---

bubbba wrote:

jmsherman8 wrote:

Ok now just to put this into prospective our 12 year old watched 12 episodes of dog the bounty hunter at 22 minutes each yesterday and another 12 today. Last night my girlfriend and I watched 1 43 minute episode on netflix and 3 more tonight. All streaming off of netflix. Now that is just one child being home and my gf being sick when she got home from work so she went to bed very early.... think about how much we will use this summer when all five kids are here? Just some food for thought.

---

Well, for myself anyway, I have thought about this. For families, this will become a REAL issue. And, kids being off of school for the summer will only make matters worse. Even if the kids spend time outdoors, more time will still be spent using the internet. I can't see how a household with kids can control their cap? Remember, these kids have grown up with technologies that were build around this medium, and parents should not be expected to control it's use or pay more money.

 

If the ISP's are having trouble selling their TV over other forms of entertainment, then maybe they should consider why? They should make changes to their TV offerings instead of putting a noose around every ones neck that chooses a better option for themselves and their families.

 

This would not be a problem if the same companies that supplied internet access were not also selling competing products. They should be separate offerings, that compete in a completely separate arena. This current combination has clearly become anti-competitive, to say the least. In my opinion.

 



---

Bubbba,

   Exactly that is how I see it. These caps are going to be very ridiculous come mid to late June...right now we are doing fine...well lets put it this way based on there Router data we are doing fine. LOL. If they are off by 4700% there is no way we would make the cap...one DAY like that would put us over.

---

flhthemi wrote:

THIS just in from The Today show!!

 

IT IS RELEVANT!

 

{Keep it Relevant: The forum is not a venue for legal discussions}

 

Now tell me we're supposed to trust and believe the non-existant U-Verse usage meter will be accurate??? NOT!!!

---

Wow That was the today show and they hit between 7% and 300% overcharges on a regular basis? Hmmm Comcast is looking better and better every single minute. And thats off of a cellular device...imagine a 300% overcharge on something like  a netflix movie... OUCH. 

This is heartbreaking news. I like U verse , have U-200 and 12mbps  and so far only have good things to say about it. But this usage cap thing has be really cruel way to treat us users. And then its just 250 GB which in today`s day and age is not much.

I goto see the usage meter but currently it is not working. So from what date will our usage be counted? From 1st of Month or 1st day of Billing cycle? So we can atleast know how we are doing usage wise and not go over.

I have contract with these guys till Nov and maybe find a better alternate afterwards. But here in Cary, NC i dun think we have too many options. And we have been with ATT since 2004 and this is how loyal customers are getting treated. 

Hopefully some sense pervails and ATT comes out of this backward thinking. Its when US is already so far behind other countries we are getting pushed more in wrong direction.

I'd be interested to see how they generated, measured, and compared the data.

If it was just a side-by-side (mobile and wired desktop) then they may be missing some of the protocol overhead associated with the wireless (cell wireless, not 802.11); that could easily be the 7-14% difference they noted.

I'm sure we'll all hear much more about  this in the future. The NBC family of networks is not exactly a business-friendly network (unless it's GE, the parent company).  This is also the network that added explosives to a truck gas tank to make sure it made a good boom for the "unsafe truck" series. They've never been too shy about bending the facts a bit to fit the story.

---

ScottMac wrote:

I'd be interested to see how they generated, measured, and compared the data.

 

If it was just a side-by-side (mobile and wired desktop) then they may be missing some of the protocol overhead associated with the wireless (cell wireless, not 802.11); that could easily be the 7-14% difference they noted.

 

I'm sure we'll all hear much more about  this in the future. The NBC family of networks is not exactly a business-friendly network (unless it's GE, the parent company).  This is also the network that added explosives to a truck gas tank to make sure it made a good boom for the "unsafe truck" series. They've never been too shy about bending the facts a bit to fit the story.

---

Yes, but this wasn't NBC's employees or reporters doing the comparison or gathering the data.  This was an independent law firm that hired outside experts.

