AT&T Internet Rationing Board - Do More With Less!

Today should be your last day for doing business with AT&T’s DSL and U-verse services.  If you feel strongly about your broadband usage being counted and limited, it’s time to bail out of AT&T’s Internet Overcharging scheme, which took effect earlier today.

From this day forward, AT&T DSL customers are limited to 150GB of usage and U-verse customers top out at 250GB before the overlimit fee kicks in — $10 for every 50GB customers exceed the cap, billed in $10 increments. It’s classic AT&T Math, where $1.01 of usage is rounded up to $10.00.

AT&T certainly got off on the wrong foot on day one.  We’ve received more than a dozen messages today from customers who find AT&T’s usage meter offline, showing this message:

“We’re sorry, but we’re unable to display your Internet usage at this time.”

Do you think AT&T would accept that excuse if you enclosed a note telling AT&T you are unable to pay your Internet bill at this time?

On an ongoing basis, we intend to hold AT&T’s feet to the fire until they rescind this unwarranted overcharging scheme.  While company officials claim it is intended to protect their customers from a handful of “heavy users,” they also argue they have plenty of capacity for everyone.  The company cannot have it both ways.

Therefore, this week’s message to be shared with your friends and family is:

AT&T’s Broadband Network Is Not Good Enough to Handle Your Broadband Needs: Shop Elsewhere

AT&T’s wired broadband network, just like their bottom-rated wireless service, cannot handle their customers’ broadband needs.  The company proved that today by having to introduce a broadband rationing scheme, limiting customer usage.  Despite being America’s largest telephone company ISP, AT&T apparently cannot handle the traffic, telling DSL customers to lay off after 150GB and their “advanced” U-verse network customers to get offline after 250GB of use.  Evidently the company isn’t willing to invest some of their enormous profits to provide an ongoing level of broadband service their customers deserve to get, especially when compared with their closest cousin: Verizon.

“While Verizon is installing fiber optics to many of their customers’ homes and providing unlimited, blazing fast Internet service, AT&T admits through their own actions their network isn’t good enough to provide that same level of service to their customers — so now they are limiting the use of it,” says Phillip Dampier, editor at consumer group Stop the Cap! “If I was an AT&T customer, I’d shop around for an alternative provider that has a network robust enough to actually deliver the service customers pay good money to receive.”

AT&T’s U-verse service was touted to customers as delivering a next generation of broadband and television service that could provide healthy competition to cable television.

“AT&T wants U-verse to compete with the big cable companies, but usage caps tell us they can’t manage to do that,” Dampier says. “If their network is so great, why do they need to slap limits on customers?”

AT&T’s representatives claim the limits are intended to reduce congestion from a handful of heavy users, a claim that does not make sense to Stop the Cap!

“AT&T’s existing terms and conditions allow them to deal with any customers who create problems for other users on their network,” Dampier said. “Instead of expanding capacity or dealing with the so-called ‘handful’ of troublesome users, they have slapped an Internet Overcharging scheme on all of their customers.”

Stop the Cap! points out the irony AT&T has plenty of capacity for hundreds of television channels, but doesn’t have enough capacity to provide a worry-free High Speed Internet experience.

“AT&T’s U-verse has no problems finding space for more shopping channels, foreign language networks, and niche channels, but can’t find their way clear to leave customers’ unlimited Internet accounts alone,” Dampier adds.  “Their priorities are all wrong — giving you channels you didn’t ask for while taking away the service you do want.”

Bell's Broadband Shell Game (image: Dave Blume)

The digital equivalent of a Trojan Horse was laid at the feet of Canadian telecom regulators Monday when officials from Bell, Canada’s largest phone company, announced they were withdrawing their controversial proposal to mandate usage-based billing on all wholesale broadband accounts.

The original proposal would have mandated that independent Internet Service Providers bill each of their individual customers a monthly fee based on their Internet usage in addition to the wholesale access rates paid to Bell all along.  The pricing proposal would have forced every ISP in Canada to abandon flat rate Internet service, raise prices, reduce usage allowances, and increase overlimit penalties.

Now Bell has told the Globe & Mail newspaper it wants to introduce something called “Aggregated Volume Pricing” instead — a plan Bell claims will shift financial penalties for “high usage” away from individual customers and onto the ISPs themselves. Bell also slashed the proposed overlimit fee from a heavily-defended-as-fair $2.50 per gigabyte to a more modest $0.30/GB, perhaps echoing AT&T’s forthcoming overlimit fee.

In fact, Bell’s revised plan is the same Internet Overcharging scheme under a new name.

The radical reduction in overlimit fees only further illustrates the “phoney-baloney” of providers attempting to monetize broadband usage under the guise of “fairness” and “congestion relief.”  Last week’s ’eminently fair’ $2.50 is this week’s ‘more than reasonable’ $0.30.

Bell exposed their hand — showing they have been bluffing about congestion all along.  An analysis of the proposed rates shows the company is still trying to target “heavy users.”  But instead of penalizing them into reducing their consumption, Bell is now seeking to monetize that usage, not control it.  By shifting aggregate usage costs to the wholesale market, Bell hopes individual customers will blame independent ISP’s for higher bills, not them.  Independent providers have to pass along their wholesale costs as part of the retail price of their service.  It’s a high tech shell game, one that consumers will always lose.

Despite this, Bell assumes the revised plan will take the bipartisan heat off its backside since it first proposed doing away with flat rate Internet service in Canada.

