On Monday, AT&T Customers Enter Era of Broadband Caps 537
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."
AT$T (Score:2)
What's just as bad as them trying to force you up from DSL to UVerse (hence the 100/250 cap) the terms they sent out also had a provision where you had to be nice when calling in for service issues or they would cancel your account. I quit two weeks ago because AT$T's attitude still sucks, and the company is still Horrible despite realizing that they now have competition.
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No. AT&T is Southwest Bell with lipstick. They are an amalgamation of Ameritech, PacBell, and assets they picked up on the way. But at the core, they are a "Baby Bell" monopoly. It's the management of SW Bell in their "take over the world" phase.
And now they need to complete their rape and pillage by buying T-Mobile. Did you think the caps were for technical reasons? No. They need revenue to finance the hideous acquisition that would make them The Death Star Monopoly again.
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No. AT&T is Southwest Bell with lipstick. They are an amalgamation of Ameritech, PacBell, and assets they picked up on the way. But at the core, they are a "Baby Bell" monopoly. It's the management of SW Bell in their "take over the world" phase.
IOW, the original AT&T monopoly reassembling itself, exactly like GPP said. The fact that the company which kept the AT&T name was swallowed by one of its children, rather than the reverse, is really irrelevant -- the point is that it was all Ma Bell originally, and it keeps coming back to that, the monster that just won't die.
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Yep, it's the T-1000 of monopolies. Although I think it's going to have a hard time swallowing Verizon, and it's still anyone's guess which of the two ends up with Qwest (a
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Great. A duopoly instead of a monopoly. I feel SO much better.
Unfortunately, for wired, there is no competition with Vzn. I can't get Verizon's fios where I live; it's either AT&T's capped uverse, AT&T's capped DSL, or comcast's capped cable.
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oblig. from Colbert: http://www.stopthismerger.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/colbert-att-merger-history.jpg [stopthismerger.com]
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Why the name, AT&T? Was the labelling on all the old switch boxes really bothering your field techs that much? Why would a company choose a name so completely and consistently associated with poor treatment of customers?
You only had to follow the news (tech and mainstream) in the 1990s to know the answer to this - the name Southwestern Bell/SBC was absolute poison because of customer dissatisfaction, repeated management cock-ups (I guess the latter isn't really separate from the former), and IIRC even financial malfeasance. They felt they had to get away from SBC at any cost. The AT&T name had some history behind it, at least.
I recall their ads at the time tried to play into the long history of AT&T.
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I have the Uverse service, but don't really see a problem (yet, we'll see). DSL alone is $20 per month, Uverse is twice the speed and is only $25. Both are cheaper than Comcast -- but if they start charging me extra, it would be easy to go to Comcast, who are even worse than AT&T.
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Consider yourself lucky, my house only gets 3MBit/s DSL.
Can anyone confirm this for UVerse? (Score:2)
What about online education, etc.? (Score:4, Insightful)
The telcos have done *everything* they can to cripple expansive growth, so that *they can save infrastructure investment dollars*. In the offing, they have paid off our legislators and others who are supposed to be looking out for us. Their actions are nothing short of criminal, and are legal only because they pay for the laws that are supposed to "protect" the consumer.
In a word, these capping policies are UNAMERICAN (and, I'm not a nationalist, by any means.) What do these caps do to things like scientific research, education, legal artistic sharing, etc. etc. They *cripple* those innovations, thus crippling the forward promise of Americans, and America. Something HAS to be done; the pure profit motives at any cost of the grotesquely greedy telcos must be legislated. It's time to nationalize these companies, or else slap them upside the head so hard that they will start *serving* their customers instead of crimping their futures.
What's more, we need to start with the people who run these companies; we need to see them for what they are, and the large-scale harm that they do. They may be scions of their individual communities, and good parents, and all that, but they are literally putting us on a path that will disadvantage this country for decades, if someone doesn't put a stop to this egregious insult to information access, invention, and innovation.
Bandwidth is (theoretically) unlimited; we don't need to meter it; we need to *make it accessible*, and let 1000 ideas bloom. From now on, we must *insist* on nothing less - our future depends on it!
