As stated by others, online gaming (whether PC MMOs or Xbox Live/PSN) uses a trivial amount of bandwidth. Like less than 1GB a month, so it's nothing to worry about. Streaming/downloading HD movies and pirating torrents is a different matter.
I use Verizon Fios for Internet and no such issues that I have heard of. I'll keep my fingers crossed because I have multiple computers in my house.
While I can see this as annoying (need to monitor usage now), I don't think that it would really affect me much, probably same can be said for majority of users (since that is alot of data). Power users however (ie. huge houses with lots of computers and lots of usage), should switch.
I am one of those users that is forced into Uverse by my apartment complex here in OC. They have a deal with DirectTV so we don't have cable service in our complex so the only internet available is ATT. I have never checked to see how much bandwidth i use in a month and very curious to see it. I am figuring they should be coming out with some app from ATT or at least have your bandwidth usage in your online account so you know where you stand each month.
http://gigaom.com/video/att-bandwidth-cap-netflix/ For those asking, you can stream 3 hours per day of HD Netflix movies at 150 GB/month. I didn't find a recent source, but when I last checked, SD took 1/4 the bandwidth of HD.
You people are complaining but here in Canada I'm paying $60 for a cap of 95GB a month with POS Rogers. What's even worst is if the decision of the CRTC ‘usage-based' billing come into affect it would screw us over even more.
Except for the massive perpetual patch/updates necessary to play WOW and other MMO's. Even better is the inevitable deep packet inspections "advanced network management" that will kill p2p speeds, which is used to distribute many of the patches.
If this is the case, I don't blame AT&T at all. The people that go over 150/250GB/month need to be clipped (or pay more) so the rest of us can benefit. I don't think paying $10 for a 50GB bucket of data is unfair. It's been out there a while that Netflix would have these issues come up and I've always thought their business model is shaky. Wonder what will happen to their stock price going forward.
I'm a comcast user and b/c of this cap, I'm required to go work into my office more, I usually work remotely and I deal with alot of file transfers of video, since they implemented this hard cap... I've been forced to not work from home as much.
You won't benefit unless you own stock in AT&T. I will agree that an extra $10 bucks for 50 extra gigs is ~fair (for now, data should increase over time as network speeds increase). AT&T wants you spend big money for U-verse movie rentals. Bet on 10 bucks for 5-10GB. IMO Google needs to buy up Sprint/Clearwire and give it a charter to sell internet at cost.
When you run a business and have a small number of customers causing a huge number of problems or taking up an inordinate amount of your time or causing a huge chunk of your cost OR using up a huge amount of bandwidth, there are two things you can do: 1. Pass the increased cost on to all customers 2. Discourage the small group from using your services by charging them more. Option #2 benefits AT&T's other customers. In my business, this is what we do. I like your Google option a lot. We can dream.
an alternate view is that if you run a business and have some rapidly increasing competitors who rely on your pipeline and threaten your voice / content sales, it might not be such a bad idea to put a few roadblocks on that pipeline .
I would say in most cases, it wouldn't affect people that work from home, but in my case it does since I deal with large file sizes. on a sidenote, if your a business, you should get business class comsast, no cap that I know of. I use to own a business and thats what we had.
I remember reading an article about how the US's lack of broadband speed\penetration could hamper future business innovation and growth. Seems like this is a good example of both. If I remember correctly it had something to do with the internet being classified differently from telephone\cable lines by the government.
You're making a mountain out of a molehole. Reason being that WoW only issues a major content patch like once every 3-4 months *at most*. Certainly not every month. Even when they do have a content patch, it's never more than 2-3 GBs. And you don't have to DL the patch by P2P, there are options to turn that off and you can always find the patch by regular DL at many places. So back to what I was saying, online gaming hardly requires any bandwidth at all. It's all from media streaming and pirating/torrenting.
I certainly don't care about my Comcast 250GB cap, since I never even use 1/10th of that (I don't pirate and I don't like watching movies on my computer). But I wouldn't doubt your point, I bet it's part of the reason for these caps by AT&T and Comcast.
I have two people here who stream netflix everyday. half hd and half not. i also play games online about 2 hours a day. (yea i know, no life). i hope it doesnt affect me