---

ScottMac wrote:

The NBC family of networks is not exactly a business-friendly network (unless it's GE, the parent company). 

---

Isn't NBC now owned by Comcast?

Back in the late 90's there was a neighborhood in NW Houston that was advertising free broadband internet.  My mom was intrigued so we went to check it out.  Apparently, the home owner's association had a hard T connection (I don't think it was a T1 but was faster) to the internet and when you built in the neighborhood your house was tied into the neighborhood's network and your HOA dues basically included your internet costs.  It was an awesome idea at the time.

Why am I bringing it up?  Well, if these carrier's Sherman-like march to hard caps that can only be overcome with business accounts, I could see a future where the neighborhood purchases a business account and homes are tied into that and for all practical purposes homes in the neighborhood become like offices in a corporation. 

The cost per home would be tiny and would only get less as more homes are added to the neighborhood

Yes , Comcast has bought NBC 

I'm now 3-weeks into having my U-verse service.  Based on the stats I got off of the RG, I have used about 380GB of transfer.  Add anohter week to that until the end of the month, and I'm looking at right about 500GB (maybe a little over) for a month.

Back to what I said before, 500GB would be enough for a lot of people that know they are going over the 250 cap.  I can see myself hitting this 500GB to 600GB on a fairly regular basis.

But with the current plan, I am looking at $50-$70 in overage fees.  

I really hope that something gets changed with these limits.  I'm thinking I will have to cancel my AT&T land line to help compensate for these extra fees.

I'm quite please with how the service is running, but the reality is that these limits hurt financially, and if they remain in place something is going to have to give and I think that is going to be my AT&T $30 a month land line package.

Jamie

---

SomeJoe7777 wrote:

---

ScottMac wrote:

I'd be interested to see how they generated, measured, and compared the data.

 

If it was just a side-by-side (mobile and wired desktop) then they may be missing some of the protocol overhead associated with the wireless (cell wireless, not 802.11); that could easily be the 7-14% difference they noted.

 

I'm sure we'll all hear much more about  this in the future. The NBC family of networks is not exactly a business-friendly network (unless it's GE, the parent company).  This is also the network that added explosives to a truck gas tank to make sure it made a good boom for the "unsafe truck" series. They've never been too shy about bending the facts a bit to fit the story.

---

 

Yes, but this wasn't NBC's employees or reporters doing the comparison or gathering the data.  This was an independent law firm that hired outside experts.

 

---

Understood, but legal firms are not always (in fact rarely) tech-savy. I'm not calling it {Keep it Courteous}, I'm just saying I'd like to see their test methodology.

---

rharkness wrote:

 

---

ScottMac wrote:

The NBC family of networks is not exactly a business-friendly network (unless it's GE, the parent company). 

---

Isn't NBC now owned by Comcast?

---

 Recently sold, yes.

 

---

ScottMac wrote:

I'd be interested to see how they generated, measured, and compared the data.

 

If it was just a side-by-side (mobile and wired desktop) then they may be missing some of the protocol overhead associated with the wireless (cell wireless, not 802.11); that could easily be the 7-14% difference they noted.

 

---

Plausible deniability at its finest.  After all, how can AT&T consumers know how much broadband they're actually using when AT&T is adding some unknown amount of protocol overhead to their broadband usage only AT&T can measure?

 

Once again, the consumer is left having to rely on data supplied by the provider, data that can easily be manipulated to the provider's advantage and is totally incapable of being independently verified.  Add to the mix a complete lack of regulatory oversight and I've got a bridge to sell anyone who feels comfortable with that arrangement.

 

What gets me is they say it is due to congestion but are more than happy to supply all the bandwidth you want through the Uverse TV portion that is using the same wire I mean the internet portion of the bandwidth is nothing compared to the TV usage if using several HD TVs !! For instance here is a pic of our usage over the past 38 days (note : Coax is 3 HD TVs - Ethernet 3 is one SDTV - Ehternet 2 has nothing connected - and ethernet 1 and 4 are our 3 computers (1 PC on 1 and 2 PCs using a switch on the other)

I mean why would they have congestion from our 300GB od internet data and not with the 12TB of TV usage !!!!

