According to an official AT&T rep, AT&T will be going ahead with a data cap for heavy users of its U-Verse and DSL offerings starting May 2. The cap will be 150GB for DSL users and 250GB with penalties for U-verse users. The penalty for going over is $10 per 50GB over the limit. What does this mean for most people? Nothing really, the average user uses much less than that around 19GB a month. So the cap really will only effect about 2% of users.
The bigger question is will this type of action taken by AT&T and others like Comcast become the norm. Also as applications like Netflix, Hulu, Onlive, Youtube, Dropbox, and others become more popular we might see that percentage of effected users go up until it feels like we are paying for internet by the page or video.
I don't want to be told how much I'm allowed to use the internet I'm paying for. I think I should be able to use it as much as I want without the threat of paying penalties. It's like if the cable company told you could only watch a curtain number of shows a day or you had to pay more. That doesn't seem right and neither does this.
Tell me what you think in the comments. Do you think ISPs should cap their bandwidth? What do you see happening in the future and do you think customers would move services based on this issue?
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