AT&T's 250 Gb Cap

Jesus

How exactly do you keep track? Kinda curious how much I use

Bell Canada and I think Bell Mobility did this too. Not too entirely sure how or what happened, b.c I'm not going into all that big of detail, but the CRTC intervened, Bell got slapped with a huge fine..and finally now, everyone finally in Canada who is with Bell Canada, recieved a lil cheque in their mail for about $70.00 or so...

Did any other Canadians see one of these in the mail yesterday, besides me???

Ya real joke it was... ever since the CRTC stepped in, b.c you're internet provider decided to charge out the wazoo for bandwidth.....

XD, Bell got served!!!!


Dasva, Don't you got some way of checking how much you use by going to your provider's website, and punching in your Username or the name on the bill, and seeing any info related to how much your usage is? Let me know if you still haven't been able to see it...or not.. should be easily to be seen, if not.. idk...


I found this????

Roaming calculator..not sure if this helps, looks interesting though..

Or go to Billing on the AT&T website, i'm sure you guys must have something....like what Bell Canada has with us @ Bell Sympatico.

OMG…

I currently work for ATT (Uverse) and boy do I feel bad.

For the general mom / pop user, just reading e-mail, checking the news, this should not be a problem.

FFXI players should also should be ok. I’m currently monitoring my bandwidth usage (even though I’m not a Uverse customer), and FFXI comes in at less then a gig a day.

But anyone who NetFlix’s, uses VoIP (Vonage), or heavy torrenting (file sharing), is going to be screwed.

Basically there are forcing you to subscribe to their TV / voice services or pay the price…

Shame Shame ATT… wasn’t DSL’s major selling point "NO!" bandwidth caps, like cable???

Anyone who is going to be hit by this cap and uses Netflixs should move onto .flv format sites/forums. Even during my heaviest watching, there's no way I pull 50 GB a month.. I probably average closer to 30GB, that's about 20-25 movies a month, plus 40-50 half hour shows, or 20-25 hour long shows (average).

You won't get 1080p HD, but once you know which file hosting sites to use, and which to avoid, you can get pretty damned clear picture quality.

Ok so if I figured this out right I hit a little more than 1GB in the last day and 6 hours... and this was way lower than normal usage for me. Slept thru most the day, barely looked at youtube (normally do a decent amount), didn't play any games online, only downloaded one 24 min anime show in low quality (do like 6 a week right now used to do more and 3 hour long TV shows mostly cause 3-4 others are on break right now)... no porn. Or streaming anything in general. No movies which I often download

So basically most of that as far as I can tell was just keeping my browser open while I slept. While I doubt I'll hit 250 based on that pretty sure I hit at least 50 on a slow month.

So where exactly was this said anyway? Did they up and send notices to all their customers? Or is there a notice somewhere on their website? I'm currently using U-verse, yet I've not received any notice via mail or email even. So wtf?

I disagree. I do all of those and I rarely surpass 150Gb a month.

Thinking over it.. I think anyone who's hitting over 250GB a month, has serious porn issues <_< I'm like a porn addict and there's no way that hitting that cap would happen to me.. Porn is the only thing I can think of that could really kick up that GB/month ratio.. I mean unless you're a huge pirate and you're just randomly pirating games, hating them, and finding a new one, like every day..

But even then, the average modern game is like what? 6GB on average? So even if you downloaded a new one every single day, that's still only 180GB a month.. And if you're downloading a new game everyday and haven't been able to find something you like to stick with for a few days at least.. Gaming probably isn't for you <.<

It's 150 GB for normal DSL, 250 GB cap for U-Verse. :(

What if you download and watch a decent amount of shows? Downloading a 1hr TV show in 720p is a little over a gig.. a few of those general surfing porn... games movies etc

Also if it hasn't been mentioned, the phone companies are trying to take the internet back.. They layed the groundwork that gave birth to the connectivity, and over the years have slowly been losing control of it, as well as stuff like Vonage or Magic Jack taking profits from that side of their business as well..

That's probably the prime reason why AT&T is doing this..

Well I'm not going into that because there are other alternatives.. Maybe not as convenient or legal in a strict sense, but there's no reason why your TV/Movie viewing has to entail racking up several gigs per session..

I have a SDTV, because having HDTV just isn't worth it to me.. Same thing applies, I sacrifice some (and minor in most all cases) quality for something far more economical (would that be the right term to use in this sense?).

This isn't legal. It's several torrents I'm looking at right now. And yes I personally don't care about 720 (and have a distaste for .mkv anyways) so just do 480 when I can. But sometimes the only releases for things are in higher def for various reasons. And some people hate going lower than 1080 lol. And sometimes the best I can find is in mp4... that isn't exactly space efficient

That's why I keep saying, forget downloading the stuff, or at least through torrents. Use streaming sites that stream in .flv format. You lose little in quality compared to what you'd expect of an SDTV, but you save a lot in bandwidth usage. If you really want a physical copy of it, then still use those sites, but get a .flv downloader, like DownloadHelper plugin for Firefox or the like to just grab the video.

I'm just trying to offer alternatives other than the obvious which is switch to cable, or just away from AT&T and any other ISP that limits what you can download. You're going to have make a sacrifice one way or another.. You'll either have to reduce the amount of shows you watch, or you're going to have to turn to methods that don't eat up bandwidth as bad. An ISP that's limiting your monthly bandwidth isn't just going to be like "Oh, our limit is interfering with your daily activities? We apologize, her take whatever you need" anyone who refuses to switch to another ISP once this thing hits, that's also managing to hit that cap, is going to have 2 alternatives. Reduce your usage, or switch to more compressed file formats.

As for the legality portion of what I mentioned, I was referring to Netflix, it's been brought up more than once that it's a huge bandwidth eater. Streaming isn't exactly legal, but you're never going to end up being held accountable for simply watching streams, copyrighted or not. The ones who face the legal problems are the uploaders and hosters.