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Saccharin doesn't cause cancer, hence why the FDA allowed the removal of the warning label. The link was never particularly strong and was based primarily on animal studies which didn't accurately model normal intake. Warning label removal [wikipedia.org]
Sweden (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sweden (Score:4, Informative)
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To be fair, 40 USD in Estonia are not 40 USD in the US (or in Sweden, for that matter). The GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power parity of Estonia is less than half of that of the US. A Big Mac is about 2.70 USD in Estonia, compared to 3.70 USD in the US.
Still, your point stands.
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tldr: In Estonia, 1 USD (12 Estonian kroons) buys more stuff than in the US. In Sweden, 1 USD (6 Swedish kronor) buys less stuff than in the US.
Well, I'm just an arm chair economist so I just looked it up on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. :)
For instance, look at these two tables, listing GDP per capita, one nominal [wikipedia.org], and one adjusted for PPP [wikipedia.org]. Sweden has about the same nominal GPD/capita as the US, but is at about 80% of the US when adjusted for PPP -- because stuff is more expensive in Sweden. For instance, a Big Mac [oanda.com] is about 8
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You do have to adjust for the cost of living. But around here you can't get a connection like that without being an ISP. For home users a connection like that isn't available at any price which is really a huge part of the problem. People will swallow this change by AT&T, but it will be primarily because they haven't any other options apart from canceling service completely. And with more and more vital services moving online only, that's getting less and less viable all the time.
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And here in Oslo I'm getting 60/60 mbit internet, hdtv and telephone over a fiber connection without any caps for about $100 :)
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Norway here, ~85 USD for 25/5 and it delivers. I downloaded a 500GB torrent at ~2.9 MB/s one month, still no complaints. Too bad I'm not on fiber though, they have 25/25 for same and 60/60 for ~105 USD/mo.
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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.
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Or it means that they figured the bandwidth your connection provides is already a sufficient cap.
My connection can do at most 963 GB per month and that is if it's used at 100% throughput permanently.
the joke(s) (Score:4, Funny)
(this is probably only sad/funny for people that have actually ever called at&t. feel free to point out all the discrepancies/truths)
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It's been a while but I vaguely recall AT&T reps being better than Verizon reps.
Truth in advertising? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the FTC should force them to add a "Not suitable for streaming" disclaimer to all of their advertisements unless their cap can support high quality streaming (2.3GB/hour) for as many hours that a typical household watches TV (6.75 hours/day), which would mean a cap of 465GB/Month.
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Well, anyone who has any knowledge of how the Internet works knew that there wasn't enough bandwidth for everyone to stream at the same time because the ISP business mode was based on overselling bandwidth. Plain and simple.
So everyone gets mad to find out that "unlimited" didn't really mean unlimited. And then everyone gets mad when they stop calling it "unlimited" and actually telling people it is capped. You can please some of the people some of the time, but...
Let me state how much I hate phone companie
Re:Truth in advertising? (Score:5, Informative)
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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its perfectly suitable for streaming, you want on demand hd buy that service, you want to watch the office 3 days later on hulu, well its still there
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What exactly do people gain by using their internet connection to watch live sports, news, or the latest episode of their favorite sitcom, instead of just watching it as broadcast or recording the broadcast, like they have done every day for the last 30 years?
Yeah, and why should they need cable either - they can watch over-the-air broadcasts through an antenna on their roof like they did every day for the last 70 years. Sure they may only get a few broadcast networks, but that should be good enough for anyone. I mean what possible reason could there be for cable? Is there really any difference between broadcast tv and cable?
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1 - People rip DVDs to files around 700MB / 1GB that's 2 hours. And that's good enough for TV
http://www.digitalhome.ca/2011/04/netflix-now-has-800000-canadian-customers/ [digitalhome.ca]
a High Definition video stream which consumes about 2.3 GB per hour.
The TV industry is telling me that I need to have BluRay player (~ 16GB/hour) to take advantage of my expensive new HD TV, now you're saying "Bah, even DVD is too much, you don't need that kind of quality, highly compressed 480i (0.5 GB/hour) is good enough for your 1080p TV"
2 - Do people really watch almost 7h of TV per day?
http://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html [csun.edu]
Number of hours per day that
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While that's fantastic that you haven't formed enough social bonds to have a spouse or children, if 3-5 people stream a few movies, it can add up.
