AT&T serves up a new ‘trick’ and takes away the ‘treat’ in Reno, Nevada
as noted in an October 31st letter to the Federal Communications Commission by AT&T’s General Attorney, Jack Zinman, where in AT&T outlines its’ intent to place limits on the amount of usage any one account can upload or download each month.
With all the uproar over Comcast’s 250GB limitation recently imposed on their customers, Reno AT&T Internet Service customers are sure to want to beat the house when they discover that their ISP has raised the table stakes by capping their ‘unlimited service’ at only 20GB for some users and 150GB for others.
“For customers that exceed their bandwidth allotment more than once – the size of which varies based on the service level, starting with a 20 GB limit for 768kbps customers and topping out at 150 GB for 6 mbps lines – they will find an additional charge of $1 per gigabyte on their monthly bill,” reports Tom Corelis, blogging for Daily Tech.
The filing notice points out that only a small minority of customers “consume a disproportionately large amount of the total bandwidth available,” and that as of now (The letter says this “trial” begins “in November.”) customers who exceed 80% of this cap will be notified that they are getting close to their limit and be reminded of the usage tier and that additional charges will apply if they exceed that limit.
The letter does state that new and existing customers not willing to participate in this “trial” run, will be permitted to “cancel their broadband internet access service without an early termination penalty.”
I don’t know about you, but this is a bit distressing for “Joe the Plumber,” and others that I’ve spoken to about this issue of limiting “unlimited” service.
AT&T is promising an online meter that customers can monitor usage with in order to avoid an overage, but if their problem is with “a small minority” of their clientele, why set up the majority for potential problems except to profit from it?
Can’t they just deal with the high-rollers by tossing them out of the game on a case-by-case basis?
What do you think about all this and how might a 20GB/150GB cap effect you?