the tindog coffeehouse

AT&T announced a few days ago that beginning May 2, it’ll be instituting Internet usage caps to all its broadband customers: 150 GB/month for DSL users and 250 GB/month for U-verse folks. Go over that, and you’ll be charged an extra 10 bucks per 50 GB of excess usage.

The evil empire claims that this change will only affect 2 percent of its users. Maybe so. Doing a quick estimate, I don’t think our household will be in danger of hitting the cap, at least not in the foreseeable future. I use about 80-90 GB from my computer, but that’s the bulk of our usage. We also stream Netflix movies a lot, but at about 1.5-2 GB per movie (SD, through the Wii), we would have to watch a ton of movies to put us in danger.

But that’s not the point, is it?

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Let the AT&T backlash begin, er, continue.

The much-maligned phone company and sole provider of iPhone voice and data service (when you can get it), has decided to put the kibosh on its $30/month unlimited data plan. From now on, new users must choose between a $15/month plan that allows for 200 MB of data usage, or a $25/month plan that allows for 2 GB (with fees for going over, of course).

And if that wasn’t evil enough, they also agreed to let you pay them an extra $20/month for tethering service so that you’ll hit your data usage caps even faster.

Of course, you can always save your iPhone internetting for wi-fi hotspots, which would presumably not count against your quota while simultaneously making you less mobile and possibly much more open to security threats. Or you can fork over $150 for a MicroCell doohickey, which would let you funnel your 3G browsing through your home Internet connection (although again, it’s not clear whether that would count toward the quota or not). (Plus, once your ISP begins implementing broadband usage caps, that may not be an attractive option, either.)

Confused yet?

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I’ve had my iPhone for about 10 months, and almost since Day 1 I’ve used a Mophie Juice Pack Air to provide both protection for it as well as extra battery life. For the most part, I’ve been pretty happy with it, even though it was expensive and even though it added a lot of extra bulk to the phone.

While some people had complained that the Juice Packs negatively impact cellular reception, I had never really thought about until yesterday. We were waiting for church to start and I wanted to check something online really quick, but I couldn’t get a signal. Just one row in front of me, however, another guy was happily browsing on his iPhone with a full 3G connection. The only difference? He only had a standard plastic case on his phone.

Curious, I ran some network speed tests later from my kitchen, home office, and bedroom — three places where I’ve gotten historically bad reception. In two of those tests (the office and bedroom), I couldn’t get a 3G signal at all and could just barely get an Edge connection. I then took the Juice Pack off and ran the same tests. The kitchen test was a little slower, but the others were much faster. Needless to say, I was shocked at how big of a difference removing the Juice Pack made.

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Ars Technica has an interesting breakdown of AT&T’s 1922 plan to single-handedly control every radio station in America:

But AT&T had another idea—a network of almost 40 radio stations strung together via the telco’s long distance lines. They would broadcast to local areas wirelessly and share content via AT&T’s long routes. The company intended [New York City radio station] WEAF as the beginning of that experiment. …

As for competing stations, they would be “minimized or foreclosed through the efforts of the local broadcast associations to function inclusively,” Wurtzler explains, “encouraging all… to join in the shared collective effort.”

If this sounds all nice and Woodstocky in print, AT&T’s implementation of the concept was far less pretty in practice, and that led to the scheme’s demise. First the telco began denying non-Bell System radio stations access to its long distance lines for shared projects, forcing other networks to experiment with inferior telegraph rather than telephone connections for their experiments. Then AT&T drew more anger by suing a nearby competitor to WEAF, claiming that its broadcast operation infringed on the carrier’s patents. “To the public, already disturbed at the growth and power of trusts and cartels, AT&T seemed to be jumping with hobnailed boots over the little fellow,” write historians Christopher Sterling and John Kitross.

AT&T abandoned its plans for broadcast domination in 1926, opting instead to monopolize the wireline connections between stations. In its place, RCA, General Electric, and Westinghouse formed NBC, with CBS and ABC following soon behind.

Ars speculates that AT&T’s withdrawal from broadcasting probably had a negative effect on innovation, with today’s broadcasters “constantly standing in the way of competing platforms, such as cable television, satellite radio, Low Power FM, and white space broadband.” I’m not so sure. It’s reasonable to assume AT&T would’ve been just as obstructing, if not more (if the company’s history since then is any indication).

Either way, it’s an interesting reminder of a technological future that might’ve been.

Previously:
Can you hear me now?
Vanity Fair’s history of the Internet
The evil genius of AT&T MicroCells

We’d resisted the onslaught of emails and junk mail from AT&T for a couple of years. The begging, pleading, even bribing us to sign up for U-verse service. But we were always leery, having heard story after story of the nightmares others had encountered with it. Besides, there really wasn’t that much incentive; we were still under a 2-year contract with DirecTV, and U-verse’s Internet speed wasn’t any better than the service we already had.

But our DirecTV contract expired, U-verse Internet speeds picked up, and we realized we would actually be saving about $30 every month by switching. So we took the plunge.

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It was 40 years ago yesterday, on October 29, 1969, that the first message was sent across ARPANET (which would evolve into today’s modern Internet). The message? “LO”. Yeah, it was supposed to be “LOGIN”, but the thing crashed after the “O”.

And thus was the born the inspiration for AT&T’s wireless network. The End.

Previously:
Vanity Fair’s history of the Internet