AT&T Follows Comcast, Will Charge $30 More to Avoid Usage Caps

[dixiegrrrrl]

In a blog post, AT&T's Bob Bickerstaff stated that starting on May 23, the U-verse usage cap will be bumped from the uniform 250 GB per month, to different caps based on your service tier. AT&T says customers on U-Verse tiers with speeds of 768 Kbps – 6 Mbps will now face a 300 GB cap; customers on U-Verse tiers of speeds of 12 Mbps – 75Mbps will see a 600 GB cap; and customers on speeds of 100 Mbps – 1 Gbps will see a cap of 1 terabyte.

Users who exceed these caps in any given month will automatically have to pay for 50 GB of additional data for $10 each. Users who want to avoid the cap will now need to pay $30 a month more moving forward. That is unless you're also a DirecTV or AT&T U-Verse TV customer, in which case AT&T is waiving the $30 fee.

That last bit is a fairly transparent ploy to address a spike in cord cutting t AT&T -- by forcing customers into signing up for television services they may not actually want if they want to avoid usage restrictions. Whether using arbitrary caps to force users to sign up for TV technically violates net neutrality (either the FCC's rules or the concept in general) is something that's likely to be hotly debated.

https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Follows-Comcast-Will-Charge-30-More-to-Avoid-Usage-Caps-136602?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

[Rex]

1. Of course they will! They found some more blood in that turnip!

Vampire companies suck.

[Ex Lurker]

2. I stream music and/or video constantly, and I've never come close to

using 250GB

[hobbit709]

3. I just got Google Fiber and told AT&T what they could do with their measly 5.4Mbps.

Every month the bill would go up from 50 cents to a dollar for some new fee they came up with.
6 years ago I was paying $50 and change for landline phone and DSL. When I cancelled it was up to $94+ for the exact same service-no increase in speed or extras. Then the bastards bought out DirecTV and started the same monthly new fee charges.
One time they tried charging me a subscriber line charge for the phone, another line charge for the DSL, and a third line charge for the privilege of dialing out long distance. THREE different line charges for the same pair of wires.

[Wellstone ruled]

4. Not worried about these clowns.

Within five years they will declare bankruptcy anyway. These fools did the same type of customer gauging in the late nineties and people did work a rounds and ATT&T had to do a bankruptcy. To darn many new things coming to market and these people live in the stone age when it comes to technology.