AT&T Begins Capping Broadband Users (dslreports.com) 180
Karl Bode, reporting for DSLReports (edited for clarity): Just a reminder to AT&T customers: the company's usage caps on U-Verse broadband connections is now in effect. When AT&T originally announced broadband caps on fixed-line connections back in 2011, it capped DSL customers at 150 GB per month and U-Verse customers at 250 GB per month. But while the DSL customer cap was enforced (by and large because AT&T wants these users to migrate to wireless anyway), AT&T didn't enforce caps for its U-Verse customers. Until now, anyway. Back in March AT&T announced it would begin enforcing usage caps on all connections starting May 23. As of today, U-Verse customers face different caps depending on their speed tier. AT&T says customers on U-Verse tiers with speeds between 768 Kbps and 6 Mbps will now face a 300 GB cap; customers on U-Verse tiers of speeds between 12 Mbps and 75Mbps will see a 600 GB cap, and customers on speeds between 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps will see a cap of 1 terabyte. Users who exceed these caps in any given month will automatically have to pay for 50 GB of additional data for $10 each.
In case you were thinking about cutting the cord (Score:4, Insightful)
The helpful folks at AT&T would like to remind you that they have a great Uverse cable package too....should your HBO Now/Sling/Hulu accounts be causing you to go over their new broadband caps.
Re:In case you were thinking about cutting the cor (Score:5, Informative)
The helpful folks at AT&T would like to remind you that they have a great Uverse cable package too....should your HBO Now/Sling/Hulu accounts be causing you to go over their new broadband caps.
I logged into my account, and as a Uverse internet-only customer in Houston, I am now under a cap. I'm not sure how they can unilaterally do this without revisiting the contract.
Predictably, I have an option in my account now to "add TV to get unlimited data".
Re:In case you were thinking about cutting the cor (Score:5, Funny)
They are altering the deal. Pray they don't alter it any further
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Whats the US contract law on the matter? All I really know is that in Scandinavia, altering the deal isn't legal. The deal basically gets refreshes, and the new terms can be denied in favor of the old.
If you're not on a 1- or 2-year contract (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure how they can unilaterally do this without revisiting the contract.
If you're on month-to-month service, as opposed to a 12- or 24-month commitment, the provider alters the contract by sending the new terms to you along with your bill. If you pay it without canceling service, you accept the offer of continued service.
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I'm not sure how they can unilaterally do this without revisiting the contract.
If you're on month-to-month service, as opposed to a 12- or 24-month commitment, the provider alters the contract by sending the new terms to you along with your bill. If you pay it without canceling service, you accept the offer of continued service.
And if you have a commitment and they alter the terms you can not accept the change and get out of the commitment for no charge. IIRC some cell phone companies had that happen when they raised a fee a few cents and customers walked away with a phone and no cancellation fee. ART may have had a cap written into the contract, however and simply didn't enforce it.
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And if you have a commitment and they alter the terms you can not accept the change and get out of the commitment for no charge. IIRC some cell phone companies had that happen when they raised a fee a few cents and customers walked away with a phone and no cancellation fee.
To get around that, they leave the "service" price alone, and instead raise one of the "fees" (of some description or another) [cnet.com]. They claim it's not altering the contract, which only speaks to service price, they had to raise the administrative fee to cover costs.
They seem to be getting away with it, too.
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> I'm not sure how they can unilaterally do this without revisiting the contract.
You mean what's already been in the contract since 2011? Just because they're enforcing it now doesn't mean the contract has changed.
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You're always been under a cap with AT&T internet, they just rarely enforced it. However now they have *increased* the cap for most people while also saying that they will enforce it. I don't really see the problem here.
How Many Times (Score:2)
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Tilting at windmills. Internet outrage has only a minuscule effect on the real world, and outrage on a niche site like Slashdot has even less effect.
Write your congressman, complain to the FCC. Those avenues are also weak due to regulatory capture and the corrupting nature of our style of campaign finance, but they are still orders of more effective than swearing into the void.
