http://www.electricimpulse.net/news/att ... es-update/

And so it begins...

I have a 80GB per month cap on my internet and it's one of the biggest packages available to us Canadians. You guys are living it up with 150GB!

The point is that there shouldn't be any reason to restrict the usage of bandwidth. Many say the same thing you've said, and that we should be pretty happy. Honestly, I feel bad for you guys, and no... I'm not happy. I think it's a ton of bullshit. In fact, it's hard to even imagine that every person now-a-days doesn't run straight-up fiber in their houses. At this point, I have no option for doing ANYTHING server related like I normally do using AT&T now. Unfortunately, the city in which I live in back home at Florida, this is the majority of service (AT&T). They say it will only affect 2% of users, but in reality it's going to affect much more. As time progresses, videos will get bigger in size, more people will download more things as they become more familiar with the internet, and so-on. It's only a matter of time before 2% becomes a vast majority of their subscribers.

Please hurry with FIOS availability, Verizon! You are my only hope!

80GB?

Want to try 25GB if UBB goes live somehow.

Fios is almost covering 100% of Tampa right now. My mom just got it. I cant wait to move back to Florida.

Why not?

(Serious question, not trolling.)

Companies change their product offerings all the time. Sometimes, this frustrates some of their customers. Every time the price of a movie ticket goes up (which seems like daily), I'm sure it frustrates all the people who enjoyed taking their entire family to the movies but can no longer afford to do so as often if at all. But certainly it is the theater's decision to raise the price.

The fact is, there is a small subset of users who abuse the system and use their DSL as their primary television access method (and watch it for as many hours), seed torrents, etc. These people put a considerable amount of stress on the service providers at the expense of the other 95% of the customers. And what may not be readily apparent is that service providers have to pay for the bits (in general) to their upstream providers. So not only does this subset of abusers (the 5%) slow your internet service, it also increases the cost, through direct costs involved in the traffic and indirect involved in equipment.

While it may be one thing to argue over their choice of bandwidth ceiling, the need to address the 5% is real.

EDIT: I read you said you can no longer do "all kinds of server work" because of the cap, but do you have any idea of how much bandwidth you actually use?

My router keeps track of bandwidth -- here's my usage (and I think I'm a pretty heavy user -- even with my own "server work"):

Incoming / Outgoing (GB)
Sept 10: 175/32
Oct 10: 83/20
Nov 10: 79/21
Dec 10: 53/10
Jan 11: 50/32
Feb 11: 99/42

And I have a 20+ Mb/s down link! You have to think if you switched to DSL (what is that now, 1.5, 3 Mb/s?) you'd use a little less.

So over the past 6 months I'd have popped the 150G limit once and never the 250G cap they have for high speed.

A lot of hullabaloo about nothing imo.

It's not anything new, it's sort-of like reverting to a lenient version of the old Dial-Up rules (AOL, and most 3rd world countries). Instead of charging by the minute, they're giving you a certain leeway per month and then charging for each additional gig.

If you run a business which requires you to produce upwards of 250gb of internet traffic on a monthly basis, then it's probably worth it to either upgrade or pay the overage fees, and therefore save the 95% of us who use less than that a lot more money in the long run (and yourself too, because it's either universally raise the base-rate or this, or a combination of both).

eh for those of us who stream Netflix / play games / purchase games online (DL'ED Content) / update games ect. this could pose to be a problem, I already called ATT and i am under a 2 year contract for UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH and i made it clear i knew that. They assured me that my contract will stay as is untill it expires. Once it does i will switch providers, metered internet is ridiculous.

The reason ATT is doing this is because they are losing BILLIONS because the fact that no one uses land lines for long distance anymore and they can no longer charge high fees for long distance / international calls with almost no cost to them.


EDIT: If they really want to play this game ill just use my Iphone 4's Hotspot feature with the UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH plan that im already grandfathered into for netflix streaming lets see what costs them more. LAWL


EDIT#2: Fomenta the numbers on your usage is fine and dandy if its just you, what happens to the Father or Mother who has 3 kids as well as them who use the internet exstensively? They will go through the bandwidth in no time.


EDIT#3: 100 Bucks says Google rolls out its own ISP with unlimited bandwidth in the next year.

Sucker, you can get 250GB here in Ontario from a french owned cable company. My buddy has an old unlimited deal through Bell that he won't give up no matter what they offer him.

@Genocide:

Maybe the caps will get families to spend more time with each other instead of staring at walls.

Quality time with the family is not the topic here, I suggest you go troll someone who cant ban you from the forums.

Who said anything about trolling? I'm merely pointing out the positive aspects of a bandwidth cap, in all seriousness.

In that case, it would be even better to limit computer usage to at most 1 hour a day. If it exceeds one hour, systems should automatically shut down till the next day. This way families can spend even more time with each other. More positive aspects! Don't forget that computer games should be banned in all households. While we're at it, let's ban technology all together so that families can spend time with each other the way they used to 200 years ago.

@Reborn, I'm merely stating that it would provide incentive for parents to leverage these caps as a tool to promote more eye-to-eye with their children. Sometimes parents need these types of barriers to be more pro-active whereas with others it might be more of a hinderance (for example a parent who is always overseas and uses video conferencing to keep in touch with their children). It really depends on the family and their values.

As much I don't like the bandwidth cap, and in my opinion it's a complete bull crap, I see fomenta's point. Although the cap would make more sense, if ATT would refund appropriate portion of monthly fee to users that are under 150GB. Which in theory could evolve to $/1GB fee with minimal maintenance. I don't believe that because of 2% of users the ATT is losing money and will go out of business. The ATT's goal is:
- force users to use less bandwidth - aka generate more income
- force users to switch to uVerse - aka generate more income
- when users are on uVerse get as many of them to use PPV instead of Netflix - aka generate more income

I also don't believe that ATT really cares about those 98% users' browsing experience. It's all about $$$.

On a side note - my wife just called me and told, that she was able to beat down the monthly fee for ATT Elite (no phone service) from $45 to $35 for next 12 months

No, Your intentions were not to point out the positive aspects of a bandwidth cap. I made a valid arguement to Fomentas post contributing to the discussion. Your reply to that arguement was a poor attempt at trolling.

Example

Legitimate statement on the subject of gas prices

"Gas prices are getting so high that i cant aford to drive to the beach on weekends anymore"

Bad troll response

"maybe the high gas prices will get you to stop wasting your time staring at the beach and do something more worth while with your time"

Just because you don't say "lawl stupid beach fag is stupid" or "lawl kids need to get out of there parents basement and stop dl'ing pr0n" doesnt mean you arent trolling and contributing to the discussion.

Sorry Kwang if a parent needs to have an excuse in the form of bandwidth control from the service provider to tell there kids to get off the computer or game console to go outside or come play dominos with the family they are doing it wrong...

Using this argument to reason why bandwidth meetering is good is flawed on so many levels

I never said it was good, I said that it could be used to aid bad parents.

Anyways back on topic...

Funny how the old norm in the UK was metered usage now they are pulling away from that

Here's something we don't see very often: an ISP dropping its usage caps and telling subscribers to download away. United Kingdom subscribers to BT's Total Broadband and Infinity fiber services will soon be able to download as much data as they want, the company claims.


http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/201 ... e-caps.ars

The CRTC in Canada is about to stop the overage fee's up here in Canada too and have everything go back to unlimited till laws can be rewritten better.