It has been in the news for a year or more now that wireless carriers were going to put a data cap on broadband usage via your Smartphone. That has become a reality for many of the networks as more and more devices are taking up bandwidth. AT&T announced doday that they will put a cap on broadband data usage via DSL and U-Verse customers.
This is broadband usage that isn’t related to your Smartphone, but related to the upload and download of the data on your home computer. This is the first time a company has put a cap on home internet data usage, although Time Warner was testing a similar cap back in 2008. Customers complained and protested what Time Warner was doing and they never implemented the data cap.
The data cap for DSL users will be at 150GB of uploads and downloads per month and that is a bit higher for U-Verse users, which is set at 250GB per month. There is also an additional fee for those that go above and beyond the data cap. That price is set at $10 more for each 50GB block the customer goes over the cap. AT&T was testing the caps in Texas and Nevada, but those caps were only set at 20GB which is about 6-7 times lower than what the caps were set at today when it went official.
AT&T unlimited mobile data plans were scrapped last year and capped at 250MB or 2GB per month. If you are a mobile user and exceed said usage cap, you are also charged a fee for going over the limit. There are many more users that have heavy data usage and they are taking away from the average Joe Smartphone user because of that. AT&T is hoping to bring some of the individual heavy data users down to the normal, thus making the network more reliable and faster for everyone.
Many mobile carriers are saying data usage caps are only going to affect the top 1 percent of customers and in the end help the rest. There is also no doubt that it will bring in more money for carriers that add caps to their data usage. Right now, other companies that have a broadband cap include Comcast, Charter and AT&T, which leaves Verizon, Cablevision and Time Warner the only companies that did not put a cap on usage.
Putting a cap on usage can kill some business, but it will only be a matter of time before the ones that don’t cap, join the club.
