Are AT&T's new usage caps going to affect you?

Hi all, wondering how many on here have At&t for internet and know about the usage caps going into effect on May 2nd?
You will get 150gb for regular dsl and 250gb for uverse-then you wlll pay $10 for every 50gb over you go. We do alot of streaming here at my house, gaming etc.
I think this will affect alot of big gamers. Anyone know approx. how many gb you use a day?

i don't know if this is going to effect me. my mom didn't mention anything about caps. i think it's stupid to put caps on internet use. i don't know how much i use my internet. i think i'm pretty good with the internet not being over used.

lol, looks like comcast isn't the one butt-fucking anymore
it's like the part in harold and kumar when the terrorists have to suck dick, and dont mind when harold and kumar have to suck big bob's dick...similar situation

They have a website where you can check what your usage has been like in the past but for some reason they have yet to get it up and running for people who have AT&T in my area.

wait, only 10 for every 50 you go over? that doesn't seem too bad

If these do affect any of you and you want a place to gripe or get info on fighting the caps, we have a group of over 700 on facebook called stop at&t from bandwidth capping. lots of good info and feedback, be glad to have you join us.

Nope. I'm dumping them and switching to a different ISP.

Can they legally do that without you signing a new contract?  

ALL American ISPs have the bandwidth cap, it's just that many don't advertise the fact.  The cap comes from the fact that their upstream providers (the dudes who supply your ISP with the internet backbone connection which your ISP then segments and sells to you) have always had bandwidth per mega/giga byte sales structures.  The reason the cap is becoming visible these days is that we have so much more streaming media available - particularly on demand video and games - all of which eats a lot more data than was previously expected and accepted as general user data consumption.

I don't know if it will or not.  I've been stockpiling porn just in case.

Oh shit, I'm gonna have to check and see. Goddamn ISPs. I quit Comcast because their server were down ALL the time. And now I'm gonna have to deal with more bullshit. Great.

You aren't gonna use 250 GB in a month just playing games.


If you're torrenting a bunch of shit constantly while streaming 1080p video, maybe.

The one time I'm glad I have comcast.

We still have it a lot better than other countries. I've got friends in Australia that can't go over 15 gigs in a month. If you're just using it to play games and stream some shows you'll never get close to 250gb.

" lol, looks like comcast isn't the one butt-fucking anymore
it's like the part in harold and kumar when the terrorists have to suck dick, and dont mind when harold and kumar have to suck big bob's dick...similar situation

comcast doesn't seem that bad at all now

"

as far as im concerned, that wasnt what i signed up for when i got ATT.

" @wickedsc3: There's most likely a stipulation that "these terms can change at any time, bla bla bla" in the fine print. Credit card companies do it all the time. "

No

" lol, looks like comcast isn't the one butt-fucking anymore
it's like the part in harold and kumar when the terrorists have to suck dick, and dont mind when harold and kumar have to suck big bob's dick...similar situation

comcast doesn't seem that bad at all now

"

Oh and yes, they might affect me.
Could someone with some general download speed/data amount knowledge (only term I can think of atm) help me out?

I play Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft around 5 or more hours a day, I browse tons of websites (30+ tabs open at all times), and about a terrabyte of my hard drive is torrented, so i occasionally seed that stuff out to other P2P users.

With the file sharing, does that sound like 1 gb? I have a 700 kb p/s connection. Without file sharing?

I hope many if not all of ATT&T's customers decide to leave like I probably will. It is ridiculous to pull in hundreds of thousands of customers and then just change the deal. Greedy scumbags.

" Oh and yes, they might affect me. Could someone with some general download speed/data amount knowledge (only term I can think of atm) help me out? I play Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft around 5 or more hours a day, I browse tons of websites (30+ tabs open at all times), and about a terrabyte of my hard drive is torrented, so i occasionally seed that stuff out to other P2P users. With the file sharing, does that sound like 1 gb? I have a 700 kb p/s connection. Without file sharing? I hope many if not all of ATT&T's customers decide to leave like I probably will. It is ridiculous to pull in hundreds of thousands of customers and then just change the deal. Greedy scumbags. "

" Nope. I'm dumping them and switching to a different ISP. "

"
it's like the part in harold and kumar when the terrorists have to suck dick, and dont mind when harold and kumar have to suck big bob's dick...similar situation

comcast doesn't seem that bad at all now

"

First of all I must say data caps is a gamers worst nightmare. If you are like me, you have a nice computer and you play everything on high quality settings to get the most out of your experience to enjoy.

