The Secretly Horrifying Implications of AT&Ts Bandwidth Caps

[Amerigo Vespucci]

The Secretly Horrifying Implications of AT&Ts Bandwidth Caps

By: Robert Brockway
March 16th, 2011

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-secretly-horrifying-implications-atts-bandwidth-caps/

As is inevitably the case for all things, it turns out that Prince was right: The internet is over. AT&T recently announced the rollout of bandwidth caps, not just for their mobile network, but for residential DSL customers as well. The announcement is here, with more details here. They've not only already implemented this system in several test markets, but were apparently pleased enough about the results to go ahead with the program nationwide. Human beings were willing to take all this fuckery lying down, and so now it's official.

I know what you're doing right now. You're trying to comfort yourself. "Sure, that sucks" you're thinking, "but that 150GB cap is pretty high; I'll probably never run into it myself." And you're right, for now at least. Of course their introductory cap is going to start out on the high side. They need to give you time to get used to the concept without really suffering the consequences. But soon it will be lowered, and lowered again. Anybody familiar with college romance recognizes this as the "just the tip" strategy: Wherein the fucker promises the fuckee that, should they find the end of the penis unsatisfactory in some way, the process can always be stopped and the whole thing pulled out. But, much like their frat-bro counterparts, I guarantee you that AT&T has no intention of pulling out. They are going to plunge it into us to the hilt, and if we're lucky, maybe they'll whisper gently into our ears about what good girls we're being for taking it all so bravely.

Right now, if those stats are accurate, the bandwidth cap will only apply to the top 2% of users. Those are the only people who are going to be charged on this new pricing plan. Have you ever known a company content to only make money off of the top 2% of their users? And even if AT&T is somehow perfectly happy with this tiny slice of the potential market, what's going to happen? That top 2% will then be more aware of their data usage, right? That means their average rate will go down, therefore the cap will go down - but that price will probably stay just the same. Even if this is baseless fearmongering and AT&T's caps don't decrease, the internet will always require more bandwidth as it grows in functionality. The highest end of the caps they're rolling out today will be absolutely stifling a few years from now.

Any time there's a new way to charge for a service, you know others offering that service are going to follow suit. Comcast has had a secret 250GB bandwidth cap in place for years. Now they have an excuse to publicize and lower it. Which means we'll be dealing with an internet operating under bandwidth restrictions very soon, and that's going to be a very different thing than it is now: It will be a place where you buy a game on Steam one week, so you can't watch internet porn for the rest of the month. You'll just have to suck it up and content yourself with masturbating to erotic twitter-feeds, or else scrolling rapidly up and down pages of ASCII art so it kind of looks like Jessica Rabbit deepthroating if you squint hard enough through the tears.

[dkf]

1. One dual layer blu ray disk is 50 gigs.

I guess they won't be streaming blu ray quality then.

[undeterred]

2. What a terrible writer.

[Name removed]

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[Name removed]

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[FormerDittoHead]

5. A few points.

I've been following this for years, from the Comcast side. I personally think "net neutrality" and PRIVACY to be a MUCH greater issue, however, it's very important.

1) DSL ain't Cable or fiber optic. Not even close.

I had DSL for ONE DAY and it pegged out at less than 1/6th the speed of Comcast. (DSLReports metered me at around 200kb. With Comcast I get streaming 1.5mb and max of 3.0mb.)

If you're downloading 150 gigs on DSL, you're downloading almost all the time. On Comcast, one month I downloaded 300 gigs and they shut me off, but in retrospect, I was grabbing everything I saw.

Back to AT&T. If you're using AT&T's "U-verse" service, the cap is the same as Comcast's well publicized and well noted 250gb. At those speeds you can go through 250 gigs downloading a few hours a day. (about 8 gigs).

Let's talk about bandwidth. A Hi-Def Netflix video eats up a more than a gig of bandwidth, and Netflix allows you 6 simultaneous connections per account. If you're a big family and if you're all watching Netflix / Hulu / Amazon you could go through that 250 gigs pretty quick.

However, I was told that UNLIKE cable, DSL is NOT "shared" (like Comcast) so the idea that heavy users effect the quality of service for light users is false.

Furthermore, and I just have to add this because I've never read this anywhere, if the issue is quality of service, then why count bandwidth at off peak (1AM-7AM)? If general bandwidth is anything like the traffic any of my websites, then the traffic goes down like 90% during those hours. Whose service are you hurting? Cellphones let you call for free on off-peak.

Also, MAYBE there would be ONE MONTH where the user may want to exceed the limit. If I used 100 gigs last month, why can't I "bank" the difference?

I agree with this being a danger, and that the way they're controlling usage is arbitrary, self serving and the excuses they give are false. But I can't help but say that if you're going to pick a battle, net neutrality is the one to go with right now.

[TheWraith]

8. "the idea that heavy users effect the quality of service for light users is false."

Well, yes and no. You don't share the "pipe" going between you and the central office, wherever that is. That's yours and yours alone. But that central office also needs to be connected to the internet, so you're still sharing a limited amount of bandwidth.

Because guaranteed high-speed connections like T1 and T3 lines are expensive, internet service providers "oversell" them. This means that, for instance, they might take a single 45 megabit T3 line going into the central office, and then hook up a hundred people each with a 2 megabit DSL line to it. Now, because not everyone is accessing their connection full bore at the same time, you won't necessarily notice it slowing down, even if there is technically only half a megabit of "guaranteed" bandwidth per customer.

These rules--which I don't approve of, by the way--are intended basically to punish people who are using their connection all the time. The ultimate and best way to get rid of them is "fiber to the premises," which is fiber optic connections for internet, as well as usually phone and TV service as well.

[bvar22]

6. Verizon has already instituted caps on its wireless I-Net Access.

Because of our rural location, we use a UM-175 cell adapter for access.
We signed a 2 year contract 3 years ago (now expired) that had unlimited access (1.5 mb/s) for $60/month.
When we enquired about upgrading to their new 3G/4G model,
we were informed that there would be a monthly usage limit.
The NEW contract would discontinue unlimited usage.
50 Gig limit costs near $100/month, with a surcharge for exceeding the cap.

So far, we are still being billed at the old rate, and still using the UM-175.
We're expecting a letter any day changing our rates.
We may go BACK to the old phone landline (no DSL) if that happens.

[TheWraith]

7. To be blunt, this is more than a little hysterical.

Bandwidth caps have been around for decades--they're not a new thing, nor are they about to kill the internet. I used to have a "broadband" satellite ISP whose bandwidth cap was a whopping 168 MB within 8 hours. The current limit on my mobile internet via smartphone is 200 MB per month.

150 GB is considerably more than most people are going to be using. Would I rather see truly unlimited internet access? Absolutely. But having people leap into panic over this is, frankly, absurd.

[JoeyT]

9. Pretty much.

How long does anyone think it's going to take before someone stands up in a meeting and says "We could increase our profits by X amount by lowering the cap by Y without losing any customers." and it will happen? Then the "competition" does the same thing.

The only companies that really had bandwidth caps up until now were the ones that had captive customers that couldn't go to anything else.