AT&T To Impose Caps, Overages | Hacker News Reader

AT&T To Impose Caps, Overages

dslreports.com

16 pointsmvs12 comments

Switch to Sonic.net if you use AT&T in the bay area: http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/03/23/drilling-through-the-ca...

sonic.net is amazing, especially if you get the two line bonded Fusion service. We've got it at Sunfire, and get 25/4 for $130/mo business; I got it at a friend's house too, for $70/mo. Instant response from customer service, actual clue on their part, great network peering and transit, etc. I like having Comcast Business Internet as diversity/backup/etc., but if I only had one, it'd be the Sonic.

Unlike the overage charges for mobile telephony, the charges for exceeding your monthly bandwidth aren't that unreasonable:

Overages will be $10 for every 50GB over the 150 GB or 250GB limit they travel.

That's $0.20/GB, which is about twice as much that you'll pay for bandwidth on Amazon's EC2.

i can't imagine anyone is actually excited about this. i'd prefer not to have formal rules here, with the exception that AT&T can punish their top 0.05% users by bandwidth usage. they want to turn the internet into a giant cable tv package because they know that as soon as they offer speeds fast enough, people will drop their tv subscription. i worry that traffic discrimination will come next.

do we have any solid numbers on how much this costs AT&T? i want to say it's a violation of network neutrality principles, but this could probably be argued on a much simpler basis that AT&T isn't attempting to save money at this point, seems like they're just price gouging now. SMS text messages are a good example here.

This is the same thing that has been happening in Canada for a while now with the exact same rhetoric: "it will only affect a small proportion of customers, roughly 2 percent of all subscribers", "[we are] looking at usage caps and usage based billing as a way to rein in heavy data users" [1].

[1]http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20058933-266.html

It's official: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20058933-266.html

That's fine, I'm calling them and telling them to cancel my 200 channel HDTV plan with DVR so I can pay for the overages on bandwidth I'll get by watching my TV shows on Hulu and Netflix. I think I'll even end up spending less per month!

I hope they realize their plan for pushing users toward paying for their TV service is backfiring. (At least that's what I see this as)

Fine by me, get what you pay for. Just don't distort the market by charging other people to put bytes onto my paid for pipe.

Many users only have ready access to one broadband provider. If that provider happens to be AT&T, they're now SOL.

How is a 150 GB cap a burden for most people?

Will the bandwith caps also apply to video and VOIP data streamed over the same connection by AT&T's UVerse service? Or will those uses of the network be exempt?

The above question borders on the rhetorical because, while it's not addressed in the article, I think we already all know the answer.

Does anyone know whether this will impact business accounts? I haven't been able to find any information on that.

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