bah, AT & T has suk'd since the beginning of time . . .
It's as simple as this - you meter my connection and instead of paying for 16Mbps I'll just pay for 1Mbps because the web would be pretty much worthless for anything except surfing pages and I can do that fine on the lowest package available.
That's how you fix that metering problem. BIG LOSS OF INCOME FOR THEM.