Cap (Score:2)
So it's come to this, has it? Good thing I still have unlimited data on my iPhone. If my home ISP starts capping I'll just have to watch NetFlix over 3G on my phone. :P
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Using the Magnifying iGlass app?
What is so bad about it? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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This is more than just a tad insensitive: "Oh wait, Japan! Country of un-limitted porn AND bandwidth and now thanks to Fukushima, tentacle porn without special effects!" I agree with the rest of your comment, but I hope it doesn't get modded as funny.
That said, the majority of the Canadian market share for high-speed is run by monopoly companies. There used to be a dozen or so ISPs in each city when the dial-up Internet was around and this worked well. Then these ISPs stayed around when the high-speed was a
you think you understand something, you don't (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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When actually it's the old who are robbing the young. For decades, everybody saw the shortfall in Social Security coming. People like Ross Perot and Al Gore campaigned on shoring it up. But by in large, the boomers voted for candidates who promised (and delivered) lower taxes (and deficits) instead.
So what if we don't fully fund S
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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.
Don't worry, the libertarians will simply claim all the problems with monopolistic ISPs exist because the market is not free enough. To me it sounds like stabbing yourself with a knife, the harder you push the more pain you're in, but if you only push hard enough the pain will go away. On second thoughts, maybe they are onto something...
Re:What is so bad about it? (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to separate the service providers from the people who are building the infrastructure. That way, people who are building infrastructure will be competing against those who are building infrastructure, and they will have no way to differentiate themselves except on price and capacity. This will have the effect of driving up the capacity and driving down the cost.
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That only works when there are enough alternative ISPs serving the same area.
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Quit the service and go where? To the other big cable company/telco that has the exact same bandwidth caps?
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Buy up all the infrastructure under eminent domain and have the ISPs compete based on services. Done.
Marginal pricing is good economics. (Score:4, Insightful)
Having a bandwidth cap per se is not a bad thing from a societal perspective; if there really is a marginal cost to carrying a GB of data you'll only get the socially optimal result if you price bandwidth at that marginal cost. From that perspective the Netflix degradation referenced in the article could be a good thing; if individuals value the higher video quality less than the price of transmitting it, the right outcome for society is for them to see lower quality video at lower cost.
Of course, the marginal price for a GB of data these days is near zero -- (one site [nerdboys.com] pegged it at $.03). AT&T has a fine idea, they're just pricing it 150x too high. The fact that they're able to do so screams market failure/monopoly to me.
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When your use of bandwidth deprives your neighbor of his use of bandwidth at the same time, you've imposed an external cost on your neighbor. Flat rate bandwidth caps are a clumsy way of making you pay for this type of market failure known as a "negative externality".
A
Re:Marginal pricing is good economics. (Score:5, Insightful)
In the real world, you alone do not deprive bandwidth from another user (even in cable with shared medium environments it is rare, and if it does happen it is STILL the ISP's fault not the customers).
With that said, the real issue is that the ISPs don't want to pony up and order additional capacity to their providers, peers, or even within their own network. They've all increased subscriber counts, data rates, and expected to spend little to nothing on improving the network? That's crap. ISP's are just trying to convince us that we are the cause of congestion because we watch too much You Tube and Netfix while they neglect maintaining and improving the network. It is ok to oversell, every business does it, but if you neglect your own service to the point that customers service is being denied because you refused to invest in your own network, how could this be the consumers fault?
Clearly the internet market in the United States is flawed. It's ok, the free market is clearly worse than the guaranteed monopolies we have with our telecoms.
Re:Marginal pricing is good economics. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I actually think they don't want to raise the overage fees. With streaming as popular as it is, this would mean dramatic overages for a huge swath of their customer base, which would ultimately be exactly same as simply raising their base rate and offering an 'email/web only' plan for grandma.
In other words, it's easier for them to just raise their base prices and have done with it.
I suspect that the real goal is to force players like Net
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Uh.. AT&T is using DSL, which doesn't affect your neighbor's last mile like cable. Unless you're talking about the bandwidth at AT&T's end which should be more than enough if they haven't screwed things up.
