Earlier this week AT&T became the second major ISP (Internet Service Provider) to start capping the usage of its customers. The cap currently stands at 250 gigabytes per month and users will be charged for each additional 50 gigabytes they go over. Comcast also caps it usage at 250 gigs but instead of allowing you to pay for more they just boot you off their service after your second violation, at least that’s what their FAQ page said. I disagree with their decisions in so many ways I almost don’t know where to begin. I suppose I will start with a quote from the article I found on CNN.com about the recent AT&T cap, link at end of this post.
"Our approach is based on customers' feedback," said Mark Siegel, spokesman for AT&T. "They told us that the people who use the most should pay more, and they also told us we should make it easy for them to track their usage. We think our approach addresses these concerns."
I have a few problems with this statement. First, I find it hard to believe that most of their customers would ask for less and continue paying the same rate. Why would I want to go from getting unlimited usage for some monthly fee to getting capped after a certain amount for the same monthly fee? Maybe users did ask to be able to keep track of their usage but how does that translate into putting a cap on that usage? The second issue I have with this statement is about users who use the most bandwidth should pay for it. As far as I ‘m concerned they do already. I went to AT&T site to see some of their offerings and they have several internet plans with different speeds. By selecting a faster, more expensive plan aren’t you in effect paying to use more than someone who selects a slower plan? If you offer different speeds of service then shouldn’t you also have different caps in place. Why would I pay more for a faster connection if the only thing it means is that I am going to reach my cap faster?
Speaking of caps and connection speed, if you’re going to put caps in place then the speed of your connection should determine your cap rather than everyone having the same cap. I don’t have a good analogy to this but that is like giving 10 people 10 gallons of gas for their cars and saying you can only go 200 miles with what I gave you no matter the fuel economy of your car. OK, it that might not be the best analogy but hopefully you see what I am getting at. Don’t get me wrong, 250 gigabytes is a lot of data. But that is only by today’s standards. I sure most programmers know the famous, although misquoted saying from Bill Gates about 640K being more than enough memory for anyone. What happens when AT&T decides to offer even faster connections in the future? I would like to believe they will also increase their cap as they get faster but I find that hard to believe since they already offer different speeds for their service now. Also, depending on what you read, video accounts for almost half of internet traffic now. With services like Netflix, Hulu and other video offerings available this figure is only going to increase as people do more than use the Internet for more than just email and checking the news.
The capped approach also presents another issue. If you as my ISP are going to cap my usage then why don’t you block the ads that appear in my browser? Since I am now paying based on my usage I don’t want ads counting toward my cap. Take your favorite search engine, if you search for anything the first few links returned are ads along with the last few. In addition there are also adds to the right of the results. Then once you find the link you’re looking for there are more probably more ads on the page you are viewing. I am sure some will argue that ads don’t take up a lot of data but over time it could add up. What if you are searching for multiple topics and clicking on the whole first page of links on several searches to try and find what you are looking for? That adds up to a lot of ads and some ads even use JavaScript to update their image without you leaving the page.
Capped usage also affects the whole browsing experience and limits innovations. This directly affects me as a web developer. Let’s say I come up with what might be the next big thing on the Internet. Obviously I would start with just about zero users so I would tell some of my friends to browse to my site and check it out. What happens if most of them have capped usage? Some of them might say great but I have some movies I want to watch on Netflix and I might need the usage this month, maybe next month. Obviously that is an extreme example but it might not be so farfetched in the future. What I am trying to get at is that users may feel hesitant to try new sites. What if YouTube hadn’t come out and usage was capped. If I told to check this site where you could watch all kinds of uploaded videos you might be a little hesitant since video would potentially use up some of the cap you might need to do something later.
What about all this talk of the Cloud? As we have the need to access our data in more and more places Cloud offerings are starting to pop up from companies like Amazon and Microsoft that allow you to store you data in one place and download it as needed. With a capped Internet why would I want to take advantage of these services? Odds are, I won’t. The ISPs will probably offer the same things as these companies and be nice enough to not count that towards your usage. If that last sentence doesn’t throw up all kinds of red flags please read it again. I am sure Comcast has already said it will offer a video service like Netflix and Hulu that won’t count against your cap and I am sure AT&T will probably follow since both of these companies provide both internet and television service. This obviously puts other companies that already offer these services at a huge disadvantage and probably cause some anti-trust lawsuits to be filed.
What happens if I don’t use all of my allotted cap for the month? If I am such a burden on the network I would expect that usage to carry over. I already know the network can handle it since they will gladly charge me more if I go over my cap. Unfortunately I don’t think this is going to happen either. Even at a company such as AT&T who seems to imply from the quote at the beginning that they take customer feedback very seriously. Please note the sarcasm is the previous sentence.
As you can tell from the points above I am very upset to see that companies are trying to steer us in this direction. I feel that I have raised some valid questions that point out some of the shortcomings of capped internet usage and how some companies feel justified to charge more for less rather than take a hit on their bottom line for a quarter or two and actually improve their services. I would hope that anyone who has any services from these companies seriously consider an alternative so that other companies who are considering these business models don’t follow suit and see that as consumers, we demand more, not less. I would love to know how you feel about this so please leave me a comment below with your thoughts. Also if you feel that I have left something out or find a flaw in one of my arguments please let me know. Thanks.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/03/technology/att_broadband_caps/index.htm