AT&T looking at charging heavy Internet users extra

[flashl]

Source: Yahoo (AP)

NEW YORK - AT&T Inc., the country's largest Internet provider, is considering charging extra for customers who download large amounts of data.

"A form of usage-based pricing for those customers who have abnormally high usage patterns is inevitable," spokesman Michael Coe said this week.

The top 5 percent of AT&T's DSL customers use 46 percent of the total bandwidth, Coe said. Overall bandwidth use on the network is surging, doubling every year and a half.

...

Most cable companies have official or secret caps on the amount of data they allow subscribers to download every month. Time Warner Cable started a trial earlier this month in Beaumont, Texas, under which it will charge subscribers who go over their monthly bandwidth cap $1 per gigabyte.

Yahoo (AP)

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080612/ap_on_hi_te/tec_at_t_internet;_ylt=Aqkjav4MRzMnsSznFI4tMnpj24cA

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Metered usage fees coupled with about 1000 variations of usage plans created gazilllionaires in the mobile phone industry and worked so well.

[whistle]

1. When they do, that's when I leave the network

[nebenaube]

2. ah...

fiber optics have been in place in my town for six years now... I bet they won't turn it on until they get their differential rates for higher bandwidth use in place.

[Carnea]

3. Yet they charge me for Cable channels I DON"T WANT AND NEVER WATCH.

The idea I'm subsidizing Fox News and Tia Tequila makes me throw up a little in my mouth.

[Politicalboi]

4. Here's another reason

To vote for Obama

http://www.jabberwonk.com/flinker.cfm?cliid=11xs7k

[MasonJar]

5. Why are you still giving AT&T any of your money? They spy on

their customers, remember? They get no business from me and never will. There are several other choices. When they bought South Central Bell and merged with Cingular, I paid to get out of both. Now I have Insight for everything; if I find out that they are spies also, I will get rid of them too.

[proud2BlibKansan]

6. I love my iphone

and am willing to tolerate AT&T. And as far as customer service goes, they are far better than any other cell provider I have had.

[ChromeFoundry]

7. Totally ridiculous!!!!

They beg you to sign-up for their Pro or Elite package, so that you can download more, faster (at more than double the cost per month)... and entice you with bandwidth hungry add-on services (Launchcast Plus, Blue Room, etc), but cry foul when you actually USE the added bandwidth!!!

Is this any different that paying $8.00 for the highly advertised all-you-can-eat buffet, and then getting charged extra for actually eating more than what they feel you should have eaten?

If they refuse to upgrade their backbone to handle the exponential growth of the applications that they bundle within their own packages... then they should not be in the resale of Internet access as a service business, in the first place.

As fuel prices rise and more and more people find ways to telecommute their daily work duties, this is AT&T's way of reaping additional profits. If a network gets too congested, then everything just operates slower...it certainly doesn't self-destruct. They are already capping the users sync-rate between the DSL bridge and the D-SLAM located at the CO, so all this tells me is that their backbone needs to be upgraded to the actual subscriber services that have been sold.

Comcast is even worse, they are using "bandwidth shaping" to limit connectivity to specific sites to promote usage of their own and partner services. Not much different than corporate censorship.

[slampoet]

8. They can meter my usage when they start acheiving those big download speeds they claimed.

[Joanne98]

9. It's a trend. Why don't we just nationalize the telecoms!

[Deja Q]

10. Why? Don't users pay per month for x bandwidth?

Therefore they should be able to use x bandwidth.

And to think other Western countries have not only faster bandwidth at the same price... maybe AT&T's infrastructure needs to be updated, as profits from companies are surely put back into the organization? Or have I been watching that Elmer Fudd and Sylvester cartoon on capitalism too much and got the wrong impression because 1950 was so long ago?