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AT&T caps DSL broadband users
I'm thoroughly pissed off and disgusted with AT&T and I sincerely hope that as a business they fail and are consumed by another media company at this point. Their wireles service notoriously sucks, and now it looks like they are trying to punish thier landline customers..some of which don't have a choice in who their provider is. Nice monopoly there...
That being said, this is the wave of the future! Capitalism at it's finest...more money for the company, screw the customer.
150gb may seem like alot of bandwidth, but lets take a closer look...
The average computer game is anywhere from 4-12gb to download nowdays, ubless you're buying them on disk (if you can even find them anymore, the shelf space for PC games is dwindling every time I go to a store it seems). Even then, theres hundreds of mb's of patches and content to download after you load the game. Lets say you're a console gamer too, even if you're buying the game on disk you're still downloading several hunderd mb's of content before the game ever launches. Throw in some streaming media from youtube, Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, Slacker, et all...and see where that gets your consumption up to. Got a VOIP phone like Vonage or MagicJack or Skype...those drink up some bandwidth too! Then add in your normal web surfing and online gaming habits to the mix. God forbid if you have a spyware or malware on your machine dialing home to the Chinese or Russians eating some bandwidth in the background. Do you host a web server or FTP for your personal use? How about your average consumption of digital media...like music and movie downloads for the old iPod? There's probably more that I'm forgetting here, but you get the idea.
150gb isn't as much as it sounds like for the average connected household these days...no matter what the suits claim.
The city I work for has it's own utility department, and as part of that, has it's own cable internet service provider. I've chatted with the guys over there today a bit, and they pretty much confirmed my thoughts on the subject. In thier case, they buy bandwidth in bulk from another provider, then resell that bandwidth and connection service to our customers. NO MATTER HOW MUCH, OR HOW LITTLE, of that bandwidth is used every month, the cost to provide it DOES NOT CHANGE unless we exceed the overall cap limit (which we don't because we intentionally buy at least %25 more than we need, and project that into the future for adjustment). The only reasoning they could give me for capping and charging for bandwidth was to ensure that users did not crowd or overload the "spectrum" (this is cable technolgy which I don't understand, but they even said that spectrum does not apply to DSL customers because each user has thier own circuit on their DSLAM, they arent' sharing bandwidth on a circuit with other users like cable does!)...but that is an issue that can be solved with throttling and other methods, which don't cost the customer any extra money!
Long story short, in my opinion, this is AT&T's pittiful attempt to save a failing business by milking thier customers for more money for a service that does not cost any more to provide based upon usage unless you're abusing the system. And if that's the case, punish and regulate the abusers!!! Not your normal customers...
I really don't know what, if anything, the common man can do about stopping this trend, but mark my words: if the other ISP's see this as a viable way to increase profits and the expense of thier users, they will do it...and that will change the internet as we know it forever. Here at the dawn of the information age, that portal to the world is going to be cut off and regulated...for profit. All the rich digital content and information that we have available and take for granted is going to be metered out by the byte.
A sad day indeed...
I'm thoroughly pissed off and disgusted with AT&T and I sincerely hope that as a business they fail and are consumed by another media company at this point. Their wireles service notoriously sucks, and now it looks like they are trying to punish thier landline customers..some of which don't have a choice in who their provider is. Nice monopoly there...
That being said, this is the wave of the future! Capitalism at it's finest...more money for the company, screw the customer.
150gb may seem like alot of bandwidth, but lets take a closer look...
The average computer game is anywhere from 4-12gb to download nowdays, ubless you're buying them on disk (if you can even find them anymore, the shelf space for PC games is dwindling every time I go to a store it seems). Even then, theres hundreds of mb's of patches and content to download after you load the game. Lets say you're a console gamer too, even if you're buying the game on disk you're still downloading several hunderd mb's of content before the game ever launches. Throw in some streaming media from youtube, Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, Slacker, et all...and see where that gets your consumption up to. Got a VOIP phone like Vonage or MagicJack or Skype...those drink up some bandwidth too! Then add in your normal web surfing and online gaming habits to the mix. God forbid if you have a spyware or malware on your machine dialing home to the Chinese or Russians eating some bandwidth in the background. Do you host a web server or FTP for your personal use? How about your average consumption of digital media...like music and movie downloads for the old iPod? There's probably more that I'm forgetting here, but you get the idea.
150gb isn't as much as it sounds like for the average connected household these days...no matter what the suits claim.
The city I work for has it's own utility department, and as part of that, has it's own cable internet service provider. I've chatted with the guys over there today a bit, and they pretty much confirmed my thoughts on the subject. In thier case, they buy bandwidth in bulk from another provider, then resell that bandwidth and connection service to our customers. NO MATTER HOW MUCH, OR HOW LITTLE, of that bandwidth is used every month, the cost to provide it DOES NOT CHANGE unless we exceed the overall cap limit (which we don't because we intentionally buy at least %25 more than we need, and project that into the future for adjustment). The only reasoning they could give me for capping and charging for bandwidth was to ensure that users did not crowd or overload the "spectrum" (this is cable technolgy which I don't understand, but they even said that spectrum does not apply to DSL customers because each user has thier own circuit on their DSLAM, they arent' sharing bandwidth on a circuit with other users like cable does!)...but that is an issue that can be solved with throttling and other methods, which don't cost the customer any extra money!
Long story short, in my opinion, this is AT&T's pittiful attempt to save a failing business by milking thier customers for more money for a service that does not cost any more to provide based upon usage unless you're abusing the system. And if that's the case, punish and regulate the abusers!!! Not your normal customers...
I really don't know what, if anything, the common man can do about stopping this trend, but mark my words: if the other ISP's see this as a viable way to increase profits and the expense of thier users, they will do it...and that will change the internet as we know it forever. Here at the dawn of the information age, that portal to the world is going to be cut off and regulated...for profit. All the rich digital content and information that we have available and take for granted is going to be metered out by the byte.
A sad day indeed...
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"DSL and UVerse connect fairly directly to a hub — unlike cable connections where users share a local loop that can become congested. Bulk-bandwidth costs for an ISP are a tiny portion of its business costs, and those prices continue to fall even as users consume more and more data."
Two public interest groups asked federal regulators Friday to take a close look at AT&T’s new limits on their broadband customer’s internet usage, saying the caps could undermine the national broadband plan.
AT&T’s caps, which went into effect Monday, limit DSL customers to 150 GB of usage a month, while customers of the more robust U-Verse service (a mixture of fiber and phone lines) are capped at 250 GB a month. Users who go past those caps face overage fees of $10 for every 50 GB.
Online video, backup and gaming services are increasingly popular and particularly bandwidth-intensive. An hour of Netflix can range from 0.3 GB to 2 GB, depending on the quality.
The letter from Public Knowledge and the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative calls the caps “particularly aggressive” and notes that with AT&T’s adoption of the cap, more than half of the broadband subscribers in the United States are now using a capped service.
“While broadband caps are not inherently problematic, they carry the omnipresent temptation to act in anticompetitive and monopolistic ways,” the group told the FCC. “Unless they are clearly and transparently justified to address legitimate network-capacity concerns, caps can work directly against the promise of broadband access.”