The idea that 2% of users using 20% of the bandwidth is hurting "normal" people is a PR move that is going to do great harm to future innovation. The way I see it those 2% of users are early adopters and a couple of years from now "normal people" will be using as much bandwidth as the current 2% does. Limiting bandwidth now hurts future innovation.
From a technical standpoint, that's not all that far-fetched. AT&T is delivering to the last mile. The fiber runs to the node, which feeds households over VDSL (copper pairs). Each node serves hundreds of households, so if you happen to be on a node with one of these people that are eating 20% of the total bandwidth passing through that node, you may see the impact on your connection. There's only so much pipe.
This moves the argument up the chain a little bit. Why did AT&T implement fiber-to-the-node after they were given billions upon billions of tax breaks and subsidies? Verizon implemented fiber-to-the-premisis in some markets at least.
Just because people are downloading a ton of illegal content right now doesn't mean 5 years from now the average person won't be downloading it legally. This is how progress is made.
Caps will move, rates will move, usage will move, prices will move. I'm not sure what your point is. I'm saying (or, strongly implying) that virtually the only people who will be hit with this cap today are the ones using BitTorrent.
And websites like http://www.graboid.com repackaged usenet to make is accessible to the general population. Movie studios don't seem to mind since they have a DMCA process and most content never gets one.
Nowadays, a significant portion of those "bandwidth abusers" are people who are just watching movies and TV shows on Netflix. The use of Netflix instant streaming has grown tremendously over the past year, and for many people, it's become the exclusive source for non-live video content.
You're also leaving out what the household might be doing with its Internet besides Netflix, and you are conveniently ignoring the 150GB cap on DSL service.
Why are you defending AT&T for lowering its level of service by an order of magnitude and imposing gigantic overage fees?
I did some quick math. I could go over this cap on my DSL line simply by using my connection at full speed for LESS than a tenth of a month; i.e., less than 2.4 hrs per day. Sorry, that's not acceptable on an "unlimited" link.
Thanks, I wasn't aware that their HD bandwidth requirements were as modest as 2.6-3.8 Mb/s, from both a more effective codec and limiting fidelity to 720p30 stereo.
I think instead of being able to advertise "up to" speeds, ISPs should have to advertise the overall average speed you can use in a month taking into account usage caps.
150GB/month works out to .47MBit/sec sustained throughput. If AT&T had to advertise that rate instead of 6Mbit for DSL lines, they'd think twice about caps.
Our family watches a lot of Netflix. My kids will watch several movies or shows throughout the day, my wife watches her shows, and we might throw a movie on in the evening after the kids have gone to bed. If the average size of a 2 hour movie on Netflix is 1.8GB (source: http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/200...) and if we watch on average move than 2.7 movies a day, then we will almost definitely hit our 150GB limit every month. Especially considering that we use the internet for a lot of other stuff too, like video chatting with out of town family members, work related file transfers, offsite backups, etc.
We don't use bittorrent, we don't download music illegally, but we will most definitely be dropping AT&T for a different service, as soon as we find one that won't cap our usage (since Comcast is the only cable provider available in our area).
FYI I'm in Canada and use Canadian Netflix. I have a 175GB cap on my cable internet (it's the biggest I could buy). This month I was sitting at about 120GB transfer with average netflix watching (several TV episodes a night and 1-2 movies a week), with about a week left.
Then I acidentally left the live.twit.tv stream on for about 12 hours. I haven't checked, but I expect to either have to heavily conserve bandwidth until my next bill, or get a friendly letter from my ISP. Offsite backups like carbonite or mozy are totally out of the question obviously. I had planned on downloading MS Server 2011, but I'll have to put that off until the next billing cycle too. I also rent and buy movies and TV shows off of itunes, but I have to balance that and my netflix watching so I don't go over.
Everything I do is 100% legal, yet without vigilance I could easily blow through my cap within two weeks. The phone company offers a slightly higher cap (you can get up to 250GB) but it's much slower. Welcome to life in Canada...
