AT&T's bandwith caps: The Beginning of the End for the Internet?

This isi not a good omen

Depends, AT&T is already rather fucked in the mobile phone world since Verizon carries the iPhone as well, vote with your money and don't use AT&T for your internet if you can help it. It'll motivate at least one company to not use bandwidth caps if it means they get fucktons of business.

Basically what Barkey said. Go with the people that will provide unlimited internet, because they will be available because there's a demand for it.

^^^ Not a good omen - for their continued business survival. I've heard crap about AT&T for years. Just one more reason why I'm happy not to have picked them as a service provider.

Just At&t shooting themselves in the foot.

The way I understand it AT&T is like Bell in Canada, really big and useless. You can normally find a regional/local company to do business with. We get "unlimited" for half the price of Bell. I heard people freaking out about 150 GB and laughed, bell/rogers/shaw have caps of 60ish.

Somebody once told me that AT&T was so fucked business wise that they got bought out by some little phone company that changed their name for stock reasons. This person also told me that they don't have to report how many people cancel contracts when reporting to the stock holders.

I thought they bought Cingular normally...

But we have a 45GB/month cap here... (Wireless broadband is the only available service here. I don't know the exact technology used...)

AT&T was bought out by Southwestern Bell (SBC), the most successful of the Baby Bells, which had by that point consumed several of the other Baby Bells already. They decided to use AT&T as the name for the whole thing.

45 GB? that's horrible :(

What do you guys even download? I hit 15GB a month and that's only if I'm downloading games (which is to say, I'm not much of a PC gamer).

What kind of games do you download that you only hit 15 gigs? One game is around 6 gigs ish.

edited 16th Mar '11 10:32:01 PM by thatguythere47

Not a lot is the answer.

To be honest, I don't see the market allowing the dire futures predicted by the end of unlimited internet. The pipe is only so big, and the grandmother who wants to check email and look at pictures of grandchildren shouldn't be paying the same as the person who streams an HD movie nightly. Yes, I fall in the latter group, and yes, that means I would be paying more, or doing less. Big deal. The market isn't going to let companies get away with skyrocketing the price of bandwidth.

Just as long as the provider only cares about how much you use and what you use it for. Just like any other carrier. You go to the post office with a box, and they charge you by its weight and ship whatever's in it as long as it's not illegal.

edited 16th Mar '11 11:56:40 PM by TParadox

Even when I was on my iPhone and using You Tube a lot, I averaged around 1 GB/month for downloads. I'm not downloading as many huge files on my Droid, so I haven't been using data as much.

The data caps for smartphones in the UK are something like 500MB to 1GB a month. That's only across the phone network, though; you can download as much as you like via Wi-Fi. I'm pretty sure my current contract is properly unlimited, since I got mine fairly early, but I'm nowhere near 500GB/month anyway.

^^^^ Retro games. I can't recall every downloading a game over 300MB.

edited 17th Mar '11 7:21:16 AM by storyyeller

I downloaded Shogun 2 yesterday, 16 GB on Steam.