AT&T, the country’s largest Internet provider, is considering charging extra for customers who download large amounts of data. After Comcast and some other ISP already capping or booting their high bandwidth consumers, it’s AT&T turn now to introduce the similar cap. According to AT&T, the top 5 percent of AT&T’s DSL customers use 46 percent of the total bandwidth. Overall bandwidth use on the network is surging, doubling every year and a half.
Cable companies are at the forefront of usage-based pricing because neighbors share capacity on the local cable lines, and bandwidth hogs can slow down traffic for others. Phone companies have been less concerned about congestion because the phone lines they use to provide Internet service using DSL, or Digital Subscriber Line technology, aren’t shared between neighbors, but AT&T is evidently concerned about congestion higher up in the network. Read on..
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