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AT&T: Internet Data Caps, Overage Fees 'Inevitable'
by Aaron Linde, Jun 13, 2008 3:00pm PDTFollowing Time Warner's announcement that it plans to meter internet usage in North America, telecom corporation AT&T revealed that it is considering a similar plan to charge consumers extra for exceeding internet usage caps.
Company spokesman Michael Coe explained to the Associated Press that the top 5 percent of AT&T's DSL customers consume 46% of its total bandwidth, and overall usage is doubling every year and a half.
"A form of usage-based pricing for those customers who have abnormally high usage patterns is inevitable," Coe said, adding that AT&T has not yet decided on any specific plans or fees for its subscription packages.
While relatively common overseas, capped internet subscription programs have been rather scarce in the United States, and are likely to concern some gamers.
An HD movie downloaded from Microsoft's online Xbox Live Marketplace typically weighs in at 4.5GB, and demos of upcoming games can be in excess of a full gigabyte in size. Select PC games available on Valve's digital distribution platform Steam exceed 4GB.
Earlier this month, Time Warner announced that it was field-testing a new service plan in which subscribers would be charged $1 per every gigabyte of data downloaded over a 15- or 40-gigabyte cap, depending on subscription level.
Comcast is said to be considering a similar plan with a $15 charge for every 10GB downloaded beyond a 250GB limit.
Comments
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So are the top 5% only using a little over 80gb or so a month? Why not cap it at some crazy amount to keep the heavy heavy users more limited.
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I think American users will come to prefer caps.
With Comcast "fiddling" with customers' packets, and TWC implementing caps, the 5% of "heavy" customers will head towards ISPs that don't erect barriers in the way of their usage.
That'll have two major effects: It'll relieve congestion and improve profitability for Comcast and TWC, and it'll impose congestion and poor profitability on everyone else.
The other ISPs, seeing the profitability and network quality of capped ISPs, will ponder introducing caps themselves. And customers, observing that their friends on capped ISPs get a better Internet-using experience and hardly ever run into the caps, will slowly shift towards Comcast and TWC (and any other ISPs who consider capping — Remember that it was an AT&T discussion paper which brought it up in the US in the first place)
After the passage of some time, I'd expect all the majors to attract the custom of a self-selected population of very profitable customers who don't mind being capped, leaving the remaining ISPs to suffer congestion and out-of-control costs as they attract the customers who want to download the whole Internet every month.
From our perspective in .au, we all know what happens to that latter class of ISP. After a few choice high-profile bankruptcies, it'll be difficult to imagine any broadband ISP in the USA operating without caps.
Just my prediction, mind you.
I think it'll all play out over the next 18 to 24 months. By this time in 2010, I fully expect the days of "unlimited Internet" in North America to be a distant memory.
Which will be good in a way, because it'll stop WP threads from filling up with people saying, "Their grass is greener than ours!" and if there are any comparisons to be had, we'll be able to make them on a more rational basis.
– mark
It's worth noting that capping isn't all bad. I mean I can max out my connection at any time of the day or night. I understand it's commonplace for slow-downs and congestion during peak usage times in the US and Europe. If that happened here customer service would be inundated with pissed off customers.
Certainly the 250gb proposed here is extremely reasonably. You can't get anything like that here without paying hundreds of dollars for a business-grade plan. My plan has 20gb between the hours of midday and 2am and 40gb for the rest. That just means I don't go download crazy during the day and queue everything up to start during offpeak. Excess-usage fees have gone out of mode here though and ISPs here cap your connection to 64k after you exceed your limit. Better than getting a surprise hundred dollar internet bill.
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In any case, I see this as a fairly massive hindrance to services like XBL, and a bane to people trying to work from home at jobs that involve having to stay sync'd up with a lot of data. Generally just a terrible solution at a terrible time in terms of societal trends and the inevitable direction all media is taking toward online transactions. Two of the main providers in the US imposing this cap could very well damage the entire progressive direction of online content delivery, particularly in the coming console generations.
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Does anyone even bother doing the math? 250GB per month is approx. 8.3GB per day. or 347MB per hour, every hour of the month, or 5.79 MB per minute, or 96KB(not kilobits) per second. Are you guys seriously complaining about THIS plan? sounds fair to me, and would definitely screw over ONLY the people who are abusing the system, and would either force those people to reduce their intake, which would likely reduce latency, making games play better for all of us, or force those individuals to pay for the upgrades to the internet's infrastructure.
i'm not sure how this would work for businesses, but I don't think even game servers should have a problem with this, or if they do, it's because they have too many servers clustered together under a set bandwidth, and would force them to get a better internet plan for them, making the latency for game servers even better(for those who can afford to not have their servers shut down of course).
