Well, That Was Fun While It Lasted

AT&T has decided to cap usage. Usage caps deploy May 2nd, 2011.

Engadget reports in "AT&T will cap DSL and U-Verse internet, impose overage fees", that DSL and U-verse usage caps are 150 GB/month and 250 GB/month, respectively. Each additional 50 GB/month costs $10.

AT&T has yet to notify customers, which supposedly happens this week. No notice appears on the U-verse page or in AT&T email.

Total usage has been 87,468,308,057 bytes since the Residential Gateway modem last had its logs reset. Since today (14 March - Pi Day!) is the start of a new billing cycle, time to reset and see how much actually passes through.

Usage caps bring up an additional point: does "usage" discount advertising? Simple tests with AdBlock Plus show that 20-25% of a commercially-supported web page comprises ad data. Likewise the streaming ads injected in movies and television programs, although streaming ads are proportionately smaller.

Getting charged for ads seems like a double-tap.

(Update 3/16)

After a mid-day Monday March 14 reset of the Residential Gateway's transmission statistics, measured traffic (sent + received bytes) for ordinary 'Net usage appears to be about 2.25 GB/day. "Ordinary" usage includes watching streaming video from Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, Skype/Google voice phone calls, DropBox, and quotidian web surfing and emailing for three users on seven computers.

Extrapolating, that's about 70GB/month, or 28% of the 250GB cap AT&T plans to set.