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Ponce
4th May 2011, 05:37 PM
Looks to me that one of this days you will see less of me when they start doing the same with my company, this should make some of you very ;D
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AT&T Starts Capping Broadband
by David Goldman
Wednesday, May 4, 2011

The days of all-you-can-surf broadband are vanishing.

AT&T this week began capping its Internet delivery service for broadband and DSL customers. The move comes 11 months after it placed similar caps on its mobile customers.

U-Verse -- AT&T's high-speed broadband, television and telephone network -- now limits customers to 250 gigabytes of Internet usage each month. DSL users are capped at 150 GB. Customers who exceed the limits will have to pay $10 for each additional 50 GB.

AT&T moved in June to set pricing tiers for its mobile customers, offering light users a plan that maxes out at 200 megabytes. The company also sells a pricier 2 GB plan. AT&T (NYSE: T - News) remains the outlier among the three major wireless companies, though Sprint (NYSE: S - News) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ - News) Wireless are expected to follow suit with caps soon.


More from CNNMoney.com:

• New iPhone, iPad Limits: 2 GB Won't Get You Far

• 7% of Americans Subscribe to Netflix

• One in Eight to Cut Cable and Satellite TV in 2010


But AT&T isn't alone in instituting restrictions on residential broadband usage.

Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA - News) -- by far the largest broadband provider in the U.S. -- also has a 250 GB cap, and Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC - News) experimented with a tiered billing service in some markets in 2008. Though broadband caps are a relatively new phenomenon in the United States, variations on Internet cap structures are quite common in Canada, Asia and in European countries.

AT&T's caps will affect just 2% of its customers, the company said. The restrictions are necessary, AT&T maintained, because those in the top 2% use up 20% of the network's bandwidth. The highest-traffic users download as much as 19 typical households, on average, which slows speeds for other users, AT&T said.

"Our approach is based on customers' feedback," said Mark Siegel, spokesman for AT&T. "They told us that the people who use the most should pay more, and they also told us we should make it easy for them to track their usage. We think our approach addresses these concerns."

Siegel called the caps "generous," and said that AT&T's DSL customers use just 18 GB per month on average. The company didn't provide similar statistics for its U-Verse high-speed Internet customers. Globally, broadband customers typically use 15 GB per month, according to Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO - News).

The caps are fairly forgiving. DSL customers would need to watch 65 hours of high-definition videos on Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX - News) to reach the limit, and high-speed customers would need to watch 109 hours.

Analysts see the move as a strategic one. AT&T, Comcast and many other broadband providers also sell cable TV service, which a growing number of customers are dropping in favor of video on-demand services like Netflix.

"This probably isn't absolutely necessary," said Vince Vittore, broadband analyst at Yankee Group. "It's mostly a move to prevent customers from cutting off video services."

Vittore believes Comcast and AT&T's caps are indicative of what will become a larger trend in broadband services throughout the country.

Cisco recently forecast that video on-demand usage will double every 2 1/2 years. AT&T said its customers are using more broadband as data-intensive video services like Netflix become more popular. Video currently makes up 40% of all Internet traffic and will exceed 91% by 2014, according to Cisco.

Though typical broadband users don't come close to approaching the caps now, the increase in average video consumption will undoubtedly cause a greater number of users to exceed their limits in the coming years.

That could force broadband providers to raise their caps in the future if customers begin to complain.

To head off a backlash, AT&T is sending customers alerts when they reached 65%, 90% and 100% of their data allotment each month. The company is also giving customers an undefined grace period before it charges them for another 50 GB. AT&T also is allowing customers to check their data usage online.

Still, data caps likely won't sit well with those who have called for broadband providers to improve their infrastructure and service.

The Obama administration has harshly criticized the state of the country's broadband infrastructure, noting that most other countries offer broader service with far faster speeds. The president even alluded in last year's State of the Union address to a study in which the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked the United States 31st in median broadband speed.

As part of its National Broadband Plan, the FCC has set out to bring 100-megabit-per-second speeds to 100 million Americans.