Everyone is complaining, and it's easy to complain, but try to see that little silver lining...or maybe you're just about to get stricken by lightning.
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Now. Do you think the cable companies are going to expand their caps accordingly to this growth in individual data send over the internet? Or do you think they're going to wait and see how much money they can make from unassuming (and legit) customers being overcharged until they increase that cap? Do you think we'll be provided with any warning when we DO go over this cap? Everything about this reeks of greed and just adds another fucking thing to the list of things to worry about in daily life.
This sets a bad precedent and reminds me of the scheming cell-phone companies that rape their customers when they go over their texting caps. 250GB will be run of the mill in 10 years. There is no reason for companies to hamper/deter the amount of data we can send to other people. We shouldn't have to worry about this retarded crap like overcharge. Companies need to bite the bullet and either provide unlimited internet as promised, or charge by the gigabytes transferred.
This is evil. There, I said it.
This is just an elaberate schema to get more money from you...
Oh and it also deters piracy, since you'll be paying through the teeth. Id be really interested to see how this plays out with MS and Apple, and Netflix and Blizzard and all the other companies that make thier money via the net, and the current unlimited data rates that we have now.
If you played WoW 24x7 you could easily use 12g a month, thats at 5k a second. Tack on your streaming audio from your fav internet radio, and Ituns/Napster/Zune Downloads and now your really pushing your limits... I'd love to see how much bandwidth Sype, and MS Live take up...
Telso are about to F&*(& us...
Everyone pays the same price.. But they're only talking about punishing the heavy users. That's stupid.
Rather than punishing those heavy users, lower your prices for the light users and attract new customers. All those who only use their connections to check their emails and do minor surfing, they use very few bandwith and compartively pay way too much.. And they are a sizeable part of the customer base. There are surely lots of customers here to attract.
Have lower cap pricing schemes at much lower costs. Much like you have for cell phones, regular phone, electricity etc.. Basically everything eccep ISPs.
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What's more likely is that the Telco and Cable companies want to stifle iTunes, Napster, Amazon, and other companies that are trying to deliver video on demand. After all, if you can get all your shows from a content provider on the internet, why bother with the services provided by the Telco and Cable companies?
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Upside we won't see crap posted to youtube etal of morons now so it might be a good thing.
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I don't have either ISP; however, I would be making the change right now if I did.
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Hey, they can do what they want. It's their company. I'll just go with whoever provides the most for the best price.
Although it's fading, the phone companies still enjoy favored status by region, as do the cable companies. If I hate Comcast and want to use Cablevision, I can't unless I move into e Cablevision territory. With that legislated brake on competition, there has to be a commensurate control of the shit these guys pull, or at least I hope so.
I'm all for a contract being a contract, but if they want to go price-crazy, then let's open up some competition.
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About 8-9 years ago AT&T did this to my family's dial up and we got fucked for like $80 one month, obviously cancelling. They supposedly sent an email out explaining the limits.
WATCH YOUR AT&T BILL KIDS.
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such bullshit.
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I find it funny though that you keep hearing about breakthroughs in internet technology and how it's x times faster than current broadband speeds...but yet as time goes on we're starting to get more limited by the companies that provide them...I know they're stubborn in upgrading infrastructure...and for a good reason...but at one point they're going to have to suck it up
perhaps this is what will encourage competition...in cities dominated by one company (mine is charter)...perhaps the smaller companies can step up and provide broadband the way it's supposed to be
if I was an appletv user or netflix user I'd be pretty pissed
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Guess I'll have to be REALLY FUCKING careful with how i use my bandwith, considering i've gone over 40GB the last few months (damn those steam purchases!)
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Fucking sucks. I hope to god Verizon doesn't do this. The RIAA must be loving this
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If you dl xgb during 'peak' your connection is throttled by 50-75% for a few hours. Drops my 20meg cable connection down to 5mbps, which isnt really that bad of a solution.
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Honestly I wouldn't care that some companies are capping usage if the industry had some sort of real competition. But since there are no market forces to correct for this stupidity, we need some serious regulation in the industry.
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If they *truly* want me to buy that they are targeting those users and me, I want to know what their usages are. If the 5%'ers are doing 200 gigs a month plus, then these caps 40 gigs and below has nothing to do with targeting these over users and everything to do with padding their pockets at the cost of the "more than casual" user.
As I really have no idea what those stats are, one can only speculate.
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I can see downloading demos & movies eating up cap limits pretty fast. Would watching streaming videos (ie you tube, and imbeded shack trailers) count against the cap? If so, how would you know how much a stream will hit your cap?
I mean demos & movies & music all have specific file sizes you can monitor, but streaming stuff is unknown.
And be prepared to be out the anus for it.