---

ScottMac wrote:

Understood, but legal firms are not always (in fact rarely) tech-savy. I'm not calling it {Keep it Courteous}, I'm just saying I'd like to see their test methodology.

 

---

I actually worked the most of the last 10 years in the legal technology field.  I must say that while there are a lot of attorney's that are sadly lacking technology skills, many of them know that is their weakness and hired companies like the ones that I worked for to accomplish their needs.  In fact, electronic discovery is big business and why you should be very careful on what you do on your computer because some of these people who specialize in that type of activity can find a lot of dirt that you "said" (not meaning spoken aloud but IM conversations, e-mails, etc) when you thought noone would find out.

{Keep it Relevant: The forum is not a venue for legal discussions}

Out of concern about the caps, I decided to post a question to my company's internal online support forum for the thousands of us that work from home.

So far I've gotten several respondants, yet, at this time none of them have been U-verse customers.

• They were all Comcast customers with a 250GB cap.
• All were cord-cutters which means they only had internet service and weren't using AT&T or Comcast for telephone service not did they have any kind of TV service from any provider
• They all were heavy NetFlix users for HD content
• They all had Slingboxes, Roku Players and other devices meant to stream content to remote locations over the internet
• One was a subscriber to the baseball streaming service
• Several even streamed radio all day long while they were at work
• They all had the same remote setup as I do where we are provided a hardware VPN solution that must remain powered on 24/7/365 so that corporate can push things down to our firmware at will (kind of the the RG from u-verse)
• They all had the VOIP phone that goes with our hardware VPN that lets us appear to have an actual corporate phone instead of using a person phone
• All have the same mandated requirement that a cloud backup solution is installed on our work machine which pushes backups nightly to the corporate cloud.

None of them have gone over their cap and only one claimed to even get remotely close to 100GB and that was a quarterly event when they have extremely data intensive jobs that collide at the same time.

One person told me that when they questioned Comcast about the caps, their response (and he was told this was the official stance) was that "gamers" were the only customers of theirs that had to be concerned about going over the cap.

Now, I know there has been EXTENSIVE discussion about the true data footprint of games already on this gigantic thread, but I thought I'd pass on the info I got.

I should point out that my fellow coworker telecommuters were reporting data consumption provided by Comcast which goes back to the overall argument on this thread on how well those meters can be trusted regardless of who the ISP happens to be.

---

ScottMac wrote:

I'd be interested to see how they generated, measured, and compared the data.

 

If it was just a side-by-side (mobile and wired desktop) then they may be missing some of the protocol overhead associated with the wireless (cell wireless, not 802.11); that could easily be the 7-14% difference they noted.

 

I'm sure we'll all hear much more about  this in the future. The NBC family of networks is not exactly a business-friendly network (unless it's GE, the parent company).  This is also the network that added explosives to a truck gas tank to make sure it made a good boom for the "unsafe truck" series. They've never been too shy about bending the facts a bit to fit the story.

 

 

 

 

 

---

Scott,

   The people doing the testing were an independent technology auditing firm of engineers working for lawyers. NBC just happened to be the network breaking the story... And I hate ot say it but this isn't the first time that I have heard of issues with ATT meters. You know it always seems to end up being wrong in ATT favor as well.

---

JDFan wrote:

What gets me is they say it is due to congestion but are more than happy to supply all the bandwidth you want through the Uverse TV portion that is using the same wire I mean the internet portion of the bandwidth is nothing compared to the TV usage if using several HD TVs !! For instance here is a pic of our usage over the past 38 days (note : Coax is 3 HD TVs - Ethernet 3 is one SDTV - Ehternet 2 has nothing connected - and ethernet 1 and 4 are our 3 computers (1 PC on 1 and 2 PCs using a switch on the other)

 

 

I mean why would they have congestion from our 300GB od internet data and not with the 12TB of TV usage !!!!

