 
Buttset
join:2001-11-12
Ladson, SC
 ·AT&T Southeast
1 edit | Uh -oh... Don't look now, but you when the caps are in place your wireless better be "locked" tight!
Can you imagine the over charges that could be run up by someone not authorized to use your internet connection?
Makes "free public internet access" a reality for sure... along with the taxes needed to support it! | |
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Madtown
join:2008-04-26
Madera, CA
| How long will it take me to get to the 60GB limit? I have the Pro plan which I think is 60GB for 3.0 how long will it take to get to the 60GB limit? How much web surfing, Xbox Live, Hulu, webcam sites, Netflix (I don't have it but will once it's Nov 19th or sometime after). How much can I do on the internet? | |
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 | MyDogHsFleas
Premium
join:2007-08-15
Austin, TX | Re: How long will it take me to get to the 60GB limit? Unless you live in Reno, there is no limit at all.
Only in Reno are they doing this on a trial basis. | |
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| | caliuser
join:2008-11-08
Union City, CA | Re: How long will it take me to get to the 60GB limit? Ha thats funny. ATT has been moving this thing along for awhile. It will be on our doorstep very soon. | |
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| | Madtown
join:2008-04-26
Madera, CA
| said by MyDogHsFleas  :Unless you live in Reno, there is no limit at all. Only in Reno are they doing this on a trial basis. Yeah but it will be (well better not be) in my area eventually, so I would like to know. | |
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anon_ssf
@qwest.net | whitespace broadband anyone? how soon? | |
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S_engineer
join:2007-05-16
Chicago, IL
 ·Comcast
| its ok... with the state of the economy, i'll be able to save $600 a year without being "connected". Thats roughly 2 bottles of cold duck a day!
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"For duty and humanity!"
- Moe Larry and Curly (MEN IN BLACK, 1934)...These are the guys we have in Congress | |
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jason236
| To the whiners...If you don't do anything about it Shut up and take it. If more users voted with there wallets I bet AT&T would back down. As I am posting this there are only 84 comments. If only 84 users wrote in and complained AT&T would just let them go on there way. I am in CA and it has not happened here yet but when it does I will leave. | |
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someonesomeplace
@sbcglobal.net
| AT&T What they are saying is AT&T IS a backbone provider so they are just paying themselves to provide access to the internet. Also if an ISP or cable company is in their area they are getting paid to provide the pipe be is a fiber or copper. Yes there are other providers ie covad and mcleod and such but they all have to pay att to provide the local loop. So AT&T is their piece of of pie no matter what.... | |
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Cyrusthevirus81
@sbcglobal.net | Full Circle Hmmm When I was younger we paid by the minute. for internet usage. I wander why they stopped doing that? This is basically the same thing I pay a fee for a certain amount of minutes worth of full throttle downloading each month. | |
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manfmmd
Premium
join:2003-01-14
Earth
clubs:
| Talk about unreasonable My hometown cable company's AUP includes:
The guidelines for Bandwidth/Network Traffic Usage/month for each service package are the following:
•Residential - totaling 5 Gigabytes, or 3 Gigabytes download/2 Gigabytes upload
•Home Office - totaling 15 Gigabytes, or 10 Gigabytes download/5 Gigabytes upload
•Small Office - totaling 25 Gigabytes, or 18 Gigabytes download/7 Gigabytes upload
•Professional Office - totaling 60 Gigabytes, or 40 Gigabytes download/20 Gigabyte upload.
Users exceeding the Bandwidth/Network Traffic amounts specified for their Service Package may be charged $10.00 for each Gigabyte used in excess of their specified amount.
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If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, what is the road to Heaven paved with?
If the Democrats win in November and retain the Congress, are they going to bitch about "no checks and balances"? Not. Holding. My. Breath. | |
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MikeVx
join:2005-04-02
Southgate, MI
| Worst timing in the world... Comcast has priced themselves out of my range. I can no longer get useful speed from them within my limit for internet service. This is a hard limit, $Limit is OK, $Limit+.01 is off the table. I have to draw the line somewhere.
Now as to the bad timing, in the morning, AT&T will be installing U-Verse with the 6mbps service. The cost is within my limit, but if these caps come in, I will, for all practical purposes, be locked out of the Internet.
In order to stay within budget while finding a new ISP, I had Comcast drop my account to the unfunny joke that is the economy tier. This has made most net access unusable at a blazing 1mbps that actually never gets more than 3/4 of the way there. I went with AT&T based on the assumption that they couldn't be quite as stupid as Comcast, and they were being semi-sane about pricing. Bad move.
While on the "economy" tier, and with my usage restricted massively due to the fact that I can't actually make much use of the service now, I've managed to rack up 61.18GB (real, not sales measure) for October. This is only with the computer transferring data for a few hours at night, on those nights when I'm home, when I'm doing my usual array of things. The machine sits powered off most of the day. A 78.1GB limit will not last two weeks under any plan higher than 3mbps, which, of course, has a much lower limit. Comcasts 244GB limit looks a lot better when faced with that. Except that Comcast no longer has an affordable tier that deserves to be called broadband.
