AT&T to impose monthly usage cap for all DSL customers, begin May 2

I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed so I readily admit I don't understand the mechanics behind bandwidth and usage. Does AT&T pay someone else for the privilege of being an ISP? Once AT&T sets up its servers or whatever other equipment it needs to be an ISP, what are their operating expenses? If AT&T has 100 million paying customers does it make a difference to them if only one person is online or all 100 million? How many MB or GB do average people use in a month just to download their daily multiple anti-malware updates? If the ISP provides free anti-malware (as AT&T does) will that also count against the user? I'm confused.

Thing is, BW using features like netflix, internet radio and cloud computing are just now up and coming. While AT&T says it'll only affect 2% of their /current/ user base, they KNOW that it could affect 25-50% of their user base in the coming few years. They are putting the caps in NOW to because they apparently don't feel like adding the service capacity needed to be the service provider for the internet of the future.

Conversely, my cable company has been constantly adding bandwidth /ahead/ of the curve, before anyone has even asked for it.

Perhaps being as big as they are, they think they can start the trend towards the dark future of the metered internet. What next? Metered U-Verse TV? I suppose it's not a surprise coming from a phone company, the very people that have had onerous levels of metered charging for decades, they certainly are the experts in this area.

marsmimar said:

If AT&T has 100 million paying customers does it make a difference to them if only one person is online or all 100 million?

Click to expand...

Yes, it makes a difference. If they have a small # of customers, or very few concurrently online, they don't need to provide much bandwidth to satisfy those requests. Nor do they need as many IP addresses available to provide to customers.

marsmimar said:

How many MB or GB do average people use in a month just to download their daily multiple anti-malware updates? If the ISP provides free anti-malware (as AT&T does) will that also count against the user? I'm confused.

Click to expand...

An antimalware update is usually 2MB to 6MB. Assuming a new update every 2 days, that's like 3 updates per week. So, maybe 18MB a week and 72MB a month. This is no big deal at all. I could watch a 30 minute HDTV show and suck up 1.5GB. That's the equivalent of 250-750 antimalware updates in just 30 minutes. Or I could download a new Linux distributation, and a few of the distros that I use are 4GB+ in size.