---

  "What gets me is they say it is due to congestion but are more than happy to supply all the bandwidth you want through the Uverse TV portion that is using the same wire I mean the internet portion of the bandwidth is nothing compared to the TV usage if using several HD TVs !!"

Again: Uverse and "The Internet" are completely separate networks, right up to the common link through the DSLAM to your RG. U-Verse is a private network, and uses predominantly multicast transmission for stable and predictable bandwidth usage. The Internet is nothing like the U-Verse network in terms of traffic predictability and / or stable utilization. They travel in different tunnels and are logically separate entities, all the way to the RG.

The cap/threshold is strictly on "The Internet" potion of the traffic on the U-verse (or DSL) link.

---

bld522 wrote:

 

---

ScottMac wrote:

I'd be interested to see how they generated, measured, and compared the data.

 

If it was just a side-by-side (mobile and wired desktop) then they may be missing some of the protocol overhead associated with the wireless (cell wireless, not 802.11); that could easily be the 7-14% difference they noted.

 

---

Plausible deniability at its finest.  After all, how can AT&T consumers know how much broadband they're actually using when AT&T is adding some unknown amount of protocol overhead to their broadband usage only AT&T can measure?

 

Once again, the consumer is left having to rely on data supplied by the provider, data that can easily be manipulated to the provider's advantage and is totally incapable of being independently verified.  Add to the mix a complete lack of regulatory oversight and I've got a bridge to sell anyone who feels comfortable with that arrangement.

 

 

---

 "Plausible deniability" - Are you serious? Good grief ...

---

rharkness wrote:

 

---

ScottMac wrote:

The NBC family of networks is not exactly a business-friendly network (unless it's GE, the parent company). 

---

Isn't NBC now owned by Comcast?

---

I *think* it is owned by microsoft... hence MSNBC news channel.

---

ScottMac wrote:

---

SomeJoe7777 wrote:

---

ScottMac wrote:

I'd be interested to see how they generated, measured, and compared the data.

 

If it was just a side-by-side (mobile and wired desktop) then they may be missing some of the protocol overhead associated with the wireless (cell wireless, not 802.11); that could easily be the 7-14% difference they noted.

 

I'm sure we'll all hear much more about  this in the future. The NBC family of networks is not exactly a business-friendly network (unless it's GE, the parent company).  This is also the network that added explosives to a truck gas tank to make sure it made a good boom for the "unsafe truck" series. They've never been too shy about bending the facts a bit to fit the story.

---

 

Yes, but this wasn't NBC's employees or reporters doing the comparison or gathering the data.  This was an independent law firm that hired outside experts.

 

---

Understood, but legal firms are not always (in fact rarely) tech-savy. I'm not calling it {Keep it Courteous}, I'm just saying I'd like to see their test methodology.

 

 

---

Yeah but it wasn't even the legal firm testing it was a independent third party engineering firm from what it sounded like. The guy had an Iphone and didn't touch it for ten days and when he checked the bill it was still using quit a bit of data...that is just wrong. lol.

---

bld522 wrote:

 

---

ScottMac wrote:

I'd be interested to see how they generated, measured, and compared the data.

 

If it was just a side-by-side (mobile and wired desktop) then they may be missing some of the protocol overhead associated with the wireless (cell wireless, not 802.11); that could easily be the 7-14% difference they noted.

 

---

Plausible deniability at its finest.  After all, how can AT&T consumers know how much broadband they're actually using when AT&T is adding some unknown amount of protocol overhead to their broadband usage only AT&T can measure?

 

Once again, the consumer is left having to rely on data supplied by the provider, data that can easily be manipulated to the provider's advantage and is totally incapable of being independently verified.  Add to the mix a complete lack of regulatory oversight and I've got a bridge to sell anyone who feels comfortable with that arrangement.

