AT&T confirmed today it will join other Internet providers in capping its service. Beginning on May 2, regular DSL subscribers will have up to 150GB per month, while those on its U-verse VDSL connections will have the same 250GB as a Comcast user. Overage fees of $10 for each extra 50GB of data will be in effect, but will only kick in for those who run over the cap three times.
“Importantly, we are not reducing the speeds, terminating service or limiting available data like some others in the industry,” a spokesman stressed in allusions to Comcast’s policy of hard cutoffs and Clearwire throttling.
AT&T will give customers usage trackers which will help identify the most bandwidth-heavy apps. Notifications will also pop up at the 65 percent, 90 percent and 100 percent marks. These tools have occasionally proven problematic with other ISP since they can at times under- or over-report usage in a way that can lead to unexpected charges.
Capped service discourages services like iTunes or Netflix, where videos can use up multiple gigabytes at a time.
Like most ISPs, AT&T has insisted that most of its users will never notice the caps and said the typical subscriber used 18GB per month, while only two percent would be affected.
