AT&T DSL cap

Saw a note from dslreports.com (http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Exclusive-ATT-To-Impose-150GB-DSL-Cap-Overages-113149) that AT&T will be capping DSL at 150GB and U-Verse service at 250GB, with a $10/50GB overage charge.  I generally hate metered services, but if they are up front about it, their caps and overage charges seem relatively reasonable to me based on the little I know of them (the article is the extent of my knowledge).

Assuming you have the highest bandwidth DSL package currently offered by AT&T that I am aware of – 6Mb download – your maximum possible consumption in a month comes out at just under 2TB, assuming you are both very close to the CO or RT and that you download continuously at 6Mb (that’s bits, not bytes) 24×7 for your average 30-day month.  My formula for that was 6/8 * 3600 * 24 * 30.  Obviously, at that rate you would be paying some hefty overage.

This is a departure from the norm for me to say this is a reasonable offering, and indeed I would probably prefer to see them simply rate-limit connections that exceed their monthly allotment (or at least provide that as an option) instead of just tacking on surcharges.  As it stands currently, I see this plan as generally fair, but it’s hard to say definitively until we see how it’s really implemented.