 

 

---

To be honest I don't think it is fair of them to make us pay for there data overhead as well as standard data transfer...that is just ridiculous. It encourages them to use the most inefficient way possible.

---

JDFan wrote:

What gets me is they say it is due to congestion but are more than happy to supply all the bandwidth you want through the Uverse TV portion that is using the same wire I mean the internet portion of the bandwidth is nothing compared to the TV usage if using several HD TVs !! For instance here is a pic of our usage over the past 38 days (note : Coax is 3 HD TVs - Ethernet 3 is one SDTV - Ehternet 2 has nothing connected - and ethernet 1 and 4 are our 3 computers (1 PC on 1 and 2 PCs using a switch on the other)

 

 

I mean why would they have congestion from our 300GB od internet data and not with the 12TB of TV usage !!!!

---

This isn't a network congestion issue, it is an anticompetitive practice aimed at netflix and huluplus, and a variety of VOIP providers.

---

rharkness wrote:

 

---

ScottMac wrote:

Understood, but legal firms are not always (in fact rarely) tech-savy. I'm not calling it {Keep it Courteous} I'm just saying I'd like to see their test methodology.

 

---

I actually worked the most of the last 10 years in the legal technology field.  I must say that while there are a lot of attorney's that are sadly lacking technology skills, many of them know that is their weakness and hired companies like the ones that I worked for to accomplish their needs.  In fact, electronic discovery is big business and why you should be very careful on what you do on your computer because some of these people who specialize in that type of activity can find a lot of dirt that you "said" (not meaning spoken aloud but IM conversations, e-mails, etc) when you thought noone would find out.

 

{Keep it Relevant: The forum is not a venue for legal discussions}

---

Computer forensics is pretty scary stuff...lol.

---

rharkness wrote:

 

---

ScottMac wrote:

Understood, but legal firms are not always (in fact rarely) tech-savy. I'm not calling it {Keep it Courteous}, I'm just saying I'd like to see their test methodology.

 

---

I actually worked the most of the last 10 years in the legal technology field.  I must say that while there are a lot of attorney's that are sadly lacking technology skills, many of them know that is their weakness and hired companies like the ones that I worked for to accomplish their needs.  In fact, electronic discovery is big business and why you should be very careful on what you do on your computer because some of these people who specialize in that type of activity can find a lot of dirt that you "said" (not meaning spoken aloud but IM conversations, e-mails, etc) when you thought noone would find out.

 

{Keep it Relevant: The forum is not a venue for legal discussions}

---

Yep, I know; I was an "expert witness" against several consultants on behalf of some customers (back when I worked with a VAR). Part of my job was to educate the legal team(s) about the technology and review the depositions for inaccurate, suspicious, and evasive responses (in addition to testifying as an expert witness).

Lawyers (at least at the time) were extremely suspicious of computer and networking folks because they were caught, scaled, cleaned and cooked by consultants that took advantage of their relative illiteracy in computer/networking . One of the lawyers I worked with actually took to the techy stuff and built a decent practice in working with other lawyers to set up their legal networks and  PCs (connectivity, applications, menu systems (later Windows stuff).

I',m not implying that they're all stupid, or trying to cash in ... I am interested on what they compared, how they compared it, and how they reached their conclusions.

---

rharkness wrote:

Out of concern about the caps, I decided to post a question to my company's internal online support forum for the thousands of us that work from home.

 

So far I've gotten several respondants, yet, at this time none of them have been U-verse customers.

 

• They were all Comcast customers with a 250GB cap.
• All were cord-cutters which means they only had internet service and weren't using AT&T or Comcast for telephone service not did they have any kind of TV service from any provider
• They all were heavy NetFlix users for HD content
• They all had Slingboxes, Roku Players and other devices meant to stream content to remote locations over the internet
• One was a subscriber to the baseball streaming service
• Several even streamed radio all day long while they were at work
• They all had the same remote setup as I do where we are provided a hardware VPN solution that must remain powered on 24/7/365 so that corporate can push things down to our firmware at will (kind of the the RG from u-verse)
• They all had the VOIP phone that goes with our hardware VPN that lets us appear to have an actual corporate phone instead of using a person phone
• All have the same mandated requirement that a cloud backup solution is installed on our work machine which pushes backups nightly to the corporate cloud.

