AT&T's 250 Gb Cap

With ATT saying they will start capping broadband service per month starting in May, my question is how do you think this will effect us?

No doubt this is how all of our ISPs will be sooner or later, and while ATT tries to feed us some *** about how rare it will be to hit this cap, chances are most if us here are heavy Internet users.

I myself not only play FFXI and use PSN, but have an Internet ready TV I stream Netflix and Hulu Plus from in place of a TV package (And because my ISP is also the only TV option in town, I'm sure they like to cap my Internet usage so I'm either gonna shell out more for Internet or buy a TV package). The point is, I really don't know how many bytes I use in a month. I'll check my router when I get home, but it's old so I doubt it'll tell me much. Does anyone know how many bytes FFXI uses? FFXIV?

-Seca (still from Titan)

PS Can someone please send a Thunder V to the foreheads of the greedy *** at ATT?

America.

Reduce the size, raise the price, reduce the size, raise the price.

Same thing they do with candy bars.

Fight the ***or accept whatever they decide to give you.

They do this type of thing all over the world, not just America.

Get your stereotypes right at least /sigh.

Currently I am paying for and using both ATT high speed and Comcast High speed.

I am one of those people who bounces back and forth to save money with 6 month -> 1 year discount rates.

I am using both right now because I wanted to test performance with both using not only one pC at high DL/UL rates but also high traffic time, when I have the 2 of us, 4 kids, all going on 3 laptops 1 PC and xbox360.

Conclusion:
*both customer service are atrocious for what we pay for internet.
*ATT bottle neck constantly, so using it for more then 1 PC is very painful.
*However, comcast has consistent connection issues. where as they tell you to change out your equipment (about every month or so it seems. Yet we all know all they do is continue to recycle the same equipment we just turned in.
*Comcast is much faster, when working properly, for running a household of internet devices. but unreliable, when it goes out for a cold/rainy weekend with not much else for 4 kids to do.
*ATT never goes out, and I have never had an issue with equipment, but it is terribly slow and will bottle neck with multiple PC using it bandwidth

I just switched to ATT DSL 2 months ago and that ***is a contract. If they change my rate plan I'm gonna get pissed. I know for a fact I will go over this.

I have been using a USB broadband wireless connection to play ffxi at work and only thing i use internet for is to play ffxi. I kept track of the data and after 6 hours of heavy FFXI playing (abyssea partying , and atma alliance hunting) data used was just 32 MB. So just putting that info out there for information.

It's just a matter of time till something like this happens, sadly:

Even being a pirate and using torrents and sites to watch movies online with, I doubt I'd hit 250GB a month.

unfortunately legally they can basically do whatever they want.

This is probably the reason a certain country made internet access a right.

They need to do the same across all services in the US, make all power and fiber lines public owned and operated and have the companies run services on those said lines, they just tax the companies the same.

Currently certain companies own lines, other companies pay for the use of those lines, hence monopoly on services. They need more competition, unfortunately the only way to do that is the need to eliminate costs and increased profit by combining companies and lines.

Just my two cents on the matter.

As to OP 250gb/month is a lot of data. Most people don't even hit 5.

I wouldn't be so sure on just 1 site I use I've averaged about 440GB per month(about 11TB's in 25 months). An thats just 1 of my content sources also use 2 other sites(usage aren't tracked on the sites so not sure of total's) as well I'm a heavy netflix streaming user and PSN user not to mention I leave 2 FFXI accounts running 24/7(which I'm fairly sure is a very low bandwidth usage since FFXI was originally meant to be played on dial-up).

So 250GB is actually extremely low tbh for most user's like myself.

you need help

Idk I've used comcast for at least 5 out of the last 7 years (various reasons why I had other stuff for short times) and I can count the times I've had some kind of connection issue on my hands. And only one those times wasn't something happening outside in which they came out and fixed it since some of the connections at the house were messed up. Most the other times something major happened... like a blizzard. Though usually that stays good unless the power goes out. Or power lines down. Actually I think I've been without power more than just the internet.

And rainy/cold weekend!? That's like 90% of my weekends lol. Last couple of weeks have been icky with high winds snow hail near constant heavy rain and been completely fine.

I've had to put up with this with Comcast for quite some time now... I've been tracking my monthly bandwidth usage for more than a year and yes I've come close to the 250GB cap multiple times, but never gone over.

Streaming and downloading are your biggest enemy, stuff like Final Fantasy uses so little bandwidth it's amazing. However streaming videos can use up a lot, and downloading fansubs, pr0n, or whatever you already know how much that uses as you can look at the file sizes before hand.

From what I found, streaming Netflix on my PC a TV 20 or so minute show uses around 200~250MB of bandwidth. Hulu I think uses less depending... Crunchyroll 720p videos are closer to 300MB each.