I can kind of understand the caps on cable but some kind of protocol neutral throttling, not heavy like they currently do to bittorrent, just minor amounts like dropping from 10Mbps to 5 when the entire network is loaded would be less bad in my opinion. You're right that using bandwidth when no on
If only it didn't suck! (Score:4, Informative)
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!
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Lol.... yeah.... fixing simple problems with complex answers is totally a good idea.... LOL. NOT!
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Call it what it is (Score:2)
New ISPs (Score:2)
Could anyone inform the other readers (and myself) about perhaps what kinds of things it would take to start up new ISPs? I mean, if we hate AT&T and Verizon so much and it only seems that Google is here pushing the Internet envelop, why aren't more entrepreneurs starting ISPs (other than it is probably expensive, just like any other business startup)?
On AT&T's man in the White House (Score:2)
The big lie of omission here is that AT&T doesn't just have an executive in the White House, they've been giving out bribes^Hcampaign contributions to about 75-80% of Congress as well as the president and a lot of other movers and shakers. That's what makes them immune to any sort of government interference. Their efforts completely bipartisan [opensecrets.org], because AT&T's only ideology is to make more money for AT&T.
Measuring at the DSLAM (Score:2, Offtopic)
Metered service, finally. (Score:2)
Good.
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If you had an unlimited plan or hadn't hit your cap, you could have typed a complete sentence. :-D
Switch to Sonic.net (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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Sonic.net sounds like a cool company - and they've been chosen as a Google partner for the FTTH experiment
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20101213/BUSINESS/12131005?p=all&tc=pgall [pressdemocrat.com]
Europe vs. US (Score:2)
Why does this work? The IM is ONLY responsible for infrastructure and it's in their interest to fulfill the market need for more capacity if such a demand exists. Thus it's in their interest to EXPAND coverage and infrastructure because
I HATE TO SOUND LIKE AD (Score:2)
But I use Clear.com -- and I've got 4G mobile and a home WiMax for ~$60 a month. If you just want home -- that's about $40 depending on deal.
You can get 7 mps and 1mps up -- and it has no bandwidth caps (except on the Mobile).
I got rid of AT&T/Bellsouth a while ago and it is cheaper.
I'm also using MagicJack -- which now has a software-only option (rather than using the usb jack) - but I'm not a fan of requiring people to press a series of numbers after using the star key (*).
>> On the downside, I
Uverse (Score:2)
Doesn't affect everyone yet, thankfully (Score:2)
Although they're pushing caps on everyone, many are still not affected due to AT&T's slow adoption of giving customers tools to monitor their bandwidth. DSLreports has had quite a few complaining about how their first attempt at giving a meter for bandwidth monitoring was horribly inaccurate so I assume that is why many still do not have it.
I am on their DSL where I am and I just checked today and there is no tool for me to monitor my bandwidth yet. Since there isn't one, it says that "I do not need to
Anti-Competitive (Score:2)
The only reason AT&T is doing this is to try to force you to buy cable TV from them instead of using online streaming services.
This is why Internet needs to be considered a public utility and regulated as such.
What can you expect.. (Score:3)
...in a country where you're charged for incoming calls! And the most outrageous/hilarious thing about it is, USians think that's completely normal.
It's false scarcity based on greed. (Score:3)
When most of the long haul and medium haul fiber was laid, they didn't just bury what they needed, they buried a bunch of it. However most was never connected to equipment (lit up).
This dark fiber is still sitting in trenches and conduits (many were taxpayer funded) running along a huge number of US superhighways, and has not seen a single byte of data.
This is mostly because having additional capacity would remove the artifical limits, increase the supply and cause prices for internet access to drop.
While some companies have problems with "the last mile" (to the home), companies that ran fiber to the home like Verizon, are still attempting to limit bandwidth and create artifical shortages.
This is proof that AT&T is not a broadband com (Score:3)
This is proof that AT&T is not a broadband company. If AT&T is going to cap its users, this is AT&T's fault, not the users.
If AT&T cant provide its users with broadband without capping data usage, they are NOT providing broadband, they are simply a shit company incapable of delivering service to its customers.
