[bherms]

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.

[amock]

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.

[gergles]

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.

[tptacek]

AT&T's video is significantly cheaper to provision; it's housed entirely on their own network.

[A1kmm]

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.

[tptacek]

Just because they don't pay a rate to their peers doesn't mean that it's equally expensive to serve traffic on-net and off-net.

[Bystander]

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.

[bherms]

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.

[tptacek]

If they were trying to keep people from turning off U-V TV, why would they set a bandwidth cap that no normal TV-watching person would approach?

[jrockway]

I think anyone that has AT&T DSL could also have Speakeasy DSL. It's just that Speakeasy costs a lot more.

[tptacek]

It also sucks a lot more. I had Speakeasy for over 5 years; AT&T has been a dream comparatively.

Slow. Friendly-but-useless customer service. Multi-day outages.

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.

[jarpadat]

I have a 6Mbit DSL line but I checked Speakeasy's availability for my address and no dice.

[bretpiatt]

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...

[wtallis]

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.

[tptacek]

We're a house of 4, we watch the majority of our TV via a Mac Mini, and don't come within 150GB of this limit.