The alternative is what we will get next, which is that everyone gets a rate hike AND these draconian overage charges go up and increase in number and complexity. If you think that this single cap will magically keep your rate down, whilst penalizing only those big bad pirates, you're dreaming. This is the same company that has a 200MB monthly cap on cell data, because its internal data says that lots of customers tend to just barely go over 200MB, thus forcing them into the 2GB tier.
I feel like this is less about ability to handle the 2% who go over the bandwidth limit and more a means to fight piracy. I would assume the 2% who go over 150/250gb/month are people sharing large amounts of media (sure people like me download tons of legal soundboard recordings from bands, etc, but probably not the majority of that 2%). By capping the bandwidth, they can effectively cripple the ability for some to share large amounts of movies/shows/music.
I think it's more about making things more difficult for services like Netflix and Hulu as well as extracting some extra revenue from their top users who don't have any other choice for internet service.
Bingo, especially since AT&T TV (which is all over IP and therefore is just as likely to 'clog the tubes' -- actually even more so since it has better QoS) is exempt.
They are going to go kicking and screaming into the age of being a dumb pipe.
AT&T is a tier 1 ISP; they don't pay for traffic from outside of their network.
The 'user pays for bandwidth' pricing is fundamentally more efficient, and is a good model to move to long term, provided there are sufficient controls to prevent price gauging in areas where ISP(s) act as a monopoly or duopoly (20c per GB in the US excluding the pricing for last-mile fixed costs seems like price gauging to me - but it depends on the technologies; it is probably a lot more expensive to get extra bandwidth to a cabinet than to an exchange), and the companies don't misrepresent what is on offer to consumers.
However, all information flows should be treated equally; companies shouldn't be able to abuse their market power as network services providers to make their own information services cheaper than those of everyone else. It seems that the best solution would be for regulators to ensure that AT&T and other ISPs charge for bandwidth used by their own applications in the same way as they do for their competitors.
BINGO! We have a winner. If AT&T had adequately provisioned their last mile networks, instead of trying to cram 10K households in a 1K household pipe, it wouldn't matter how much bandwidth an individual used.
Good point... I hadn't even considered IPTV and streaming services for some reason. It definitely looks like a move to protect revenue when people may be switching off services like U-Verse TV.
Let's not forget, Speakeasy is just another BigCo. If you want to stand on your principles, go look up the ISPFH people in Chicago. They'll sell you a DSL line.
This isn't just piracy, it is IP video streaming, it is roughly 1GB per hour for HD content. For somebody single, 150-250GB/month is plenty, for a house of 4 if everyone watches Netflix, Hulu, etc.. it isn't hard to use that up.
This is about revenue protection for their U-Verse TV business. They want to control the share of wallet and they'll use the tools they have available to do that. They don't want to become "just a pipe" where you go Internet only and then pay your TV content dollars to Hulu, etc...
My household of 4 uses upwards of 100GB per month without even paying for services like Netflix. Our usage of ad-supported SD streaming sources is such that buying even one game on Steam is likely to push us over the limit. The next time Steam has a big sale, we're likely to spend several times more on downloading the games than on purchasing them.
It's amazing how much has been given to ATT & Verizon to build out new fiber networks (which they still haven't finished) and now when people start using them to their potential we will be hit with overages, awesome.
It won't get any better until the cities/localities remove exclusive territory rights for companies that provide phone and cable.
Telecoms also fought hard to make it illegal for cities to offer ubiquitous broadband for free. It started being a small trend for cities to do this as incentive to live there, but it was quickly squashed.
They also sat on DSL for over a decade until the telecom act of '96 allowed others to roll-out DSL. They finally started to market it themselves when they were forced.
My calculator tells me that, with my low-end DSL connection, I could eat that up in about 10 1/2 days. That's not too bad of a limit, but I do worry about what precedence it helps set. When I signed up, they were very clear about saying that it was unlimited*.
We are having big shifts to content distribution over the internet with things like itunes, netflix, Amazon streaming movies, Apple TV, Skype, video chat, games, and software. Comcast (xfinity) and AT&T are going to do their best to cripple the internet to protect their other sources of revenue.
I recently moved to Seattle and had no choice but to sign up with Comcast. I wanted to have streaming video of NHK Japan coverage open while I'm doing things around the house. I'm to worried about eating into my monthly limit to do so.
