AT&T follows Comcast with a bandwidth cap, competition anyone?
By Matt Jansen
AT&T is seeing the light and following Comcast’s lead with a set of bandwidth cap tests that scale according to which tier of service a user subscribes to. Customers in Nevada will be testing out the new feature in November.
This is obviously bad publicity for AT&T, so the company must be expecting some large payouts in the form of cost savings. If the statistics it’s sharing are true, that could be possible. But, mostly it points toward a lack of healthy competition in an industry filled with every sort of segment: people surfing the web.
Hopefully with white space spectrum now approved for public use by the FCC, some sort of new ISP will emerge, forcing companies like AT&T and Comcast to adapt their business practices. Putting caps on how much data consumers can push through the Internet does little to improve our standing as one of the worlds most wired nations.
On a positive note, AT&T is varying its approach slightly from Comcast’s. Instead of disconnecting bandwidth hogging users, it will simply charge them a $1 per GB beyond their quota, according to PC Magazine.
In order to self-monitor usage, AT&T will provide users testing the new feature with a bandwidth application. They’ll also receive notification when they’ve reached 80 percent of their total monthly bandwidth cap.
AT&T justifies the new feature test by saying:
A small group of customers are using the majority of bandwidth on our network. In fact, almost 50 percent of total bandwidth is used by just five percent of customers – customers, for example, who are uploading and downloading the equivalent of more than 40,000 YouTube videos or 40 million e-mails a month. This kind of heavy usage has an impact on all of our customers.
More users are downloading large chunks of content from the Internet, most recently video. Television on demand will only grow in popularity as more content owners share their content through channels like Amazon Unbox, Netflix Instant Downloads, and Tivo.
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November 6th, 2008
ATT gives a percentage of users using the most percentage of the network but there has never been any hard data to show how much these high users are actually using and for what purpose. We don’t know if the top users are 250gigs, 500gigs, 1 terabyte? Instead of bandwidth caps for the majority why don’t they show what the top group of users is averaging and figure the caps from there. I am sure that the caps model they are going to use is to maximize profits, encourage people to move up in speed for a better cap(and profit), and to control video
distribution in the future.
November 9th, 2008
Your recommendation makes sense…common, good stree smart sense. Therefore, it goes without saying that ATT will do the opposite!