| Load of Bull No matter how AT&T tries to spin this, they are lying to us all. Uverse is a 25Mbit pipe of which I have at least 2 TV's going almost 24/7 (kids). Do the math on those 2 streams not including any HD/SD I get on the main TV. The bandwidth usage from that obliterates anything I do on my internet for the month. Yes, I know those streams don't count towards a cap, but my point is that Uverse by nature is a bandwidth beast and to say we need caps to protect us from the "abusers" is absurd. How about QOS? If we really have "abusers" then throttle them with QOS. No, this is exactly what others have pointed out...an attempt at monopolizing the bandwidth. AT&T doesn't want other IPTV services competing against Uverse (i.e. Netflix on demand vs. Uverse Pay-Per-View). AT&T doesn't want to compete against Vonage and other IP Telephony services. When the next generation IP Telephony w/ video services come out AT&T doesn't want to compete against them. This is nothing but an Oligopoly where the handful of ISP's left are trying to shut out 3rd party content providers that ride their networks by using the "abuser" excuse.
I guarantee if AT&T does this in my market, the 1st time I'm billed over my cap I will take action. If I can't find another ISP then I'll just drop my speed tier and then I'll hit them on another service by swapping Uverse with DirecTV, or change my wireless from AT&T to Verizon or Sprint, and change my phone service to Vonage. If everyone in these test markets would take the same action, AT&T would drop this in a heartbeat...especially if they start seeing $150/mo subscribers going down to 1/2-1/3 of that. |
