Starting Monday, May 2, Dallas-based AT&T Inc. will start limiting amounts of Internet data that DSL and U-verse users are allowed before subscribers incur overage fees from the telecommunications company.
If users go past 150 GB for DLS customers and 250 GB for U-verse subscribers in the course of a month, users will first receive two notifications before being charged $10 for an additional 50 GB of data.
AT&T stated that 98% of users shouldn’t have a problem with the cap on bandwidth, and that the charges will only affect extremely heavy users. The company has released a website to help consumers track how much data they use by logging into their accounts.
Streaming movies – especially in high definition, video chat applications such as Skype, and transferring large files swallow up most bandwidth. According to the Austin American-Statesman, an average movie downloaded in high-definition from iTunes takes approximately 1 GB of data. The increase in services such as Netflix, Skype, Hulu and cloud computing are the reasons why the company said it decided to alter unlimited data plans.
AT&T expects that the average person who occasionally does high-bandwidth activities along with low-bandwidth activities such as e-mailing, downloading music or surfing the Web won’t have any problems.
Some users are contemplating moving to business DSL plans, which haven’t yet been levied the same caps as home accounts. Others may decide to switch to Time Warner Cable, which originally tried to cap bandwidth on its Road Runner Internet services in 2009, but backed down after customers threatened to leave. Time Warner reportedly claims that the company has no present plans to add caps to its services.
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