With playing your favorite game, and you are on skype/ventrillo/teamspeak filled with your friends to work as a team better, to also maybe listening to music streaming. And possibly some of you are like me and the main game you play has periods of loading/wait time or travel time. Then you have a side game to play online as well to fill in that time to do something. Well listen to this, I just recently downloaded a usage monitor and get this people. If you want your full gaming experience, you will use 1 GB every three minutes with the downloading and uploading simultaneously with your maximum gaming experience. I am not at this rate all the time but I am like this sometimes over 12 hours in a given day and 1 GB every three minutes times a 12 hour day, you are looking at a usage of (hopefully my math was correct) 240 GB in a single 12 hour timeframe.

Obviously a data cap will not fly with any gamer, you may not think much of it now but you measure your usage at your peak and you do the math. You are looking at the death of online gaming right before your eyes. It's going to die in less than a month unless you stand up and fight this. Data caps are invented by the ISP's to ruin the internet. It's been a honor to enjoy the internet what it once was, unless you fight to keep it as it is that we love. -plays music as the online gaming ship is sinking-


EDIT: Oh yeah I failed to mention, I don't use a gaming console or any other external devices to plug to my computer to use the internet. And also this is just my online habit. Imagine if a whole family had to deal with this data cap scam, i'd hate to be in their shoes right now.    

Imposing broadband data caps is the same as limiting our future.  Look how many media services are threatened by bandwidth caps -- Netflix, Internet Radio, You Tube, Video Streaming -- what you're really seeing here is the digital equivalent of book burning.  Now the freedom of digital information is being threatened by tolls along the new highways of the information age.   The infrastructure of information must be treated with the same reverence as our water, food, roads and electricity -- they must regulated so that they are not subject to arbitrary fees and rate hikes.  Just like a road block keeps you from being free, so does a bandwidth cap in an age of Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook and Craig's List.  If the government does not regulate this, then we have to, as citizens of the world.

I know alot of people are saying "big deal-we have caps, or other companies have caps, so what's new"?
What's new is, if  we can have success stopping ONE company, then people with feel more empowered to go against other companies. We need to stand up for ourselves.
I'd rather stand up and try to stop them than bend over and take it in the ass.

" ALL American ISPs have the bandwidth cap, it's just that many don't advertise the fact.  The cap comes from the fact that their upstream providers (the dudes who supply your ISP with the internet backbone connection which your ISP then segments and sells to you) have always had bandwidth per mega/giga byte sales structures.  The reason the cap is becoming visible these days is that we have so much more streaming media available - particularly on demand video and games - all of which eats a lot more data than was previously expected and accepted as general user data consumption. "

" First of all I must say data caps is a gamers worst nightmare. If you are like me, you have a nice computer and you play everything on high quality settings to get the most out of your experience to enjoy. With playing your favorite game, and you are on skype/ventrillo/teamspeak filled with your friends to work as a team better, to also maybe listening to music streaming. And possibly some of you are like me and the main game you play has periods of loading/wait time or travel time. Then you have a side game to play online as well to fill in that time to do something. Well listen to this, I just recently downloaded a usage monitor and get this people. If you want your full gaming experience, you will use 1 GB every three minutes with the downloading and uploading simultaneously with your maximum gaming experience. I am not at this rate all the time but I am like this sometimes over 12 hours in a given day and 1 GB every three minutes times a 12 hour day, you are looking at a usage of (hopefully my math was correct) 240 GB in a single 12 hour timeframe. Obviously a data cap will not fly with any gamer, you may not think much of it now but you measure your usage at your peak and you do the math. You are looking at the death of online gaming right before your eyes. It's going to die in less than a month unless you stand up and fight this. Data caps are invented by the ISP's to ruin the internet. It's been a honor to enjoy the internet what it once was, unless you fight to keep it as it is that we love. -plays music as the online gaming ship is sinking- EDIT: Oh yeah I failed to mention, I don't use a gaming console or any other external devices to plug to my computer to use the internet. And also this is just my online habit. Imagine if a whole family had to deal with this data cap scam, i'd hate to be in their shoes right now.     "

150GB is amazing great. If you break that, it's cause you have 5 people using your internet, and you deserve to be charged extra.

So their response to Verizon moving in on iOS is to give people yet another reason to switch?

" ALL American ISPs have the bandwidth cap, it's just that many don't advertise the fact.  The cap comes from the fact that their upstream providers (the dudes who supply your ISP with the internet backbone connection which your ISP then segments and sells to you) have always had bandwidth per mega/giga byte sales structures.  The reason the cap is becoming visible these days is that we have so much more streaming media available - particularly on demand video and games - all of which eats a lot more data than was previously expected and accepted as general user data consumption. "

An ISP cartel is probably already deciding what minimum ISP caps all providers will have. Big business collusion is fucked up but believe it, everyone's doing it right now. Real estate, ISP, insurance, everyone.

" An ISP cartel is probably already deciding what minimum ISP caps all providers will have. Big business collusion is fucked up but believe it, everyone's doing it right now. Real estate, ISP, insurance, everyone. "

The good thing about cartels is they're formed by greedy people and the first person to break the cartel gets a distinct market advantage. So it normally never lasts. Its just a question of who, years down the line, will drop the ISP cap to gain ground on the field.

