According to DSLReports, AT&T, the popular American communications network, will introduce traffic restrictions to all of its DSL customers on May 2, including those on the company"s U-Verse package. Standard users will receive an allowance of 150GB per month, with U-Verse users being given an extra hundred gigabytes to bring the total up to 250GB. Starting from the 18th of this month customers will start to receive letters informing them of the changes to their contracts.
Seth Bloom, an AT&T spokesperson, has confirmed the rumour and added that users will be subject to overage charges if they exceed their caps, however only the ones who repeatedly ignore this limit will be penalised. The newly-formed charges will be an extra $10 per 50GB of data used over their agreed cap, meaning that if a customer uses a total of 500GB of bandwidth per month on a standard tariff they may be billed an additional $70.
The company claim the average user only uses around 18GB of data in total per month, which to many may seem a very low figure, and only two percent of customers exceed this. "Using a notification structure similar to our new wireless data plans, we"ll proactively notify customers when they exceed 65%, 90% and 100% of the monthly usage allowance," said Seth Bloom.
The company has tested out capping before by conducting trials a few years a go in Reno, Nevada and Beaumont, Texas, testing out limits ranging from 20GB up to 150GB. These trials were considered a success and may have had something to do with the new caps being introduced.