New AT&T Broadband Customer Additions Take Nose Dive > Wait until they institute caps

Wait until they institute caps

Well, if the competition has caps it wn't matter. However if the competition doesn't (hint: VZ FiOS overbuilds) then AT&T simply won't intro caps in the area due to the risk of losing all customers.

Looks like AT&T needs to plaster $9.95 (w\POTS, as dialup requires POTS, but cheap POTS) 768/128 DSL ads everywhere, then upsell to their higher tiers. I'm not talking about a 6 Mbit down, 768k up tier. I'm talking U-Verse, or ADSL2+ where U-Verse doesn't wanna go. When I say U-Verse or ADSL2+ I'm talking speeds of 10 Mbit or higher, with uploads of 1 Mbit or higher. At that point tey're competitive with cable.

Oh, and if they match their landline prices with cable VoIP, then the POTS bleed would probably stop. C'mon, $40 isn't so hard to match...

Then again, I have no love for AT&T. U-Verse is crap, and their FTTP stuff being capped at 10/1.5 is just plain lame. Grr.

Well in my area I have at&t and Charter. Charter has only minimumly tlak abut looking into caps perhaps sometime in the future. So they both might have caps but at&t will have them first and thus drive customers to Charter. Also if both have caps and both have very low caps then I will simply quit most of my internet usage and get the very cheapest package I can get and only use it for e-mail, online bill paying etc. I'm sure I won't be the only one doing this or dumping internet completely.

reply to iansltx
For the large portion of customers who can't get speeds faster than 3Mbps, ADSL2+ wont help until AT+T does some serious line conditioning or they start building out more RTs. And if they're busying building out RTs, it's more likely that you'll get a U-verse VRAD with VDSL instead.

reply to iansltx
"Uverse is crap!"

Better then any Comcrap or Wow I've ever had. Works perfectly ALL THE TIME.

reply to BF69
As others have said, if they have usage caps as well as the competition, there won't be much of a difference other than ordinary customer churn.

However, this is all the reason for AT&T (and other phone carriers) to offer truly unlimited service, or at least set the caps substantially higher than any of the cable companies (i.e. 500+ GB). They need to distinguish themselves from the cable companies somehow, especially as they start to compete with them on television offerings.

People will be willing to take a slight speed hit to avoid worrying about caps. This should be easier for the DSL carriers since they don't have the same sharing concerns that cable companies have. (Yes, I know it is shared at some point... but the nature of the network setup makes this less of a problem for the DSL carriers)

At least they finally offer DSL without home phone service. I would have been a DSL customer a while back, but the $20+ for a basic phone line which I would never use just didn't make sense. It may be less profit for them per line, but it is some profit where they were getting none before.