" The good thing about cartels is they're formed by greedy people and the first person to break the cartel gets a distinct market advantage. So it normally never lasts. Its just a question of who, years down the line, will drop the ISP cap to gain ground on the field. "

" @SeriouslyNow said:

" ALL American ISPs have the bandwidth cap, it's just that many don't advertise the fact.  The cap comes from the fact that their upstream providers (the dudes who supply your ISP with the internet backbone connection which your ISP then segments and sells to you) have always had bandwidth per mega/giga byte sales structures.  The reason the cap is becoming visible these days is that we have so much more streaming media available - particularly on demand video and games - all of which eats a lot more data than was previously expected and accepted as general user data consumption. "

My Verizon FiOS says no....But yeah more and more companies would rather cap their customers then update their networks since competition is stifled. "

It will affect my house, we go through 500GBs per month on average. This is so crazy for us, (to imply a cap), were most definitely switching to Charter or some other provider before May. 

I live with a 20 gigs a month cap for $80 bucks. 

How do I find out how much I'm using.

" I don't know if it will or not.  I've been stockpiling porn just in case. "

Nope, I don't live in the US.

" How do I find out how much I'm using.

I'm assuming it's sort of high. :(

"

this is why I am happy i am in a area that is controlled by a different company for ISP / Cable then comcast. <3 WaveCable!!! I have like a 500gig bandwidth a month for mine and I am the only one who uses it but I do torrent / game Tons which I highly doubt uses even 100gigs a month.

 @wickedsc3 said:

" @example1013 said:

" @wickedsc3: There's most likely a stipulation that "these terms can change at any time, bla bla bla" in the fine print. Credit card companies do it all the time. "

Yea I figured there would be but you would be surprised what you can get when you call up and complain.  When you start pulling out words like scam, switching companies, telling all my friends about it, you should see how fast the "well we do have this one time discount I can apply to your account" lines come out. 

Just a couple days ago I bought BFBC2 off on demand and it didn't come with a VIP code.  So i had to call up and complain and as soon as I said well this sounds like a scam, I'm not going to buy BF3.  All of a sudden this free code came out of nowhere because I was such a loyal customer lol.

"

Nope, I don't use AT&T... or a smartphone :(.

I've had Comcast's bandwidth caps for over a year now. I use the internet like I normally would and at the end of the month I look where I'm at in regards to the 250gb cap and then I make sure I spend the last days downloading, streaming, etc to make sure I get within a few GB of the cap without going over. I don't know if I'm using more or less bandwidth than I used to before the cap but If they're going to put a limit on me, I'll make sure I max it out. 

I had to get rid of Netflix. I stream a lot of video from other sites, play games all the time, skype, listen to music etc. I won't come anywhere near the 250 gig bandwidth cap with all of that, but Netflix takes up a ton of bandwidth.

well I tested how much bandwidth I might use with a bandwidth counting program and over 6 days I used over (correction 93.6gb) on my laptop and on myvdesktop and netflix bluray player. Without torrenting. I didn't include my 360 which I did download some stuff off live. I also streamed a bunch of MLB too. Granted I downloaded 3 steam games, one over 14gb. 
One netflix movie in HD took well over 2gb of data, I just checked the bandwidth counter before we started the movie. And have you seen how large the HD videos on Giantbomb are? Just the Might and Magic QL was almost 500mb and under 30min. Most of my bandwidth comes from my gf streaming netflix constantly, mostly tv shows.

Doesn't seem like much, but if you feel you watch maybe 1 hr of video on here a day thats about 20% or 12% of your daily allowance of 5gb/day for dsl and 8+gb/day for uverse customers in a 30 day month. It doesn't go as far as you'd think with how fast the connections are. I have  a 10Mb/s connection so I can eat through some data very fast. But I have no options for ISPs in my area, and Uverse has been very stable and fast so I can complain there. 

So yes it will affect me. We'll have to think if downloading that porn movie is worth a % of your daily bandwidth allowance. Or if you should really install that 14+gb Witcher: Enhanced or 9+gb Company of heroes you bought on sale months ago if it will take 10% or 16%(150gb cap) of your months bandwidth just to retrieve the data for the game license you paid for.

Is it just me, or does anyone else here think it's wrong when a company arbitrarily changes it's policies without any consumer education about what they are doing?  If it's such a necessary and good thing, then why hide it, why not make a commercial announcing it?   You know why they haven't announced it to the mainstream media?  Because they know it's wrong.   I read in an article the other day that by 2020 they don't expect most users to use desktop computers, but "clouds" which are located--where else--in the Internet. . .how is that going to happen with ridiculous rate caps?  Your freedom is all that's being capped.