> I'm to worried about eating into my monthly limit to do so.
Depending on the area, the limit may not even be enforced. I've pretty drastically gone over the cap every month since it was implemented and have yet to receive a warning, and I've heard the same thing from other users. Of course, YMMV.
Comcast has the same thing 250GB cap and has such for 3 to 4 years. No one is blowing through 250GB watching netflix, hulu and such, which I think is the reason behind this move by AT&T.
Actually I burn up about 190GB with netflix, hulu, Xbox 360 games, OS updates, Zune pass, pandora, etc.
I don't use any illegal means to acquire content and am already flirting with the cap regularly. The "bandwidth hogs" of today are the "regular users" of tomorrow. Imagine telling somebody from 10 years ago "the average internet user will be using 10 GB of bandwidth a month." Their mind would be blown.
$10 is fully half the monthly fee for ATT DSL. So they are charging quite a bit more for data if you go over the cap.
I'd be less ticked off if the rate above cap were more similar to the rate below cap, and if the cap allowed saturating your link more than 9% of the time, which is what this cap does for DSL users with a typical 6.5 Mbps download speed.
To buy a connection that can actually be used 24/7 with the new price structure would cost well over $200/month. That's not cool.
Glad to see US ISP's starting to take a note from Canadian (and Australian) ISP's. Next, you can look forward to unabashed packet shaping, as practiced by Rogers.
Bullshit. Nearly every broadband ISP in the US has had unlimited download and upload for the last 12+ years. When I got my first cable modem in 1997 and since then, its always been unlimited. While our access speeds have gone up, they haven't gone up in comparison to other nations. What AT&T and other providers are saying is that they haven't been investing in their backbone and regional connections, while increasing customer speeds. This is complete bullshit.
Bullshit. Nearly every broadband ISP in the US has cut you off with varying levels of warning if you use "excessive bandwidth" for years and years now. It's been a continuous stream of complaints about such things over the years. I actually give kudos to Comcast for finally putting a marker down on "excessive usage" a couple of years ago, and even more kudos now to AT&T for not only being explicit but providing an overage plan that is not terribly unreasonable for consumer internet. Despite my disinclination to give kudos to either company for anything.
There's no such thing as a truly unlimited service. I prefer that they be upfront about the limits.
Since Comcast put the 250 GB cap in place, I've had a hard time breaking 100GB, and I do several things that chew through bandwidth, like hi-def Netflix and a lot of OS updates and downloads. (Been shopping around for a Linux distro the last couple of weekends, for instance.) I have a hard time complaining.
Broadband and wireless ISP's have for years have been advertising unlimited plans of service while silently cutting you off if you cross some vague limit deemed as "excessive". You're right, kudos to Comcast and AT&T for putting a hard number out there to monitor against, but forgive me if I don't have the least bit of trust or respect for the ISP community.
What is something legitimate that you can do with 250GB in a month (that's 83 HD movie downloads), and, when you identify it, can you also tell me why the 98% of people who pay for U-Verse should have to pay for that level of service, which they will never come close to using/
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Either the top 2% pay a noticeable premium, or everybody pays a less noticeable premium. AT&T is not a charity, it's not a public utility, and it's not a monopoly.
> can you also tell me why the 98% of people who pay for U-Verse should have to pay for that level of service, which they will never come close to using
They are now effectively paying the exact same amount for a reduced level of (potential) service. Unless you're willing to speculate that this will eventually lower costs for the 98% (doubt it, are Comcast's users better off?), there is no gain for any end user in this scenario.
Now I'm wondering if they'll continue being reasonable with a clear commitment to a specific speed, or - at the very least - a decent and reliable average.
If so, they'll be in a position to run marketing campaigns where they start assaulting those godawful "up to" claims by demonstrating what their competitors actually average.
Alternately, this really is about offering less for more. I suspect we'll know one way or the other within six months.
maybe blocking open wireless networks is one of their goals. They want to be able to maximize revenue - if a couple of thousand people have to now actually buy access, rather than riding off of their neighbors - it's a win
OK, where's my $10 a month refund for every 50 GB I go under the limit?