Anyway... if you are torrenting, streaming movies and what not you'd be surprised how quickly you can reach 250GB... my idiot brother in law was sick and in bed most of the day for 2 days and all he did was stream netflix without letting me know and he used upwards of 20GB in less than 2 days.

If you track it and keep yourself under control you won't hit the cap, and really it is a lot of bandwidth, at first I was pretty mad, but then after a few months of seeing how much I really could download even with the cap in place I stopped caring so much. Do I agree with the cap, no, but I deal with it as I need to as there is nothing you can do about it unless you want to pay for a commercial account, which Comcast offers with no caps. I used to work for them, and I hated telling customers who had gone over "if you pay us more we'll give you more, but the people who pay less get the same amount of use, just less speed"... I just gave up the argument almost every time since I didn't agree with it.


Edit:
Oh about the Comcast stuff... I've had 0 technician calls since I've been in this house 5 years... however I've known people who have had 20+ in the same time... certain portions of the system don't function as well as others and usually has to do with the age of the house and area of town and age of the equipment there. Most of the calls we got the person needed to power cycle the router and or modem, or the entire node was out and wasn't a home issue, or it was the lines at the house that needed some work. Cable is just one of those things that has so many points of failure because of the nature of the system that users have such varying results in service levels.

i had att a while ago and it went out daily

comcast is bad too so idk im stuck with *** for internet

Why because I like to watch TV shows and movies without having to spend the money on cable tv service? More then half the movies I've downloaded I've bought a bluray copy of just for the special feature's that you cant get on a ripped copy online. For me I use DLed movies to figure out weather or not I like the movie enough to buy it or weathers its so bad I cant get threw watching it in the first place. I don't know about you but I've bought movies in the past and they turned out to be horrid and a waste of money this just lets me try it before I buy it and i dont think there is anything wrong with that.

Kinda depends on who you do it from and what you downloading. Like if I ever bothered to download most my 1 hour TV shows in 720 they'd be slightly over 1GB... follow a dozen or so of those a week some anime too.... adds up

I have more issues with my router or modem needing reset than the service being out, I can't remember the last time it went out, it's been a few years.

I also live in a rural area so there's not many people using it out here. (Comcast)

As for dsl vs comcast, last I checked dsl is severely slower max speeds.

I don't download that much X.X.. In torrents on average, I probably download about 10GB (A recent game, a couple of movies that I don't feel like streaming, and random, but small [20mb and smaller] programs when the need arises) max.

On average I also watch about 20 movies, even at the best quality, they're about 800MB-1.2GB each, So we'll just call that another 20 GB, which so far brings the total to 40GB. Add in another 10GB (generous estimate) for TV shows/documentaries and Youtube, bringing it to 50GB.

So that leaves 200GB for random browsing and porn streaming.. Even when I'm at my boredest and just looking through porn video after video I can't imagine that I'd even eat up 20GB a month. Which then leaves me 180GB just for browsing random pages.. FFXIAH, Yahoo, News, Lyric databases etc etc.. I don't think I could break 180GB/month with just basic browsing if I tried.

There's definitely something wrong with using an average of over 400gb/month, it's mind boggling. Do you spend all your time online?

Try convincing hardcore DSL users of that. /rage

Had it for a short time in this house... and it was not too bad as long as only 1 person in the house was using much and no one was doing any serious downloading. But seeing as I always was either downloading or having ffxi up and probably a few pages up that meant I could tell everytime someone did anything by how much I started lagging. And even alone torrenting kinda killed my ability to play ffxi most the time

1hr TV show usually = about 42-44 minutes without the commercials in 720p that's 1.10-1.11gb's.

1hr movie station TV show(think Dexter Spartacus) usually = about 58-59mins in 720p that's 1.45-1.49gb's.

Average 90min movie in 720p = 4.00-4.45gb's.

Average 90min movie in 1080p = 8.00-8.5gb's.

rage away it's simple numbers.

as for the torrents, roommate and I used to use bittorrent a lot (he liked to leave it running) and holy ***the lag on XI was insane from it.

I've been ripping dvd's in 720 to about 1.1gb files... movies mind you.

When I'm home yes I do is there something wrong with using my PC when I'm home?


That's a DVD up-convert not a blu ray/TV rip which is what I was referring to i should have been more clear sorry.

What kind of short *** movies are you watching to get them that low on best quality? I get 700MB-1.3GB for most movies at the lowest quality... right now I'm looking at a 3.49GB torrent for Avatar.

there's definitely something wrong with using your computer so much as to be downloading that much data, yes.

I'm not up converting anything, I'm ripping in the same quality as source.

I watch them in .flv format, because my computer doesn't like to load Divx. Bad quality cam movies in .flv are all of 200-300 MB. The highest quality, blu-ray ripped ones are about 1.2GB at absolute max, they're usually more like 798MB.

This is of course streaming, off like Quicksilverscreen..