Some Internet companies fed up with the state of American broadband are taking matters into their own hands. Google (Nasdaq: GOOG - News), for instance, is deploying a 1-gigabit-per-second network in Kansas City, Kan.

http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/112671/att-capping-broadband-cnnmoney

7th trump
4th May 2011, 05:40 PM
There just cutting their own throats.

TheNocturnalEgyptian
4th May 2011, 06:10 PM
I love how these guys come on the scene 20-30 years late and start trying to tell people how to use the products they had no participation in building.

gunDriller
4th May 2011, 07:00 PM
they are creating a HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUMONNNNNNNNNNNNNNGOUS

Humongous

market opportunity.

the way Internet & microwave technology works, they are just creating a big market incentive for some enterprising engineers to develop a "freecycle" response to the phone & cable company bullsh.t

they are acting as if Moore's law doesn't apply to communications electronics.

it does, i promise & guarantee you, the cost for wireless broadband microwave has fallen very similarly to the cost of computers.

in the old days a computer upgrade was $2500 ... now it's $1000 - if that, for something a lot faster.

now, land-line phone + DSL costs $50 to $65 in the US.

in Canada it costs $25, it's a for profit company - and their DSL is faster.


to explain what i mean by "freecycle" response, for starters, if i could convince a neighbor to let me install a laptop computer & one of these on their property - the Buffalo high-gain high-bandwidth router, i can use the free wireless from one of the local free wireless companies. i have 2 "hops" to accomplish this, and i might need a third, a "repeater", to get to the neighbor that is within range of the wireless node i'm trying to use.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833162134

http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/newegg/33-162-134-TS?$S300W$

$60

the way that would work, i would have 8 Megabit performance in the morning (1 Megabyte per second download) and other off-peak-times, tapering down to lower speeds later in the morning & during business hours.

well, then i'm in the position of providing secured networks access (i.e., not anonymous, so it won't get used for child porn etc.) to my neighbors.

that's an example & just the beginnig - the technology i am talking about is a transceiver (like the Buffalo) which allows people to set up network nodes across a town, and then to tap into the official Internet - or to just use that type of technology & create a side net where there is genuine competition & the geeks do an end-run around the phone company.

i am not the type of engineer who can just whip up such a transceiver, but i have worked with guys like that for a while and know their capabilities.

i expect some talented geeks will be responding to bandwidth caps etc. by giving a big FU to the phone company, if necessary collaborating with a local district attorney to blow up the phone company monopoly - just like happened to AT&T many years ago.


i would like to see people be more intolerant of the phone & cable company price-jacking, their equipment is getting cheaper, not more expensive.

if people would refuse to pay the prices, that would send a message.

my prices go up $10 a month in about 3 months. so i will be getting one of the Buffalo's to see what network nodes i can "see", without putting repeaters at my neighbors' houses. the repeater is just the act of setting up a computer with an antenna that receives & transmits, just like normal home wireless, though with a little more fidgeting with the antenna position.

in the old days the repeater would have 2 antennas, one aimed at the network source, the other at a customer's router. they have gotten away from that but it is very helpful to use antennas because they massively increase the distance a router can "see". it's an old technology (the antenna & the repeater) applied to a new technology (wireless 802.11) in response to the phone & cable company monopoly bullshit.

Ares
4th May 2011, 08:00 PM
Gundriller,


While I completely agree, I can see ISP reasoning for instituting such caps. I consider myself a moderate user, download movies, watch Netflix, and the occasional MP3 album once in a while. I don't come anywhere close to the cap that Comcast has put in place. The most I've ever got up to was 30GB a month.

Now my point in all of this is, yes the equipment to provide broadband has without a doubt gotten cheaper. Speeds have increased tremendously but the amount of data has increased exponentially. You have media providers like Netflix for example that are consuming almost 1/5th of all Internet traffic across multiple providers.(Level 3, Qwest, AT&T etc) That is an enormous amount of traffic. And that's just for streaming a video into your home.

They are mostly instituting these caps to go after the extremely heavy users. A friend of mine that I met while in college was using almost a TB a month of bandwidth. That is a hell of a lot of bandwidth being used. Even in your scenario I don't believe even the geeks would provide a TB a month of "free" bandwidth. He was hosting movies, software, an entire FTP server farm, mail servers you name it. His provider was comcast. He was cut off multiple times, but always came back with you said "unlimited."

