their energy to frothing at the mouth about the free market, small government etc etc and they stopped complaining about the ass raping they are getting. Always works.

I know he was trolling

[rsilvergun]

but that doesn't change the fact that he was right :(. My idea of quality of life is a rising income higher than my parents, good schools and good health care. All of those are disappearing fast. Real wages have been stagnant since the 70s, school funding is being slashed (and what little money there is goes to wealthy schools thanks to the property tax scam) and the only thing going up faster than insurance premiums is the speed they deny your claims. Here in Arizona we literally just let two people die because we didn't want to pay for organ transplants.

As for the manufacturing, the big threat to Americans isn't Outsourcing, it's computers & robotics. I know keep bringing this up in my posts, but there is a sleeping bag factory making 2 MILLION bags a year with a total workforce (including salesmen, marketing, accounting and all other non-manufacturing jobs) of JUST 120 people. Fact is, it's not just that we're outsourcing, we just don't need all these people. So far the only answer I've heard to this is "Tough titties, at least they're free to starve to death in the streets".

A free, inexpensive Internet is seen by a lot of progressives as the only hope. China is starting to see some progressive movements (very little, I know) because they have a well educated middle class whose brains work well enough now to realize they're being taken advantage of. If the schools & centralized media fail us, the only hope is people on the Internet. It's not much, but I still like it better than saying 'Oh well, time for 70% of our populace to die in a gutter'.

So, yeah, he was trolling. But ye was also right.

Re:Of course people are swallowing this

[KDR_11k]

It's because many issues foster an us-vs-them mentality where it's either kill-the-market or kill-the-government, never anything in between. Meanwhile the Social Market Economy works just fine in some countries.

you think you understand something, you don't

[YesIAmAScript]

You don't understand how the politics break in the US.

In general, it is the old people who have the money who are complaining about taxes, government regulation and state how the free market will fix everything.

But it's the young people who watch a lot of video over the internet (specifically torrent a lot) and they aren't anti government-regulation in general. Mostly because they wouldn't mind voting some older people's money into their pockets, which is (to circle back) what the old people are worried about in the first place.

So you've created a false dichotomy. Those who are up in arms about caps likely would not complain if the government stepped in.

Re:Marginal pricing is good economics.

[FSWKU]

It all boils down to greed. First, they pocket the money given to them for building out their infrastructure. Now, they see Netflix/Hulu/etc becoming more popular than their overpriced VOD services.

My guess is they ultimately want to start raising their overage fees. The reasoning (internally, of course) will be something along the lines of, "Fine...you want to shrink our profits by choosing the better & cheaper streaming alternatives? Well now you're going to be paying us more in overages than you save by not giving us your money in the first place!"

Now in public, they will try to spin this as a win for "fairness" and being able to provide "quality services that customers demand" or some other such bullshit...

And this is why I'd love to see more companies providing nothing but a connection to the internet. No phone companies, no cable companies, no other vested interests trying to stifle what you do on your connection because it competes with the other offerings they want to shove down your throat.