In Seattle... (Score:2)
Re:In Seattle... (Score:4, Informative)
They are basically saying I'm going to give you a monthly account but at 75mbps you can only use it for about 18 out of 720 or so hours in month.
Alright I know that even with me being a cord cutter and all my TVs running on streaming services and kids playing games on xbox live I only use about 400-450GB a month because those services don't actually serve up video at 75mbps but if you're selling 75mbps on a monthly account the cap needs to be 75 * number of seconds in a month.
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if you're selling 75mbps on a monthly account the cap needs to be 75 * number of seconds in a month
You can get that, but you'll be paying closer to $1,000 per month. The only reason normal people can afford retail internet connections is because they are oversubscribed. The wholesale cost of bandwidth is counter-intuitively many times more expensive than the retail cost.
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They are selling a service on monthly account and then capping it but I don't even get to keep my unused data... so if I use 400 this month I don't get to keep my 200 and next month when I use 700 they charge me an extra $20. All those people that never go over and always have a couple hundred GB left over aren't getting a $10/50GB discount either.
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I live in Queen Anne, to get anything broadband-ish I have a choice of Comcast or Comcast. I won't go into detail here, but their business practices are... questionable. Century Link DSL need not apply, I have too many friends that have been screwed by them and their 'fiber' service.
In most places in Crony Capitalismland, a given location has a choice of identically one broadband provider. Thus you pay far more for far less than one does in regulated Europe, where the local last-mile proprietors *m
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I live in rural Spain (arse-end of nowhere) and I STILL have more internet choices than most of the US, it appears...
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And in Colorado (Score:2)
I have exactly one provider, CenturyLink, $60 a month for DSL 7/1 service, no cable available. CenturyLink bought the local phone company and mothballed all the work they were doing to improve service, to include laying residential fiber and now says no to any upgrades in the foreseeable future.
Granted I live on the Eastern Plains but it just shows what competition can do to prices and service. Since the military stationed me here moving is not an option.
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In Seattle I have multiple providers of 1Gbps service that I can choose from with low rates. My guess is it is the proximity to Microsoft and the progressive city council that has helped make this happen. Data caps stink!
Must be a fairly recent development.
Five year ago I had a roommate who finished his degree and was hired right into Microsoft. At the time we were sharing a 50 mbps cable modem connection (we were in Kansas), and apparently he could not get higher than 15 mbps in the area of Seattle he was relocating to. It was an uptown apartment so maybe it was a case of old infrastructure and an incumbent provider controlling it.
I'll never understand (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'll never understand (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, good luck getting that law through all the Congressmen they've bribed.
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No the technology doesn't get more expensive. But $20/mo for 56 kbps scales up to $17,860/mo for a 50 Mbps connection. Fortunately, technology has allowed that price to drop closer to about $2500/mo for a dedicated 50 Mbps connection. So how are you able to get a 50 Mbps connection for just $50/mo? Because you're sharing that 50 Mbps with 50 other cu
Then build out more capacity (Score:2)
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Unfettered capitalism wouldn't have allowed at&t to be a regional monopoly provider in many of its service areas, essentially eliminating any competition and allowing them to do basically whatever they want. What you have instead is cronyism. Try not to mistake the two.
Re: Then build out more capacity (Score:2)
Yes cronyism is the future tense of unfettered capitalism. The one inevitably degenerates into the latter. To prevent it you need actively enforced regulations with real bite that outlaw ever giving money to a politician (for example), restrict mergers that would lead to monopolies, punish collusion and protect consumers.
In other words to prevent capitalism from becoming cronyism it has to be fettered capitalism. Conveniently it also makes government less corrupt by removing legalized bribery so any politic
If they built out their networks properly.. (Score:3)
Re:If they built out their networks properly.. (Score:5, Interesting)
..then they wouldn't NEED datacaps.
They likely don't need data caps now. They just want you to buy their Uverse cable/phone package. And putting caps on online cable alternatives is a great way to...ahem... "encourage" you.