None of them have gone over their cap and only one claimed to even get remotely close to 100GB and that was a quarterly event when they have extremely data intensive jobs that collide at the same time.

 

One person told me that when they questioned Comcast about the caps, their response (and he was told this was the official stance) was that "gamers" were the only customers of theirs that had to be concerned about going over the cap.

 

Now, I know there has been EXTENSIVE discussion about the true data footprint of games already on this gigantic thread, but I thought I'd pass on the info I got.

 

I should point out that my fellow coworker telecommuters were reporting data consumption provided by Comcast which goes back to the overall argument on this thread on how well those meters can be trusted regardless of who the ISP happens to be.

 

 

---

Wow and here we have people pushing out 380 GB based on there metering in 3 weeks... hmm something is broken in the ATT meters I think.

---

jmsherman8 wrote:

---

bld522 wrote:

 

---

ScottMac wrote:

I'd be interested to see how they generated, measured, and compared the data.

 

If it was just a side-by-side (mobile and wired desktop) then they may be missing some of the protocol overhead associated with the wireless (cell wireless, not 802.11); that could easily be the 7-14% difference they noted.

 

---

Plausible deniability at its finest.  After all, how can AT&T consumers know how much broadband they're actually using when AT&T is adding some unknown amount of protocol overhead to their broadband usage only AT&T can measure?

 

Once again, the consumer is left having to rely on data supplied by the provider, data that can easily be manipulated to the provider's advantage and is totally incapable of being independently verified.  Add to the mix a complete lack of regulatory oversight and I've got a bridge to sell anyone who feels comfortable with that arrangement.

 

 

---

To be honest I don't think it is fair of them to make us pay for there data overhead as well as standard data transfer...that is just ridiculous. It encourages them to use the most inefficient way possible.

---

 Protocol overhead is intrinsic to the data, you can't separate it; it's how the data know where to go, or how (in the cse of WiFi) a reasonable level of reliability is achieved (also why Wifi uses twice as much link rate as actual data transfer).

---

jmsherman8 wrote:

---

JDFan wrote:

What gets me is they say it is due to congestion but are more than happy to supply all the bandwidth you want through the Uverse TV portion that is using the same wire I mean the internet portion of the bandwidth is nothing compared to the TV usage if using several HD TVs !! For instance here is a pic of our usage over the past 38 days (note : Coax is 3 HD TVs - Ethernet 3 is one SDTV - Ehternet 2 has nothing connected - and ethernet 1 and 4 are our 3 computers (1 PC on 1 and 2 PCs using a switch on the other)

 

 

I mean why would they have congestion from our 300GB od internet data and not with the 12TB of TV usage !!!!

---

This isn't a network congestion issue, it is an anticompetitive practice aimed at netflix and huluplus, and a variety of VOIP providers.

---

 That is your opinion. Opinions are like {...} everybody has one ...

---

rharkness wrote:

Out of concern about the caps, I decided to post a question to my company's internal online support forum for the thousands of us that work from home.

 

So far I've gotten several respondants, yet, at this time none of them have been U-verse customers.

 

• They were all Comcast customers with a 250GB cap.
• All were cord-cutters which means they only had internet service and weren't using AT&T or Comcast for telephone service not did they have any kind of TV service from any provider
• They all were heavy NetFlix users for HD content
• They all had Slingboxes, Roku Players and other devices meant to stream content to remote locations over the internet
• One was a subscriber to the baseball streaming service
• Several even streamed radio all day long while they were at work
• They all had the same remote setup as I do where we are provided a hardware VPN solution that must remain powered on 24/7/365 so that corporate can push things down to our firmware at will (kind of the the RG from u-verse)
• They all had the VOIP phone that goes with our hardware VPN that lets us appear to have an actual corporate phone instead of using a person phone
• All have the same mandated requirement that a cloud backup solution is installed on our work machine which pushes backups nightly to the corporate cloud.

