AT&T Starts Throttling Bandwidth

You read the title correctly: AT&T today starts throttling customer’s bandwidth. Regular DSL users get a 150GB/month cap, while UVerse users get a 250GB/month cap. If you didn’t know, AT&T is the #2 internet provider in the US, while Comcast is #1. For comparison, Comcast gives its customers the same bandwidth cap as UVerse users: 250GB per month. The article linked earlier says that companies do this both to discourage people going to online sources such as Hulu and Netflix for TV and Movies, and because heavy data usage from those websites affects other people’s connections down the line. The latter problem is because the infrastructure is so lacking that it can’t handle all of the data. The article points out that it costs almost nothing (comparatively) for companies to provide data to customers, so this isn’t about money. In the end, the solution is developing the infrastructure. Of course, once that is in place, the companies who have moved to bandwidth caps will most likely be hard pressed to remove them. Such is greed.