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Every residential ISP network is overbooked. If it wasn't you couldn't afford it. AT&T's is more overbooked than most, because they prioritize investment in their mobile network because it's less regulated and more profitable.
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The fiscally optimum amount of network infrastructure is not the amount where bandwidth congestion management isn't needed, but the amount where the marginal cost (MC) of expanding the network equals the marginal revenue (MR) it would bring. Or in other words, when the additional profit from expanding the network drops to zero.
So when you say a "properly built network" doesn't need data caps, you are actually referring to an overbuilt network.
Now that we know that a properly built network has congestion (a
Doesn't matter (Score:4, Informative)
I've got 18 Mbps ATT DSL, and I don't think that I could hit that cap anyway given that their service is so unreliable. My connection goes down at least once almost every evening... (Granted, it usually comes back 5-10 minutes later, but still.)
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Every 20 minutes? I have a service interruption every *@#$*!@..... *NO CARRIER*
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Call support and complain they will send a tech out.
I've had to have them come out and work on the line at work 10 times or so in the last couple of years last time they switched me to a diffrent pair to the local hub now the connection is stable and we get 12mbps instead of 6mbps.
Although we are on our 6th modem now.
They've never charged us for any of the service calls but they do charge about $100 each for the modems when they are out of warranty.
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I've got 18 Mbps ATT DSL, and I don't think that I could hit that cap anyway given that their service is so unreliable. My connection goes down at least once almost every evening... (Granted, it usually comes back 5-10 minutes later, but still.)
I'm a Uverse customer who previously had DSL. I'm convinced that AT&T is doing this deliberately with DSL customers to drive them to Uverse. Uverse is significantly more reliable and for me at least it was cheaper and faster than my DSL service anyway. My DSL went down at least once a day and eventually it got so inconvenient that I moved to Uverse. I had to change TV providers though which is one of the reasons I delayed getting off DSL because I had TV from another company and I was OK with it. O
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I had Uverse (i.e. DSL+TV) for until last March because they gave me a nice intro offer. It was never any more stable.
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I had a similar problem on my Uverse, the Modem thingy would reboot itself every night it seemed. I even had it replaced and it didn't stop. One day I went in and disabled IPv6 on the thing. Haven't had a problem since.
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I had one outage. My data cap is actually increasing. Price has stayed the same. And it's internet only.
Oh, my netflix subscription went up too, but that's fine with me since prices always change and they gave existing users a year at the old price anyway, but that didn't stop slashdot users from complaining about it.
Pretty Extreme (Score:5, Funny)
Instead of capping [urbandictionary.com] them, AT&T could just limit their usage.
Att uverse business (Score:2)
So are business plans still exempt? $50/mo gets 12/1mbps uverse business here without phone.
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Are business plans even available in residentially zoned blocks? Some ISPs don't understand telecommuting.
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Afaik you just ask for a business plan and they happily charge you extra. But I don't know that for sure as I don't live close enough to town to get dsl.
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Yes, you can get a business U-verse account, even if you're in a residential area. I have no cap and 5 static IPs for my house. I pay more, of course but, I don't have to deal with problems such as data caps and dynamic IPs.
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Equal capping of all traffic sources (Score:2)
I thought net neutrality meant no preferential treatment to a particular source of traffic. Data caps apply equally to all sources of traffic. To which provision of the legislation do you refer?
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Data caps inevitably lead to "zero rating" certain services that said vendor provides. This means that some things do not count against your monthly data usage effectively penalizing you for using anything outside of their approved network which is exactly the kind of shit that the net neutrality laws were put in place to prevent.
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Also it will be up to the FCC to decide if it is allowed, such as they are doing now by asking for public comments.
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That's the problem. There is a preferential treatment to source of traffic.
How? Everything is digital over those lines, now. No analog broadcasting over wire. That means everything is a bit, a 0 or 1. AT&T places a cap on the 0s and 1s not originating from their services.
