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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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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It’s not just the Chinese government imposing nationwide Internet filtering. Australia is getting it, too.

Under the current plan, Internet content filters will be mandatory for all Australians. They get to choose, however, between two different levels. The default plan blocks all content that may be objectionable to children, but consumers can opt-out, choosing a more watered-down blacklist which allows pornography but still blocks other “illegal content” (potentially including “euthanasia, drugs and protest”).

(Never mind that the filtering system probably won’t be very effective or that the deep-packet inspection required at the ISP level will cripple Internet speeds. And of course, all costs associated with the filtering will be passed on to consumers.)

As ridiculous as this is, however, I can’t help but to wonder if this same sort of nonsense is inevitable here in the U.S.  Surely not, right?

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I’m only at the end of the 2nd day of my month-long metered bandwidth experiment, and I’ve already exceeded the 5 GB usage cap being imposed by New York ISP Frontier Communications (not my ISP, thankfully).

What pushed me over the limit? Well, on Friday I remotely connected to my computer for maybe about 30 minutes. I also downloaded audio podcasts using Juice, video podcasts using Miro, and did some general browsing. Today I downloaded some YouTube videos, downloaded a few trial programs, and uploaded the YouTube FLV videos to Media-Convert.com to convert them to a different format.

Combined, those activities over two days amounted to a total of 8 GB of total usage. And keep in mind that’s only activity from my computer, not including Christy’s or the girls’ computers or any other Internet-connected device we may have (such as the Wii).

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