The proposed caps would render Internet access non-existant for me. I've been waiting to catch up on things when the U-Verse comes in, but caps like that would mean dedicated access no longer had any value. For what few useful features would remain after abandoning the large data transfers, I can get a better deal for the price of a small fries once a week at Wendys. Account monitoring and bill payments would pretty much be it. Fun places like BBR would not justify even the cheapest plan from AT&T, and I think I'd probably risk running over the limits at that point. And that assumes that I can turn off all graphics and such clutter. | |
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| mrvid
join:2007-06-19
Levittown, NY
| its just another way to raise the price.... Why are people making a big deal because they call it a cap. If they instead just raised the cost of all their tiers by 10%, people would bark, I would think, but then likely just chock it up to inflation.
To me, a cap is better than raising rates cause people who use the net less still wont have to see a higher rate. | |
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| Kearnstd
Elf Wizard
Premium
join:2002-01-22
Mullica Hill, NJ
| Re: Time for the Government to seize control of the last mile problem is the government would only let it age and decay. and they would install all kinds of methods of packet inspection to make their MAFIAA overlords happy(and it would deliver reliable false positives).
that said if home broadband goes fully metered then they should get called a utility because once a service is metered by usage its a utility.
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[65 Arcanist]Filan(High Elf) Zone: Broadband Reports | |
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sw3090cd
@rr.com
| Re: Time for the Government to seize control of the last mile The Problem is that the government "seizing control" is absolutely immoral. Basically you want a bunch of men with guns to shatter your neighbor's storefront window and bring you the merchandise you are too lazy to work to pay for. Don't you people realize that's basically all that governments do?
said by Kearnstd :problem is the government would only let it age and decay. and they would install all kinds of methods of packet inspection to make their MAFIAA overlords happy(and it would deliver reliable false positives). that said if home broadband goes fully metered then they should get called a utility because once a service is metered by usage its a utility. | |
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I pos rep
join:2008-08-22
1 edit | First of all they are full of **** even in their numbers 1GB does NOT equate to 34hrs of gaming. 1GB of gaming including both download and upload equates to close to 5hrs. They must mean gaming online in pacman and not in some more bandwidth demanding game. I have done over 2GB alone in gaming in a day. I must have been gaming for 68hrs in a 24hr period where I gamed and slept. Talk about impossible. There are not even close to 68hrs in a day.
The moment I can watch 65million Blu-Ray movies a month is when it will be generous. NOBODY GIVES A FLYING **** how many text alone e-mails I can send. That is the most worthless way to measure bandwidth.
With low caps, and their incredible overcharge of x20 bandwidth price for exceeding their tremendously low caps, if anyone still wants to argue that it is not just corporate greed like I claimed a year ago, then step up and speak. I want to see what an idiot has to say. | |
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TZi
k1L0
join:2001-07-05
Miami Beach, FL
| How does bandwidth wasted on ads figure in? Seems to me that in an era when they start metering broadband usage, the cable company ought to then offer filters free of charge so the ads that they load into their home portals and auto pop-up ads. I refuse to pay by the byte for advertisement to be delivered to me. It was different when it was unlimited.
If I'm expected to show some restraint, they ought to be forced to do the same? is this not unreasonable?
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128kbps too much, 100GBps never enough! | |
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Woody79_00
join:2004-07-08
united state | Re: How does bandwidth wasted on ads figure in? I am not too concerned, If ATT brings this dumb cap into my area im gone
I have options | |
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mikeohara
join:2003-04-23
White Oak, TX | Reg: AT&T Caps If they bring the caps to this area of the country that I live in, I'll pretty much have no choice but to pay overages because I absolutely refuse to move back to the local cable company's so called "internet" service (Suddenlink) | |
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Sammer
join:2005-12-22
Canonsburg, PA
3 edits | Low caps are a restraint of trade While these ISPs will enjoy the increased revenues the clear intent is to stop potential competition before it even starts. These ISPs want any innovation involving the internet to be stopped cold unless it has their expressed permission. What they are doing may be illegal and certainly unethical. If the incoming administration actually enforces anti-trust law and its campaign promise of inclusion isn't just a lot of hot air these caps shouldn't last long! | |
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Mr Matt
join:2008-01-29
Eustis, FL
·Comcast
·Embarq
| Some additional thoughts. As a former Dial Up ISP management level employee here is my two cents as to why Broadband Service Providers want to charge per byte for downloads. First of all I am no fan of CAPS but have some theories as to why the ISP's want to put them in place. Most important reason is that the broadband ISP's are happy with their return on investment and want to avoid the cost of upgrading their networks.