Where forced to make TV cap free as they can't not (Score:2)
Where forced to make TV cap free as they can't not count IPTV data. And if they did change for tv data then comcast will have a field day with that.
Fuck AT&T (Score:3, Insightful)
I am so glad that I left AT&T, the mobile company, because of the same kind of bullshit that they are pulling here. It looks like the other half of their business is not much different. T-Mobile's service isn't the best, by any stretch, but at this point I'm content to continue paying [less] for their business practices.
All of the carriers, except possibly Sprint, are raking in profits faster than they put it into the bank, while they continue to have the cartel attitude to screw the customer with fees (every time Verizon or AT&T introduces or raises a fee, then the other follows).
Want to upgrade your device? Oh, that will be $30. Oh, you're on an enterprise account? That should be waived. Please contact customer service to have it removed, because we hope you don't and then we can keep the fee. Please, bring your own phone so we can charge you money for doing it!
It's so frustrating because AT&T is not a capitalist company -- they are not seriously competing. Both AT&T and Verizon are at the same place that they were years ago, except with better technology doing things for them (like building penetration for AT&T). I have not seen a new area get covered by AT&T in years. The only thing they seem to do is to keep the towers running with relevant hardware (a good thing), and that's it. Then they sit on the profits and moan that they need to charge users for using the service they're paying for.
Let's think about it: a 1 TB data limit for a 1 GB connection. I can only assume that they are using Apple math for binary values, but to be as fair as possible, you could theoretically use your data cap in 1024 seconds, or just over 17 minutes. That makes sense?
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As your bandwidth approaches infinity, presumably you have no use case where you're using 100% of your bandwidth in sustained use. Do residential users really have a normal usage case that involves downloading 1 gig of data every second? Sure, you can get a 50 gig game in 50 seconds, but do you now need to be able to get 200 games that size in one month?
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Doesn't the 1TB data cap give the ISP a business case to bring fiber to everyone?
Twentieth century (Score:2)
Why don't they just invest in some infrastructure and bring their customers into the twentieth century.
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Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
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For some REAL perspective, bandwidth without caps requires a dedicated connection. An OC3 costs a [t1shopper.com]
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For some REAL perspective, bandwidth without caps requires a dedicated connection.
No one is asking for a dedicated connection, so you can drop the hyperbole. What is wanted is (a) a guaranteed and realistic minimum (dedicated) bandwidth for each user—as a percentage of the user's peak burst rate—and (b) a fair division of the remaining bandwidth between all active users. Oh, and no extra charges for unplanned overages. "The vast majority of users" as you've defined them should generally be able to achieve the advertised burst transfer rates; those who use their connection 24/
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It is also less then 1 Windows reinstall if I include my Steam games.
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Congrats to AT&T, you are finally a worse option than TWC. no small feat.
AT&T says... (Score:2)
Yeah, because so many customers have said, "We want to have our data capped for a better internet experience".
[Disclaimer: I am (or was) a moderately satisfied UVerse customer]
unless you're in a google fiber area (Score:3, Funny)
UWhat? (Score:2)
I don't exactly live in the sticks, just very far from any AT&T CO. The best DSL I could get form them was 1.5 (really 1.25) down. And I put up with it for a long time, because I really don't do much online. I have all the bandwith I need in the form of a good blu-ray player and 1.25 is good enough for basic-to-moderately complex web sites.
I asked about better speeds. Repeatedly. No can do. No UVerse for me, not at any price. And having had DirecTV back in the late 90's I wasn't keen on repeating
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I don't exactly live in the sticks, just very far from any AT&T CO. The best DSL I could get form them was 1.5 (really 1.25) down.
The average copper local loop in the US is 4.25 km. This is higher than any other OECD country, and almost four time as long as the average length in Italy for example.
Those people 2+ km out are never going to see data rates over 5 Mbps down, regardless of technology.
It is possible that it is because the US adopted electronic telephone switching before other countries, and/o
Monetize! Monetize! (Score:2)
These are OUR PIPES, and don't you forget it!