Now that goes without saying, if you do want unlimited bandwidth with Comcast, or with any other provider you can always get in touch with their business services and go with a Business package where the caps are not in place and it is unlimited.

You can still have Unlimited internet access here in the states. It's just going to cost you more.

Bigjon
4th May 2011, 08:09 PM
Does anyone know of a good tool to measure internet usage?

Son of Dave
4th May 2011, 08:39 PM
This is not so much about how much bandwith you're using as opposed to how you're using your bandwith.

Comcast is pissed people are streaming gigabytes of Netflix movies and not watching their crap, same with AT&T UVerse.

Ultimately they will throttle Netflix's bandwith so that you're forced to watch their offerings. It's about keeping the customers home on the range.

What their deathly afraid of is people dumping their shitty cable channels and just getting internet bandwith so they can bypass comcast, pay a low rate and watch Netflix all day.

Netflix doesn't have any copper in the ground, no guys driving around in vans, and nobody that worries about phone lines or alarm systems, and that's pissing the big ISP's off.

vacuum
4th May 2011, 09:01 PM
they are creating a HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUMONNNNNNNNNNNNNNGOUS

Humongous

market opportunity.

Adding on to your post gunDriller

http://www.streakwave.com/mmSWAVE1/Images/NanoBridge5.jpg
Nanobridge from Ubnt (buy at Streakwave): $79

Two of them pointed to each other give you 20 km of range...150 Mbps real throughput.

A nanostation:
http://streakwave.com/mmSWAVE1/Images/loco_m5.jpg
$49

Range of 15 km.

lapis
5th May 2011, 10:26 AM
Comcast is pissed people are streaming gigabytes of Netflix movies and not watching their crap, same with AT&T UVerse.

Ultimately they will throttle Netflix's bandwith so that you're forced to watch their offerings. It's about keeping the customers home on the range.

I think you're right. We have AT&T DSL service, and when we were just surfing on the net and watching Netflix DVDS our rates stayed the same for years.

But then over the course of last year we got a new Wii, laptop and iPad. So now in the family someone could be watching streaming Netflix while others are on the Internet. My rates went up a couple of bucks.

A couple of months ago we finally got a wireless router, and they raised our rates another couple of bucks.

Meanwhile it seems like every two days I get some junk mail from AT&T extolling their Uverse offerings. I would switch to another provider if I could, but there's not that many companies that tempt me.

Ponce
5th May 2011, 01:12 PM
In winter time I am 10 or 15 hours in the WWW (I read a lot) , living here in the middle of the woods there is nothing else to do.......I don't go out in the cold.......so that it would cost me an arm and a legg.....summer time about 5-6 hours so that is not that bad.

gunDriller
5th May 2011, 01:12 PM
http://www.streakwave.com/mmSWAVE1/Images/NanoBridge5.jpg
Nanobridge from Ubnt (buy at Streakwave): $79

Two of them pointed to each other give you 20 km of range...150 Mbps real throughput.

A nanostation:
http://streakwave.com/mmSWAVE1/Images/loco_m5.jpg
$49

Range of 15 km.


http://www.streakwave.com/product-ubiquiti.asp

one more reason to be nice to your neighbors.

you might need to park some electronics on their roof so the neighborhood can have affordable Internet access.

Ash_Williams
5th May 2011, 01:31 PM
in Canada it costs $25, it's a for profit company - and their DSL is faster.

Which company is that?

SilverMagnet
5th May 2011, 10:41 PM
I hope AT&T is planning on investing the extra revenue into their towers instead of pocketing the profits and advertising BS 4G commercials that aren't even remotely true.

gunDriller
6th May 2011, 06:16 AM
in Canada it costs $25, it's a for profit company - and their DSL is faster.

Which company is that?

Telus, in British Columbia.

best voice synthesis i've ever heard on a commercial phone system. like sci-fi. almost scary, the first time you hear it - sounds like a real person, then you realize - that's a robot.

i hope they expand into the US & start kicking AT&T's ass - or at least force them to drop their prices.