AT&T Nevada Bandwidth Caps - FUN!

[Kunikos]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...in-nevada.html

Starting in this month, some of its customers in Reno, Nevada will be informed that their broadband will be "subject to a certain monthly usage tier for the total amount of data they may send and receive, as well as a per gigabyte charge in the event they exceed the usage tier."

An AT&T spokesperson told Ars that as few as five percent of all customers account for almost half of the total bandwidth consumed.

My bad guys, I ruined it for everyone LOL

[100_Percent_Juice]

An AT&T spokesperson told Ars that as few as five percent of all customers account for almost half of the total bandwidth consumed.

Go to their house and arrest those people because they are either watching too much porn or pirating everything available on the internet. Then att can leave all the rest of us the f#$k alone. I am curious to see what the GB cap will be per month and if it is solely based on the users tier level. You have to figure in playing xbox live or ps3 online and also if you have netflix and watch those movies. I imagine that if they are mainly concerned about these 5% of people, the bar should be set pretty high as to not have an overload of complaints.

[cody]

Finally, a reason to be glad I'm with Charter.

Edit: and there's no such thing as too much porn.

[tysonK]

Originally Posted by 100_Percent_Juice

Go to their house and arrest those people because they are either watching too much porn or pirating everything available on the internet. Then att can leave all the rest of us the f#$k alone. I am curious to see what the GB cap will be per month and if it is solely based on the users tier level. You have to figure in playing xbox live or ps3 online and also if you have netflix and watch those movies. I imagine that if they are mainly concerned about these 5% of people, the bar should be set pretty high as to not have an overload of complaints.

I doubt AT&T is worried about complaints.

[Kunikos]

AT&T Complaint Department - Our Motto is "Fuck you, you don't have a choice."

[kidatari]

Originally Posted by Kunikos

AT&T Complaint Department - Our Motto is "Fuck you, you don't have a choice."

That's for pretty much all ISP's.

[Kunikos]

I switched to Charter b/c I couldn't get higher than 768Kbps with DSL at my new house, so I'm glad Charter has no caps (yet?).

[100_Percent_Juice]

I don't really know how valid this article is. I have never gotten anything in the mail or email from att talking about this or a change in the user agreement. Also I did have the 3mb service and about a month ago I called them to ask about something and the guy said "hey we have some promotions if you are interested." and then he upgraded me to 6mb for a year for FREE. I do speed tests all the time and I always get my full 6mb regardless of time of day. I have no complaints.

[sperry]

Originally Posted by 100_Percent_Juice

I don't really know how valid this article is. I have never gotten anything in the mail or email from att talking about this or a change in the user agreement. Also I did have the 3mb service and about a month ago I called them to ask about something and the guy said "hey we have some promotions if you are interested." and then he upgraded me to 6mb for a year for FREE. I do speed tests all the time and I always get my full 6mb regardless of time of day. I have no complaints.

You think they would bother to tell you?

And, transfer caps != throughput speed. Having 6Mb download speed just means you'll hit the cap twice as fast as someone with a 3Mb download speed.

[cody]

Originally Posted by sperry

You think they would bother to tell you?

And, transfer caps != throughput speed. Having 6Mb download speed just means you'll hit the cap twice as fast as someone with a 3Mb download speed.

Right, because doubling the speed, doubles the amount of data you download.

Speed increase != data volume increase.

[100_Percent_Juice]

Originally Posted by sperry

You think they would bother to tell you?

Yes. If there is ever a change in the user agreement they are obligated by law to tell you about it. I have received 2 letters from them in the last few months with changes to said user agreement however, they did not make any of the changes that are referred to in this article.

Originally Posted by sperry

And, transfer caps != throughput speed. Having 6Mb download speed just means you'll hit the cap twice as fast as someone with a 3Mb download speed.

I was not referring to the download cap, I was referring to the comment in the article about throttling download speed.

The telco submitted them to the FCC on Thursday, and it looks like speed throttling is on the menu... The disclosure concedes that these changes "will prevent some customers from obtaining the maximum downstream speed capability,"...

AT&T says these new conditions will go into effect starting October 18.

Its past Oct 18th and I not received any information about it and my internet speed has not changed regardless of the services I am using at the same time.

[sperry]

Originally Posted by cody

Right, because doubling the speed, doubles the amount of data you download.

Speed increase != data volume increase.

If you download at max capacity all the time (you know, torrent users), then doubling throughput certainly does half the time 'till you hit the cap. Of course, if you never transfer more than 150GB in a month, your speed will have nothing to do with the cap at all.

Frankly, the only people this will affect are the people that have a perpetual massive queue of movies, TV and music to illegally download.

Let me put it another way: the cap on the SECCS server is 50GB/mo. We use about 6-10. The cap AT&T is going to turn on is supposed to be three times what we've got on our server, and 15 times what we actually use.

