AT&T ‘tests’ traffic throttling
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- In Canada, the major ISPs are reaping the whirlwind after trying to shackle bandwidth, blaming a tiny handful of P2P file sharers.
Now it seems a movement initially started by Bell in Canada and Comcast in the US is becoming a trend.
AT&T is “testing” the idea of a broadband data cap, “and could move toward a more widespread rollout in the future,” says PC World, going on:
“Users in Reno, Nev. will be the first to see the limits pop up, spokesman Michael Coe indicates, though a secondary test market may soon be added. Beginning this month, AT&T will restrict new customers in the affected areas based on their Internet plans. Users with the slowest speed DSL service will be limited to 20GB of bandwidth per month, while users of the fastest plan will receive a cap of 150GB a month. Any data transferred above the limit will be billed at a rate of $1 per gigabyte following a one-month grace period.”
Time Warner Cable and FairPoint Communications also are “testing limits,” says the Los Angeles Times, going on:
‘Comcast Corp. already started capping Internet use in October and said it would suspend the service of customers who exceeded the company’s 250-gigabytes-a-month limit after repeated warnings.”
Who’s to blame?
“A small group of customers are using the majority of bandwidth on our network,” says AT&T spokesman John Britton in the story.
In The Register, “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,” he says.
By an astounding coincidence, Bell Canada also claims 5% of users are directly responsible for its decision to implement traffic throttling.
Stay tuned.
reaping the whirlwind – p2pnet traffic shaping digest, April 19, 2008
PC World – Broadband Caps Coming to AT&T, November 4, 2008
Los Angeles Times – AT & T to try limiting subscribers’ data use, November 5, 2008
The Register -AT&T feeds metered internet to American gamblers, November 4, 2008
astounding coincidence – Bell Canada tries to justify throttling, April 11, 2008
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November 5th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
The whole industry sux.
In the US they are given 250- or 150-gig limits
Asshole Bell gives its users 60-gig limits!!!