Here are some of the issues that my employer ran into between 1996 and when they sold their 40,000 dialup customers to a National Dialup ISP around 2000.
1. Constant equipment upgrades: When I started working for the company I discovered several cartons of Modems in the warehouse. The cartons were labeled 14.4. 28.8 and 33.6. When I asked what the modems were for I was advised that they were removed from the various POPs as they were upgraded for higher speed in order to keep up with the competition. Unfortunately the modems had no value although they were expensive when purchased. Furthermore once rack mounted modems became available there were software upgrade costs as technology was improved. The last major upgrade was to 56Kbps, the first K2 and then V.92 later. This problem also dogs the broadband ISP's. The cost of constantly upgrading their networks to provide increased throughput with no increase in revenue per customer leaves them between a rock and a hard place.
2. Reduced revenue per customer: Gross revenue for a dialup account decreased from about $25.00 per month to about $16.00 per month between 1996 and 2000. This same problem holds true for Broadband ISP's. When introduced, the initial price for a 1.5Mbps DSL Connection was about $50.00 per month. Currently in the Central Florida Market a customer can subscribe to 768Kbps service for about $20.00 per month and 1.5Mbps for $25.00 per month. The only reason for price cuts is competition with the CATV Industry.
3. Increased holding time on dialup ports: Between 1996 and 2003 the holding time of a typical session increased from about 23 Minutes in 1996 to 47 Minutes in 2003. ISP's had to increase the number of modems and access lines without any increase in revenue. In the case of a Broadband ISP the cost for back haul circuits do not increase in a linear fashion. The cost for an OC12 is much higher than the cost of an OC3. Back haul circuits will have to be upgraded in order to support the additional traffic.
By 2000 my employer saw the handwriting on the wall. Telephone Companies were beginning to offer DSL Service in some markets. My employer was approached by several local exchange carriers offering to allow my employer to utilize their network to deliver broadband via DSL. Unfortunately both the projected revenue and profitability were lower than for the dialup customers. The final result was for my employer to get out of the Internet Access Business and expand their Web Hosting business.
This issue will never be resolved without government intervention. If you are unhappy about the situation write the FCC, your Senator and your Congressman. Remember the squeaky wheel gets the most grease. | |
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| cpsycho
join:2008-06-03
Orangeville, ON
·Wightman Telecom
·Rogers Hi-Speed
2 edits | Re: Some additional thoughts. rogers profit this year: $495 million
Rogers grossly oversells their capacity when I mean grossly I mean a 500 square mile filled to the brink with cow poo and you can smell the thing 20 years into the future.
That is the best analogy I could think of.
Then they say that their networks are overloaded with p2p. Well duh, everyone checking their email at once would overload their networks. They are even squishing their HD signals for their tv. To save money on not haveing to upgrade that.
Rogers is basicly selling what they do not have. Last time I checked thats fraud. But since they are a corperation the harper government thinks that it has more rights then me or you.
Thats 495 million dollers that they rightfully did not make. | |
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| | Mr Matt
join:2008-01-29
Eustis, FL
·Comcast
·Embarq
| Re: Some additional thoughts.  Unfortunately in the United States unless a company is registered as not for profit their main objective is to make a profit.
It is my belief that the rates broadband ISP's are charging when a customer exceeds the CAP is punitive, that is to punish the customer not just to cover the cost of increased network usage but to deter what the ISP considers overuse of the network. One of the major impairments of increased profitability is the capital cost of new equipment to replace perfectly good technologically obsolete equipment. The current crop of broadband ISP's cannot predict how Internet Access will be deployed in the future. They want to punish customers that exceed the ISP's expectation of what network capacity a normal customer should use, so they can delay making additional investment in their networks.
Broadband ISP's should be subject to the same type of regulation that the telephone companies are subject to. The telephone companies are subject to regulation which includes service objectives. For example dial tone delay was one service objective. If the dial tone delay exceeded 5 Seconds, the Telephone Company was subject to sanctions. In return legalizing the regulation the Telephone Companies, they were guaranteed a percentage return on their investment. Whether the ISP is in Canada or the United States the only way the customer can be protected against price gouging is through regulation. | |
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tj007s13
join:2005-09-06
united state | Anon Users? Why are so many anonymous users posting taking the ISP's side. Not just on this article, but on many across this forum, it seems the PR police from companies come here to post as Anon's. | |
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| techygeek
join:2008-04-30
 ·Verizon FIOS
·Optimum Online
| Re: Anon Users? said by tj007s13 :Why are so many anonymous users posting taking the ISP's side. Not just on this article, but on many across this forum, it seems the PR police from companies come here to post as Anon's. What difference does it make, if one's side of the argument is right then it shouldn't matter who responds otherwise.
I would think it should not be to crucify people for their ways of making their point but rather to challenge the point itself. | |
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