AT&T to Put 5gb Data Usage Cap on iPhone | Hacker News Reader

AT&T to Put 5gb Data Usage Cap on iPhone

breitbart.com

9 pointsdkasper13 comments

I hope users that are peeved enough realize that this constitutes AT&T breaking their contract. This in turn for the user means that they can cancel their AT&T account without paying an early cancellation fee or, in my experience, the carrier will allow you to remain on your plan without the limitation (i.e., leaving the original agreement in tact.)

Note: the user has to approach AT&T the right way, and not give up when the rep says no the first few times. This has worked for me several times, usually after a txt msg rate hike.

If you've been following this story throughout the day, it's been pretty amusing to see each blogger or news site try to exaggerate what was said more and more. AT&T's CEO made an offhand comment (that may be a trial balloon, may not) that AT&T is going to try and educate consumers about their usage and, if that doesn't help, they'll consider a tiered pricing model. How does that become "AT&T to put a cap on iPhone usage"?

Not to say that I wouldn't drop AT&T like a disease if they did...

I usually stand up for AT&T, but this is just idiotic. Their executives are morons that honestly need to be replaced. They need to quit spending money on marketing their crappy network and use that money to fix their crappy network.

I'm still waiting to see an Apple response to this. It would seem to have an impact on buying video through iTunes.

Exactly what I was thinking. Downloading just a few videos from iTunes over 3G would use up a quota very quickly.

Do they have the ability in the contract, to arbitrarily cap you? Assume I have an iPhone and for the last 6 months have been using 5.7GB per month; now I use it and get either capped or charged more... I would not be happy.

And FWIW, 5GB/month of data transfer, were you to buy it at any major datacenter, is about 10-30 cents' worth of bandwidth.

I am pretty sure you are paying for the traffic from your phone to the cell tower, not the traffic from the cell tower to the Internet.

This title doesn't match what the article says at all. The article claims the cap is already in place:

> Right now, the carrier has a monthly usage cap of 5 gigabytes on its data plans, the same as other carriers.

Those are data plans for laptops, not phones.

Sorry, guys, but streaming your tv to your phone over a cellular network all month costs way more than 30 dollars and ATT would be retarded not to try to rein you in. Anyone who gets this enraged and self reightous over something so obvious really comes off as pompous and petty.

Related Post: When The World Gives You Lemons, Sell Lemonade http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=987138

Not to be too pedantic but gb != GB. The g is unambiguous(though wrong) but the b could be bit or byte depending on the capitalization. 1Gb networking is much slower than 1GB. (.125GB vs. 1Gb)

It's one of my pet peeves so sorry about the digression.

As far as I know there are only two situations where b commonly refers to bits: individual raw DRAM / Flash chip packages, and network channel bandwidth. Otherwise it rather unambiguously refers to bytes.

On the other hand the G is actually ambiguous -- is it 10^9 or 2^30?

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