Multichannel News discusses how AT&T's new 200 MB and 2GB caps will be quickly chewed up by streaming video -- leaving users facing high penalties for actually using looming services like Netflix's upcoming iPhone application. As Multichannel News's Todd Spangler notes, such low caps create a marketing advantage for those carriers willing to offer unlimited services. The piece also points to AT&T's new data usage calculator.

Like many other companies before them, AT&T tries to make the caps seem more generous by often measuring data in ridiculous metrics like "emails sent." Still -- according to AT&T's own measurements -- it takes just 35 minutes of streaming video before you reach AT&T's 2 GB cap and begin having to pay $10 per gigabyte.

While the meme circulating by many is that such a cap is very reasonable --and it's "only fair" for users to pay for what they use -- we've repeatedly explained how such caps aren't about fairness at all. They're about putting off upgrades, monetizing data per byte to offset inevitable SMS/voice revenue losses from mobile VoIP and push IM clients, and using pricing systems that funnel all users eventually toward higher bills (which is much different from real, per byte billing).

That's before we even get to AT&T's higher ETF, below the line fees, or other ways in which carriers ensure that your bill soars ever higher. AT&T knows today's bandwidth hog is tomorrow's regular customer, and the move is (obvious to most of us) about money, not fairness. People who are openly embracing AT&T's new pricing model will ultimately come to regret their current enthusiasm.