AT&T DSL Cap Starts Tomorrow

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AT&T customers, prepare to turn off your 24/7 BitTorrenting tomorrow. The company announced back in March that they would begin limiting the amount of monthly bandwidth that DSL customers can consume, and those caps go into effect tomorrow, May 2^nd. Plain DSL customers can expect caps of 150GB per month, while U-Verse customers will be getting caps of 250GB.

The company is putting the caps in place to throttle the top 2% of users they claim, who use excessive amounts of bandwidth. It’s the same argument we’ve heard from the mobile carriers on why wireless bandwidth needs to be capped. AT&T is claiming that one “top 2%” house can use as much internet as 19 households in the lower 98% of their users.

As soon as the caps go in place, you’ll be charged $10 extra for every 50GB you go over, but there will be a two-month grace period. So, you won’t start getting billed for overages until the term starting July 2^nd, or later, if our math is correct.

Between Comcast and AT&T, it seems monthly home internet caps are going to become the norm in the United States. They’re already standard in Canada, and other countries, like Australia and New Zealand, where the caps are so low users can’t even enjoy streaming HD movies via Netflix or some similar service.

Back to the AT&T caps, U-Verse TV customers won’t see their TV put under the data caps. As you may be aware, U-Verse is an IPTV solution where the TV is sent to your house through the internet. Thankfully, AT&T won’t be putting your TV bandwidth under the caps. The higher cap for U-Verse (250GB vs. 150GB) seems to be just an incentive to get folks to get U-Verse TV from AT&T.

Those who are on AT&T DSL can check how much bandwidth they’ve consumed for the month by checking myusage.att.com.