None of them have gone over their cap and only one claimed to even get remotely close to 100GB and that was a quarterly event when they have extremely data intensive jobs that collide at the same time.

 

One person told me that when they questioned Comcast about the caps, their response (and he was told this was the official stance) was that "gamers" were the only customers of theirs that had to be concerned about going over the cap.

 

Now, I know there has been EXTENSIVE discussion about the true data footprint of games already on this gigantic thread, but I thought I'd pass on the info I got.

 

I should point out that my fellow coworker telecommuters were reporting data consumption provided by Comcast which goes back to the overall argument on this thread on how well those meters can be trusted regardless of who the ISP happens to be.

 

 

---

"None of them have gone over their cap and only one claimed to even get remotely close to 100GB"  and "they were all" doing all of activities?  *point to* "heavy Netflix users for HD content"

I'd say either the meter is broken or "heavy Netflix users for HD content" (heavy) does not mean what I think it means or thousands of you must be single/married with no kids......

---

ScottMac wrote:

---

bld522 wrote:

 

---

ScottMac wrote:

I'd be interested to see how they generated, measured, and compared the data.

 

If it was just a side-by-side (mobile and wired desktop) then they may be missing some of the protocol overhead associated with the wireless (cell wireless, not 802.11); that could easily be the 7-14% difference they noted.

 

---

Plausible deniability at its finest.  After all, how can AT&T consumers know how much broadband they're actually using when AT&T is adding some unknown amount of protocol overhead to their broadband usage only AT&T can measure?

 

Once again, the consumer is left having to rely on data supplied by the provider, data that can easily be manipulated to the provider's advantage and is totally incapable of being independently verified.  Add to the mix a complete lack of regulatory oversight and I've got a bridge to sell anyone who feels comfortable with that arrangement.

 

 

---

 "Plausible deniability" - Are you serious? Good grief ...

 

---

Dead serious.  All AT&T has to do to deny a customer's complaint that their usage has been inflated is to blame it on some amorphous "protocol overhead" that only AT&T can see and only AT&T can measure.  Sounds plausible.  But it's really just a way for AT&T to throw up a smokescreen so its customers can't successfully track their own usage, jack up its revenues and drive out its competitors.

Good grief ...

---

bubbba wrote:

jmsherman8 wrote:

Ok now just to put this into prospective our 12 year old watched 12 episodes of dog the bounty hunter at 22 minutes each yesterday and another 12 today. Last night my girlfriend and I watched 1 43 minute episode on netflix and 3 more tonight. All streaming off of netflix. Now that is just one child being home and my gf being sick when she got home from work so she went to bed very early.... think about how much we will use this summer when all five kids are here? Just some food for thought.

---

Well, for myself anyway, I have thought about this. For families, this will become a REAL issue. And, kids being off of school for the summer will only make matters worse. Even if the kids spend time outdoors, more time will still be spent using the internet. I can't see how a household with kids can control their cap? Remember, these kids have grown up with technologies that were build around this medium, and parents should not be expected to control it's use or pay more money.

 

If the ISP's are having trouble selling their TV over other forms of entertainment, then maybe they should consider why? They should make changes to their TV offerings instead of putting a noose around every ones neck that chooses a better option for themselves and their families.

 

This would not be a problem if the same companies that supplied internet access were not also selling competing products. They should be separate offerings, that compete in a completely separate arena. This current combination has clearly become anti-competitive, to say the least. In my opinion.

 



---

Perhaps offering TV channels a-la-carte and not shove 200,300 channels down my throat that I will never going to watch at an unsustainable (for me) price?  Networks that cannot attract enough viewers probably should not survive or should be free (over the air with ads like the old days) and not force us to subsidize them with these unsustainable prices.