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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The tech blogs are up in arms over AT&T’s new MicroCell service, femtocell base stations that wireless customers can use to boost cell phone service in places where service is spotty. The blogs essentially have two complaints: first, that AT&T should just fix their network instead of applying a band-aid to it; and second, that AT&T should provide the service for free. (They’ll charge $20 a month for the MicroCell service, or $10 if you have AT&T phone or Internet service. Customers who have both can get it for free.)

Both complaints are valid, but at least give AT&T credit for offering something. Yes, it’s a band-aid, but it’s better than what we have now. Personally, since I would qualify for free service, I’m thrilled; my house is one giant dead spot.

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On July 31st I made a decision to monitor by bandwidth consumption for the month of August to see how many bits I downloaded and uploaded. The experiment was in direct response to the decision of several ISPs who are now imposing usage limits, including New York ISP Frontier Communications’ paltry 5 GB cap.

I installed DU Meter on my home computer and then just used it as I normally would. The results were pretty surprising.

The total usage for the month came to 21.4 GB, using a whopping 4.3 GB the first day alone.

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The mainstream press is finally starting to catch on to the broadband caps issue.

It’s about time.

The phone company, Frontier Communications Corp., is one of several Internet service providers that are moving to curb the growth of traffic on their networks, or at least make the subscribers who download the most pay more. This could have consequences not just for consumers — who would have to learn to watch how much data their Internet use entails — but also for companies that hope to make the Internet a conduit for movies and other content that comes in huge files.

Meanwhile, ISPs such as AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast are starting to get behind the push for P4P as a way to reduce the load on their networks while speeding up traffic. (Overview of P4P here.) That’s good news.

Previously:
Metered broadband: An experiment
Bandwidth experiment, day 2: Throttled?
Metered broadband vs. cloud computing

So I’m chugging along in my month-long experiment to measure my home Internet usage while simultaneously cursing the very thought of having a usage limit imposed by my ISP, and all of a sudden the question smacks me upside the head: What about cloud computing?

“Cloud computing” is one of those fancy Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0?) buzzwords for software that runs from a web server on the Internet instead of your local computer. It extends beyond web-based email or even blogging. Google has a whole suite of web-based applications (Calendar, Google Docs, Picasa, etc.). Adobe has rolled out Acrobat.com as a web-based collaboration tool that integrates with their Acrobat products. They also have Photoshop Express, an online photo storage and editing portal. And Microsoft has their Office Live online application suite. Those are just a few examples.

And then there’s Midori, Microsoft’s experimental web-based platform that could possibly one day replace Windows.

Where do all these things fit in a world of metered Internet access?

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