(combining an actual quote from a broadband exec with, Road House [youtube.com])
What about wireless? (Score:2)
$10 per 50GBytes?
That's $0.02/MByte
If you have the temerity to take your AT&T phone across the border to Canada, they will charge you $2.00/MByte. 100X more.
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If you pay $30/mo extra or subscribe to any tier of Uverse TV, it is unlimited.
If I enjoyed suffering, yes.
I have Frontier FiOS, with a static subnet. All TV comes through the inter tubes. No caps. No Comcast, AT&T or other largely hated communications corporation. Any service with an illiterate first letter (Uverse, Xfinity etc.) is to be avoided at all costs.
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$30 buys a local prepay SIM with LTE in Canada. This is what I do.
Protect that monopoly cash cow! (Score:2)
Nothing more than an exercise of a monopoly, protecting its cash cow--leveraging that monopoly, possibly illegally, to squeeze more money out of customers at the threat of making the services they're paying for useless.
I can burn 150 GB just watching netflix. What a joke.
There's a Workaround (Score:3)
They will get their money no matter what (Score:2)
If you notice, paying the unlimited fee raises the broadband costs beyond the TV costs in most cases. So you can cut the cord all you want, they'll maintain their profit per customer regardless.
We cancelled Uverse 2 weeks ago (Score:2)
Consequences (Score:2)
If you end up having to uncut the cable due to cost of overages with Netflix, Hulu, and the like, be sure you tell those services WHY you are leaving and encourage them to take the same course of action you are like complaining to the FCC and writing your congressman.
"ay, Vinnie, pop a cap on 'im" (Score:2)
and a customer bites the dust. and another gone, and another gone....
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I left AT&T back in 2011 when they instituted the caps. I'm much happier with my current ISP which doesn't have any caps, doesn't monitor/filter/throttle and allows home users to run servers.
That's great for you... Until your current ISP follows the rest of the pack in a couple of years and does the same. What are you going to do then?
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Hey, if you have the option and market available to do that, awesome. But something like 30% of the US doesn't, last I read.
And I bet a lot of the "choice" that the other 70% has is actually between the one cable company or DSL/satellite/dialup at 1/0th the speed or worse.
I'd love to have a real choice personally - even the smallish regional cable company around here is full of profitmongering jerks. But I can't justify going from 25 meg service down to 1-3 meg DSL just to stick it to em in a tiny way.
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I live in a City of 100,000 and we have Comcast only. The DSL option is at 1.5m down and 256 up. barely out of dialup.
Why? because comcast signed an agreement with the city to keep out any competition.
Re:More than one city supplies a home (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to say here. That people unhappy with their ISP should pack up all their things and move to a different city, possibly far enough away they need to find a different job and new social circle?
Isn't that a little bit overkill?
Other /. users believe moving is warranted (Score:2)
I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to say here. That people unhappy with their ISP should pack up all their things and move to a different city
If you work from home, and the best Internet connection available in your city makes it impossible to do your job, then Thanshin seems to believe moving is warranted [slashdot.org], as do sglewis100, Zero__Kelvin, allquixotic, Bengie, FlyHelicopters, and several Anonymous Cowards [slashdot.org].
possibly far enough away they need to find a different job
If you work from home, you can take your job with you.
and new social circle?
New in-person social circle, same social media social circle.
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If you work from home, you can take your job with you.
New in-person social circle, same social media social circle.
If you are single, then it is possible if you are willing to do so and have resources to go to a different city. Most people aren't in that condition especially when there are families involved. Even worse, if you have younger kids (that aren't going to college yet). Moving from one place to another will be a horror that needs a lot of preparation...
If your Internet is like Flint water (Score:2)
unless you're willing to risk your job.
Which could be rephrased as "unless you're willing to search for jobs in the city where you want to live."
If you see home Internet as an essential utility, and the best home Internet offer in your city is as intolerable as the leaded water in Flint, Michigan, then your city is intolerable. If your city is intolerable, than any job available only in your city is likewise intolerable.
