AT&T to cap broadband usage. Streamers beware

It's purely a profit maximization calculation - there's no moral "right" or "wrong", and certainly no "should" or "shouldn't".

Presumably, someone will offer unlimited bandwidth at some price - and ATT will either make a competing offer or they won't. That decision will turn on their view of the risk of losing customers, their cost structure and their requisite margins, not on some notion of apportioning their costs "fairly" to "bandwidth hogs". Evidently, ATT has concluded that, right now, they can pull their existing unlimited bandwidth offer and charge more to heavy users without the risk of losing too many of them.

I can assure you that ATT does NOT want to lose high bandwidth customers.

I'd also note that there are several reasons to believe that the actual cost of incremental fiber capacity will see significant downward pressure in the coming years. However, that doesn't mean ATT will pass the cost savings on. In order to realize that benefit as a consumer, you might have to deal with someone other than your current bandwidth provider. It remains to be seen who will emerge to fill that "unlimited bandwidth demand" space (ATT might well jump back in) and it should be interesting to see how this plays out.

Marty

It's hard to find on their site, but they have a page with a running tally of your bandwidth usage by month.

I've been streaming episodes of Lost over Netflix since I had no network feeds when it was current. My DSL speed won't sustain HD content, but I'm about halfway thru the 4th season - about 80 episodes - and my total is 47 Gig since I started watching. This includes my normal internet usage as well.

There's not enough hours in the day for me to use 150 gigs at this rate, maybe if it was HD. The Netflix stream is four dots, I think that's the best quality short of HD and it looks great, really.

Perhaps it should be mentioned that this conversation is based in the USA? I wonder if they have this problem in Finland or South Korea. I would be surprised if they did.

Metrization of a free resource (the cable is already laid down) is only meant to extract more money from the end user. It's not like they're going to pay fantastic salaries to the cable guy, either.

These machines now can handle huge bandwidth and CHEAP. The problem is the monopoly over the cable. If it was owned by the public instead of Wall Street, well, you might get the same level of service as in Helsinki.

Trebejo,

I'll disagree - pretty strenuously, actually. These assets (telecom for regulatory purposes) have historically been in the hands of publicly owned or regulated utilities. As a result, they were horribly mismanaged and the public paid the price.

Once the sector was privatized and opened to competition, prices dropped like a rock. There should be no doubt about this - it was specifically as a result of private sector competition. In fact, prices dropped so quickly and steeply that a few of the highly levered companies which laid the fiber went bankrupt.

If these assets were in the public sector, you can bet anything that high speed service would be sparse, hard to find and very expensive.

We've been there, no one should want to go back.

Marty

Incidentally,

I should add that one of the examples you cite (South Korea) is illuminating. South Korea has effectively fostered competition in the deployment of high speed connectivity by aggressively forcing the last mile monopoly (Korea Telecom) to open its local access ("unbundle the last mile") to bandwidth providers like Hanaro. To my knowledge, South Korea has by far the least regulated Telcom sector in Asia. Additionally, a fair chunk of South Korea's subsea fiber was developed (and to a lesser extent provided) by private entities like the Asia Global Crossing/Dacom JV.

Honestly, I am much less familiar with the situation through most of Europe, and I definitely can't comment on Finland. However, there are so many factors - ranging from the aforementioned last mile legacy, to geography, population density, etc. - that such comparisons are very difficult in any circumstance.

Marty