[Kunikos]

There are tons of avenues to download legal music, TV, movies, games, and other things off the internet these days. Downloading tons of GameTap games, Netflix Instant View on TiVo, Xbox 360, or PC, Comedy Central South Park episodes, YouTube is now doing streaming movies, Rhapsody all-you-can-eat music, downloading games from Steam, Direct2Drive, Impulse, GameStop, Amazon, etc, and also playing games eats up bandwidth too. Not to mention hosting a web site or game server on your own system if you wanted to (unlike cable companies traditionally telcos would let you host whatever the fudge you wanted to). Also, downloadable demos on PC, 360, and PS3, and full games on 360, PS3, and Wii.

No offense meant, Scott, but SECCS gets hardly any traffic and hardly services much big content. If you were streaming out videos or serving up archived downloads to your users things would change in a hurry. I have to guess that a small site like TESNexus blows through about 50 terabytes a month.

[ScottyS]

ATT Press Release: "Due to the continual increase in global demand for bandwidth, such as the emerging internet economies of countries like China and India, we see the need to restrict bandwidth supply within the U.S. Domestic market. Look forward to seeing increased prices as demand for bandwidth continues to rise. This emerging crisis may be solved and lower prices returned to the consumer if the government approves our application to drill in Alaska."

[sperry]

Originally Posted by Kunikos

There are tons of avenues to download legal music, TV, movies, games, and other things off the internet these days. Downloading tons of GameTap games, Netflix Instant View on TiVo, Xbox 360, or PC, Comedy Central South Park episodes, YouTube is now doing streaming movies, Rhapsody all-you-can-eat music, downloading games from Steam, Direct2Drive, Impulse, GameStop, Amazon, etc, and also playing games eats up bandwidth too. Not to mention hosting a web site or game server on your own system if you wanted to (unlike cable companies traditionally telcos would let you host whatever the fudge you wanted to). Also, downloadable demos on PC, 360, and PS3, and full games on 360, PS3, and Wii.

No offense meant, Scott, but SECCS gets hardly any traffic and hardly services much big content. If you were streaming out videos or serving up archived downloads to your users things would change in a hurry. I have to guess that a small site like TESNexus blows through about 50 terabytes a month.

All those things you mentioned... no one does that perpetually. The only people that perpetually use all their bandwidth are the torrent guys.

I'm not saying that I think caps are good, or even fair. I'm just saying that it's really only going to effect the folks that have 24/7 bit-torrent running.

My reference to SECCS's bandwidth usage was to point out that internet users that don't pull lots of media (i.e. 90% of internet users who's biggest downloads consist of streaming YouTube) are never going to come at all close to the cap. SECCS hosts text and pictures on par with the type of data that most people pull from the web, so if we can do that for ~100 people a month and stay under 10GB, one person can certainly get by with "normal" internet usage under 150GB.

[Kunikos]

I guess it's a bit of a damper for BitTorrent.com then, since their business model partially depends on not having bandwidth caps.

[cody]

Any update on this? I'm thinking of moving to ATT but I move a lot of packets.

[ScottyS]

My ATT connection doesn't like doing anything else when torrent is running. I run DD-WRT on my router, and have tried some settings to give torrent background priority, but it doesn't seem to help too much so far. I have torrent scheduled to run at off-times when I need to get the latest Top Gear.

[cody]

That's a good workaround if you can't get QOS to work. Just schedule your torrent client to run during your off hours.

I called ATT and they admitted that some ATT customers in Reno are guinea pigs for the caps, but gave me a phone number to learn more. It's 877-677-0059 and I'll call it later and report back.

[100_Percent_Juice]

My att internet is blazing fast.

*Billy Mays*
Its so fast that I can download torrents, upload private data, install malware, and cruise this forum all before I can finish a single batch of Big City Sliders!

[Dean]

Originally Posted by 100_Percent_Juice

My att internet is blazing fast. [...]download torrents, [...] install malware

I can vouch for these. He and Bob are the current kings of bad Intarwebbing.

[derail]AVG Free sucks! Avast4Home free rocks. If your ISP offers either the McAfee or Symantec Suite, those entire suites may offer better protection than Avast and Windows FW.

Most of all, don't torrent executables! No AV can keep a good "installer" executable from building a Trojan on your machine.[/derail]

[cody]

Avast FTW.

[cody]

Pro (1.5-3 Mb/s) 60GB/month volume limit. After that each GB is $1.

I think she said taht you get 80GB with Elite. She said that they will evaluate the study at the end of 2009 to count how many complaints they got, etc.

That rules out ATT for me for now.

[Dean]

60gb = 2.5 one CD movie torrents per day! WTF do you need more than that for?

[cody]

I do more than download movies. It all adds up. I'm sure i'd be under most months, but I don't want to risk getting that one bill that makes me sick to my stomach.