Not to be outdone by its peers Comcast and Time Warner, AT&T has announced it will be charging users according to bandwidth usage under a new “usage-based pricing system”. This is just a fancy way of saying that the company is moving to a tiered pricing system similar to that being tried out by its competition in various test markets.

AT&T spokesman Michael Coe said, “A form of usage-based pricing for those customers who have abnormally high usage patterns is inevitable.” This comes fast on the heels of their unpopular data plan rate hike that will drop with the new 3G iPhone in July.

AT&T is no stranger to customer dissatisfaction. The company has been under the gun in recent years for everything from poor service and high prices to spying on its own customers for the government without going through proper channels. None of it seems to phase them, unlike their competitor, Comcast, which has gone as far as to create a Twitter account to try and combat any bad press.

It used to be that only the top 5% to 10% of a company’s users used the most bandwidth. Now that downloading of movies and other content is becoming the norm rather than the exception thanks to iTunes, NetFlix, Amazon Unboxed, Hulu and others, these new pricing structures affect more than just the torrent freaks. The new pricing affects budding new businesses and customers alike.

When will the telecoms learn that punishing the user isn’t the answer? By making it expensive to use services AT&T, Comcast, and Time Warner are making it hard to innovate. In this struggling economy, can the companies afford to make it harder and more expensive for customers to use these services? I think that once the companies realize that internet access and entertainment can be left behind as customers budget in a coming crunch, they might change their tunes. Or not.

Image courtesy CounterAgent

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Entry was posted on Saturday, June 14th, 2008 at 2:35 am under Ecommerce, Internet.

Read more entries by Leslie Poston.
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