If AT&T had my home address (Score:2)
ISPs should meter only when congested (Score:2)
Networks are measured in maximum throughput over a given period of time, not total number bytes transferred to a given place.
Data caps measure each user's contribution to average throughput, which is (imperfectly) correlated to each user's contribution to peak throughput.
Data caps are a solution to the wrong problem.
Agreed. If the problem is peak throughput, the solution is to run the meter when the network is congested, that is, when the user's packets are passing through a segment at its maximum throughput. Satellite ISPs have the right idea: run the meter only during congested hours to encourage users to move their transfers away from times of maximum demand for throughpu
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your network should be able to handle peak load without negative traffic routing interactions.
Allowing all subscribers to transmit at peak rate simultaneously "without negative traffic routing interactions" would require such an investment in capacity, including the purchase of land and equipment for cell towers, that most subscribers would consider the service unaffordable. For this reason, most ISPs oversell their networks under the assumption that not all subscribers will reach peak load simultaneously. Metering during congested periods is ostensibly a way to reduce peak load to the point where i
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To get aroun
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In my apartment complex, the previous owners entered into an illegal "exclusivity contract" many years ago.
How long do you plan to live there, compared to the difference between what you'd pay for Business DSL and how much it'd cost to hire a lawyer?
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No, you should move if you work from home and AT&T makes it impossible to do your job where you live.
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Once it has been there awhile I would expect that they could easily move it down, or hold the caps constant as usage goes up (4k/8k streaming, ever bigger games downloads, etc.). Getting folks used to it with large caps keeps the outrage down, while still acclimating everyone to the concept.
Re:That's a pretty big cap though (Score:4, Insightful)
Good point. The only cap policy that I think would be reasonable would be to set all the slower connections to something more generous like 600 GB and the top tier connections to 1 TB, then implement a policy to increase the caps by 15% per year (doubling time = 4.96 years). The exact year over year cap growth would have to be based on a scientific study of the per-user increase in fixed line broadband Internet yearly data consumption in the US.
Caps should be in place to prevent abuse, not to artificially punish regular users doing a reasonable amount of work / activity. I always like the public water analogy.
Now granted, public water is metered instead of a flat rate, but let's say hypothetically that it were flat rate.
If you turn on all the sinks and showers in your house and just leave them on 24/7, you're going to get a call from the water provider, no matter who it is, whether you're on a flat rate plan or metered. Even if you're paying for the water on a per-volume basis, even if that makes them a significant amount of money, they'd rather you *not* use their resource to the point of exhaustion, because it impacts other customers.
If, on the other hand, you happen to be a pool enthusiast and have a gigantic pool filling your backyard, and invite neighbors and friends over to dirty up your pool and have to frequently drain and re-fill it, you could end up using many times more water than your neighbors. But you're doing it for what is nominally a legitimate *purpose* - you aren't just running it down the drain because you can; you're doing it for entertainment/social purposes. You're also probably using water at a much slower rate than the guy who leaves all his faucets and showers on 24/7.
If caps are low enough that the pool enthusiast can face punitive fees or risk being disconnected from the water supply, that's *broken*. The only guy they should be catching in their net is overt resource *abusers* (whether intentional or accidental; maybe they have a virus that is pegging their connection as part of a DDoS botnet).
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I bet they did that because either they couldn't figure out how to differentiate between TV and non-TV traffic or doing so wasn't worth the cost and effort.
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What if you want to use a competitor for TV, like Dish satellite, and AT&T for internet? This kind of bundling smacks of a net neutrality violation. You are allowed to use your connection fully, the Internet "fast lane," only if you subscribe to AT&T's other services? That's a crock.
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U-Verse TV is done over IPTV, so it's all data. They are effectively zero-rating that TV data, and uncapping your other data uses, only if you bundle products. This seems to me a violation of net neutrality. You might want to use a different TV provider.
Or another attempt to squeeze blood from a stone that you refuse to upgrade through sound investment to modern internet standards.
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