AT&T sets monthly limits on broadband use

Originally posted by hillynilly
Thats garbage I would be saying GOOD BYE AT AND T your days are numbered..



Anyways I think ATT is being selfish and will be a killer to their business

The problem there is their Dear John Charges as I like to call them.

Say you have a bundled service for 2 phones tv phone and net with AT & T and want to leave but your service contract has still got 13 mnths on it Thats $175 early termination x5 ie $850 that if you decide not to pay, they will charge the CC you used to pay your bill with an implied consent that is in the fine print every time you pay.

Late last night I posted to a thread about the economy and I made the statement that, even though I am unemployed and living on a shoestring budget, I don't feel any shame over springing for Internet because I have the least expensive DSL I could find and that, for the price of a few DVD rentals, I get 24/7 access to entertainment and television.

Then I log on today and read this. And, yes, my cheap Internet is with AT&T.

What a bunch of crooks.

As it stands my "$14.99", per month, Internet is already always between $25.00 and $30.00 bucks due to a 2 page list of arcane fees that one would have to be a lawyer or engineer to fully understand, and so many different taxes that I often wonder if they are actually real. So, basically, I already pay double the advertised price. And now this!?!?

I'm probably not the only one here old enough to remember the days of AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy. But the limited use model is how things began with the Internet and the greed of these companies is what spawned the unlimited model. In the late eighties to mid nineties. It was not uncommon, in the old days, to hear of somebody running up a one month Internet bill in the high hundreds, or even in the thousands. Local ISPs sprouted up, everywhere, offering unlimited use contracts for a fair fee.

I used one of these for years.

Then, the major companies caught on, and offered even faster unlimited service with more amenities, and began buying up or putting the local ISPs out of business. After that the switch to high speed, from dial-up began. I never stopped to question the motive. But now it is clear. This was done to prevent small, local, start-up ISPs from being possible. Having a few servers with modem banks is one thing. Having access to fiber optic trunks is another altogether.

Now, with the monopoly in place... right back to pay by the hour plans we go.

Pathetic.

~Heff

reply to post by Hefficide


Ya know I just posted a bit on this topic..
Seems a study was done and they found price gouging to be the cause of all these Internet piracy problems

the report is a little dry but you get the drift
who's got $750 to by MS office when they guy down the block will sell it to you for $5???

www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by jessejamesxx

Here is a good quote that I found that sums everything up nicely

I'm sorry, what? Are you advocating AT&T capping their ISP customers whilst letting their TV customers - which use the same bandwidth pipe - go unimpeded?

www.hackingnetflix.com...

If they didn't have some sort of angle, or reason to do this, they'd cap everyone's bandwidth across the board. Not just the internet.

Its a crappy situation for sure but not many people at not going to hit a cap like Comcast's at 250gb a month, I routinely download large files on the order of several gb each and I have never come close to the limit. My big issue with these caps is that in the case of Comcast at least (and probably others) they don't provide you with a way to easily monitor your usage; in order for me to track my usage I had to setup a specialty router to track the usage. Unless the ISPs provide a tracking solution (which is trustworthy) or companies like Netgear and Dlink start producing home routers which track bandwidth usage people will be at the mercy of the ISP to determine how much data they have used and how much remains.

Like someone said here already, file sizes are not going down, they are going up! The amount of HD video being downloaded is going to rise and even if this is imposed it will have to be changed eventually. Anyone with an xbox or ps3 is going to use a hefty chunk of bandwidth. Or if you really want to open your eyes, the inflation of services increase...the value of your currency falls. Here comes the one world currency to save the day.

reply to post by Helig


You can track your comcast usage directly from the site. They even show you your past month usage. Just sayin'.

They even say that they don't come after someone just because they go over ever so often. They define it as excessive usage. So if you routinely go over by 100gb, then they will contact you and try to work out a solution, like switching to a business account (which is unlimited). They don't just charge you.

Boycott AT&T

Most of the bandwidth being used is from waste.

As you try typing something in the Google search engine for example it starts searching for responses for you as you type each letter.....wasting lots of bandwidth pulling responses in for you before you even type out what you want to search for.

Isn't that annoying? And why I use a different search engine. Most of the Internet bandwidth is WASTE.

Adobe FREE PDF reader now has a user agreement telling you if you use their PDF reader.....advertisement will start to be shown on those PDF files you want to read.....more waste.

You can avoid waste by using text based browsers, I like Lynx & links, inevitably I find myself using FF because I use Flash, and enjoy jpegs. I like Konqueror because of all the settings also. Here lately Ive been changing distros every month(included in a zine subscription)But the post office likes to open my mail, so I'm stuck using Mint, the Ubunto based distros suck B-sacks, so I have not been very eager to apt-get any new browsers. I get my zine from India in the middle of the month, or when ever the post office is done reading it, or whatever TF they do...

Here's a screenshot of Lynx, it removes all the BS, and loads the pages in fractions of a second.

I'm tired. I was not wearing my glasses. I thought the headline read 'ATS sets monthly limit... I freaked. I got my glasses. I'm all better now. Never ever do that to me again!

On topic?

Did you really think Utopia would last? Did you really think we'd keep getting all 'this' (looks around at the web) so cheap?

Now the big question? What are you prepared to do about it.

...

...

Notice no use of the '?' at the end of the sentence. Why? Because no one will do anything about it.

Can you say 'Bahhhh Bahhhhh'...

(None of my remarks are directed directly in direct to the OP...not really)...

peace

LInks may be faster than Lynx because the links are clickable .

reply to post by fordrew


I doubt if I ever exceed their proposed limit. We rarely watch movies on the internet though.

reply to post by silo13


Yes Ma'am, I wont let it happen again.

I still use firefox for the most part, I click adds, and donate to MDMA...
The adds seem to be tailored for me, so I dont mind. I can remember being able to purchase addspace on ATS, I paid 20 bucks for an ATS add once, used it to link one of my old sites.

Reminds me of the old days when AOL use to charge by the hour to use the internet. Man they made a fortune.
Competition crushed that though, thank goodness, and I am sure that will happen to AT&T too.

Now the big question? What are you prepared to do about it.

Boycott AT&T

I canceled AT&T, and will be tethering to my cell until I find a better ISP.