My advice, CANCEL your AT&T immediately.
Put it this way. Only a shitty ISP/Broadband provider fails to understand that users will always demand increased bandwidth as technology advances.
AT&T is trying to fuck you over. CANCEL your accounts immediately, and TELL THEM EXACTLY WHY.
My advice to AT&T, start improving your shitty networks (internet and cellphone) or go out of business. Light is pretty much easy to produce. Lay down more fiber, and stop being a shitty fucking company trying to rape its subscribers.
I will use this time to acknowledge and praise Verizon for FIOS. I've been with them for years now. I was an early adopter of FIOS, I knew when it was coming. I anxiously awaited FIOS, and gladly left Cablevision to get on FIOS because like AT&T... Cablevision started to cap their users secretly, rather than upgrade their shitty networks.
Verizon brought Fiber to my house. AT&T.. Where the fuck were you?
SEE THE PROBLEM?
AT&T... You're LATE TO THE GAME, and you cant provide service because you refuse to be a quality company. Go out of buisness, the consumer doesnt give a shit if you cant provide a quality service.
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What else do you think MultiTouch was for?
Just you wait, someone will develop an interface that actually creates SFW real work with those motions.
"Johnson! What the HELL are you doing??"
"Your report is in your inbox, Sir."
Re:Crappy (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Then they'll be happy to sell you the "twice as expensive per month" business class so you can still connect to "the cloud".
I know he was trolling (Score:4, Interesting)
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:I know he was trolling (Score:4, Insightful)
Real wages have been stagnant since the 70s
Great, but why would you use that statistic? A lot of people talk about real wages in order to deceive you, because it matches the narrative they want to push. Forget it: it leaves out portions of compensation. Measuring real compensation is hard of course, but it gives a better measurement of what the average employee is getting [wikipedia.org]. And it's been going up. Look at the graph.
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.
Where did you learn history? Really, do you even think? Do you realize how many people were employed in the farming sector just a hundred years ago? When tractors got introduced, people were complaining about the same things you are complaining about. They even made movies about it (check out Gene Autry, The Old Barn Dance [google.com] as an example). These are things people manage to adapt to.
And we do adapt. We've already adapted to the robotics revolution. For example, there is a sleeping bag factory that produces millions of sleeping bags with only 120 employees. All this stuff happened years ago. Some people moved to other industries, some people retired early, and for some people who had trouble adapting, it was quite painful. But you'd have to be braindead to think this is going to cause 70% of the population to die in the streets when the manufacturing industry only employs around 10million people? Even if all those people exploded, it would only be ~4% of the population dead. Really, 70% of the population is not going to die in the streets because of robotics. Anyone who told you that is lying.
A free, inexpensive Internet is seen by a lot of progressives as the only hope
They are idiots.
China is starting to see some progressive movements
Please never use China as an example of what we should do, unless you have extremely smart, solid, amazing reasoning backing up why we should copy them. They jail dissidents, disallow many types of public gatherings, and prohibit free speech, you know. We don't want to copy them. People who hold up China as an example of what we should do are typically just propagandaists.
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Measuring real compensation is hard of course, but it gives a better measurement of what the average employee is getting [wikipedia.org]. And it's been going up. Look at the graph.
That graph is meaningless. It isn't referenced within the Wikipedia page that contains it, except for a caption saying that "health insurance" is one thing it counts. This is misleading, since insurance rates have been inflating wildly for the last decade, while coverage has been dropping. So yes, you get "more insurance" now than you did costwise, but in reality you get the same amount of less.
Also, to illustrate a point if not make an actual argument: A lot of people talk about compensation in order t
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That chart has no explanation in Wikipedia, but a little digging finds similar charts [angrybearblog.com] some that include wages, salaries, and benefits of wage earners, salaried employees, CEOs, small business owners, etc., some that are limited to the paycheck of wage earners. Unfortunately for the wage earners, they mostly don't get stock optio
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And History has nothing to do with it. It's just what lead us here. The farmers were absorbed into the factories. We have nothing to replace the factories, but we've
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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.
