Internet

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Recently Internet reports show that next year South Korea will have Internet bandwidth speeds 200 times that available in Canada and the US.

What has not been widely reported is that AT&T is going to impose a cap on the number of gigabytes transmitted per month. 

The reason for this is the tremendous increase in downloads of movies and the load imposed by online streaming games.

How does AT&T say it will work?

• 150 gigabytes per month will be free of charge for U-Verse users^*.

• The overage charge will be $10 for every 50 gigabytes over the monthly 150 gigabyte limit.

• Only those who exceed 150 Gigabytes per month 3 times in the life of their contract will be charged.

AT&T claims that the average DSL customer uses 18 Gigabytes per month.  These overage charges are aimed right at very heavy users who download a lot of movies.

As a frame of reference the movie "The Pianist" is 736,641,024 bytes in size.  (one Gigabyte = 1,000,000,000)

Why is AT&T doing this?  The answer is money.  It's not the income they can get from the heavy users, it's the growing use of heavy loads on the net and they must keep up with more servers and better connectivity to the end customer.

An unintended consequence of this will be movie sharing by people, where the movies are put on memory sticks and given to friends.

^*AT&T U-verse is a registered service mark under which AT&T offers VDSL and ADSL2+ services. It provides broadband internet access, TV, and phone through a fiber-to-the-node or Fiber to the Premise communications network.

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Sunday, March 27, 2011