The days of unlimited data transfers may be dwindling. AT&T is now testing the idea of a monthly data cap for its broadband Internet users, the company has confirmed, and could move toward a more widespread rollout in the future. Users in Reno, Nev. will be the first to see the limits pop up, spokesman Michael Coe indicates, though a secondary test market may soon be added. Beginning this month, AT&T will restrict new customers in the affected areas based on their Internet plans. Users with the slowest speed DSL service will be limited to 20GB of bandwidth per month, while users of the fastest plan will receive a cap of 150GB a month. Any data transferred above the limit will be billed at a rate of $1 per gigabyte following a one-month grace period.
Existing AT&T customers will not yet be affected but will be added into the test later this year. All existing users will automatically receive the highest cap of 150GB a month, Coe notes. AT&T believes the caps are more than sufficient for average users, pointing out that a small subset of its customers — about 5 percent — uses a full 50 percent of the network’s bandwidth, slowing things down for the remaining majority. AT&T isn’t the first provider to move toward bandwidth caps, but as America’s largest ISP, it’s certainly the one with the heaviest impact. Comcast started enforcing bandwidth limits of 250GB per month — a slightly larger number than the maximum cap being tested by AT&T right now — at the beginning of October.
Source: PC World
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