The computers and robotics are the solution. That factory is only employing 120 people, but it's employing 120 Americans. Those people can get paid an average of $40,000/year and the labor cost per sleeping bag will only be $2.40. Now put the factory in the vicinity of an Amazon.com warehouse instead of on the other side of the world and you can get a sleeping bag of the same quality, shipped to your door, for $15 instead of $50.
The idea that there will be no work to be done is totally ridiculous. We have m
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TL;DR
Be considerate and concise (Score:2)
> if reading is "too much '4U'"?
1) Notice how his "TL;DR" is a criticism of your article in the slashdot context. It is not in any way a nuanced criticism, but he found it too long for what he comes to slashdot for.
Your criticism, however, is to insult him. It makes you look worse and him look better, especially when dealing with an audience of professional and largely courteous people.
> why don't you TRY to technically disprove ANY of the 20 points I put up then, instead of doing the "TRUE ANONYMOU
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I don't think the speeds are that high; I have 6 mbps for $25, 3 mbps is $20. And the TOS forbids leaving your router open. This kind of annoys me, as I latch on to open hotspots and would like to leave one open for others.
My only other choice is Comcast, but I don't know what speed they deliver. Movies stream fine, so the 6 mbps is working for me.
Re:Vote with your Wallet (Score:5, Insightful)
oh thank you, I have never thought of that before, lets see here in my area there is
#1) ATT
#2) Comcast
well fuck me, that showed them
Re:Vote with your Wallet (Score:4, Insightful)
YOU TOTALLY HAVE A CHOICE!
But you forgot:
#3) No internet at all
The amusing thing is that the free market libertarians argue very much like religious people (usually they're one in the same), in that the choices religious people present to you are:
#1) Bask in God's glory and accept Jesus Christ into your heart and be saved.
#2) BURN IN THE FIERY PITS OF HELL AND BE TORTURED FOR ALL ETERNITY
Doesn't sound like much of a choice to me, but for them, it is.
Back to the market for a second, the obvious excuse is "Well, if you feel that you cannot do without the service, that means having the service is worth whatever they're willing to charge and whatever you're willing to pay before you'll do without."
But me, I prefer to live in a more modern society, with an elected government body that represent the people. And I want laws that I know are good for *everyone*, not just for a *select few*.
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Except, of course, that this isn't a sign of the free market in action.
Local monopolies for Telco and Cable are government imposed, not free market entities.
For that matter, all the corporate immunities that annoy so many people are also government imposed.
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You have Comcast? My choices are:
#1) AT&T
#2) Broadstripe (one of the worst rated ISPs on Broadband Reports)
I currently have Broadstripe and am seriously considering switch to AT&T because Broadstripe seems to think 150+ms ping times that wildly fluctuate up and down following their last upstream provider change is perfectly normal. They also consider random 15 second upstream dropouts to be perfectly normal. Did I mention I called techs out twice to fix this issue?
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You have choices? My choices are:
#1) Time Warner
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You have choices? My choices are:
#1) Time Warner
AT&T didn't do DSL out here until just recently. I used to only have one choice. As it is, the fastest DSL speed I can get from them is 1.5Mbit/s down, 384kbit/s up.
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It's as if extremely opinionated people are impervious to the ideas of everyone else, or something! (Oh no!)
Re:Of course people are swallowing this (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I believe that's common in the USA and it's one of the reasons the US cellphone situation is considered outdated by Europe and Japan.
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yea and where the hell are you going to go, comcast has caps, cellphones have caps (if you read your contract) so where is this great exodus going to take us, 20 years back passing messages over fidonet on a 2400baud?
Shut up already! (Score:2)
Nothing bothers me more than hearing this whining. blah blah blah... I want things for free... blah blah blah...
If thats what you want, then GO GET IT.
Want to hear a dirty secret? My ATT internet will NOT be capped starting monday. Why not? Because I decided it would be a better idea to PAY FOR a business account. Those are not capped at ATT, or Comcast.
Yes, it is more expensive than 'residential' service, but it also meets my needs, has better reliability, etc. My Uverse biz acct is also cheaper(and
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Here we used to, now we don't. That seems the natural progression, but apparently it works backwards in the US.