“With our filing today, we are officially withdrawing our UBB proposal,” said Mirko Bibic, Bell’s head of regulatory affairs. “Let’s move on, in my view, and use the CRTC hearing as an opportunity to approve those principles and get the implementation details right.”

"We don't like (Bell's proposal)."

Several Canadian officials were not impressed and one — Industry Minister Tony Clement — said exactly that.

Canada’s consumer groups and politicians have the giant telecom company on the run after using Bell CEO George Cope’s own words against him.  Cope openly admitted in conference calls with investors UBB had everything to do with monetizing broadband usage for profit.

Bell’s attempt to serve warmed-over Internet Overcharging from a new recipe isn’t flying among consumer groups either, who recognize it as more of the same leftovers, just under a new name.

Bill Sandiford, who heads a coalition of wholesale ISPs called the Canadian Network Operators Consortium, told the Globe & Mail Bell was simply presenting its usage-based pricing model in a more acceptable guise.

“We don’t think this is an about-face. It’s the same thing, just dressed up differently,” Mr. Sandiford said. “We don’t like it. It’s still wholesale UBB.”

Openmedia.ca, an online activist group, said Bell’s new proposal shows consumers are having an impact, but the fight is by no means over.

“We’re pleased that Canadians will now have the option to use indie ISPs like Teksavvy and Acanac to access the unlimited Internet,” said OpenMedia.ca’s Executive Director Steve Anderson. “This is a giant step forward for the Stop The Meter campaign, and a victory for those who support competition and choice in Canada’s Internet service market.”

“While this is a positive move, it is only a Band-Aid solution to a much larger problem. We at OpenMedia.ca hope the CRTC takes Bell’s submission as a sign that widespread usage-based billing is not an acceptable model for Internet pricing, and that it creates policy to support the affordable Internet.”

AT&T’s forthcoming changes to their broadband service include more than just an Internet Overcharging scheme.

As the Los Angeles Times reporter David Lazarus discovered, AT&T now reserves the right to terminate your service if you excessively annoy the company’s employees, perhaps while calling to complain about the company’s new 150-250GB usage limits.

Lazarus reports AT&T’s contract now stipulates the company can cancel your service “if you engage in conduct that is threatening, abusive or harassing” to the company’s workers, or for “frequent use of profane or vulgar language” when dealing with service reps.  At least they won’t wallop you with an early termination fee if they pull the plug on you.

But that’s not all.  AT&T also followed Verizon’s lead telling their existing DSL customers once something better arrives from the company, they can stop selling DSL. For AT&T, this means they can switch your standalone DSL service to U-verse with or without your permission, billing you for a potentially more expensive broadband service.

While U-verse delivers a much improved broadband experience over traditional DSL, some budget-minded AT&T customers tough it out with DSL because it often carries a lower price and does not require an expensive bundle of video and phone service to win substantial discounts.  U-verse does.

AT&T spokesman John Britton told the newspaper he couldn’t imagine the company actually doing this to customers, but he acknowledged that this is what the new contract says.  More than a few AT&T customers couldn’t image the nation’s largest phone company would need to cap broadband usage of their customers because of alleged “congestion” problems either.

AT&T’s support forums are being censored to stop a free and open discussion about the company’s elimination of an unlimited Internet experience.

We received word this morning from Stop the Cap! reader Roger, who tried to post a message including a link back to one of our stories exposing the myth of AT&T’s “congestion problems” to share with the large community of readers angry with AT&T about its Internet Overcharging scheme on its support forum.

“AT&T will not allow people to post links to your website,” Roger writes.  “Both myself and a friend of mine tried on two separate occasions to write messages that quoted from your facts and figures and linked back to them for readers looking for additional information, and AT&T removed them within minutes.”

Stop the Cap! can confirm AT&T is actively engaged in censorship on its support forum when I tried posting a message myself to test the theory, under my real name, including three links to three individual stories, and signed with a link back to our website’s home page.  Sure enough, within the hour, AT&T stripped out the links and implied we “revealed personal information” (about myself in the form of my name, which still appears as my ‘handle’) and were “spamming” the forum — a stretch when the only links were back to the content referenced in the piece.  A few other linked sites, including Broadband Reports, are not suffering the same fate when users link back to their content, at least for now.

(click to enlarge)

AT&T followed up claiming it does not allow messages that support the work of third-party groups, even if that “support” comes only from links back to content referenced in the forum.

“At least your message remained partially intact,” Roger adds.  “Ours were deleted completely.”

“With AT&T’s heavy handed ‘editors’ at work, no wonder there are concerns about Net Neutrality.  AT&T censors first, asks questions later.”

BitTorrent, the company behind the popular file sharing protocol routinely blamed by providers for overburdening broadband networks and by Hollywood for distributing pirated content, took a tentative step today to oppose Internet Overcharging schemes.

Eric Klinker, CEO wrote a guest piece for GigaOM calling out AT&T for its announced 150-250GB usage caps:

While the trend toward metered bandwidth is not inherently pro-consumer, ISPs have staked out a singular public rationale: data caps are necessary to limit the consumption of “bandwidth hogs” in order to protect the network experience for everyone else. Such concepts are simplistic and easy to imagine. They are also completely wrong.

And with that, Klinker stumbled into a public relations and marketing effort defending the company’s culpability for increasing broadband traffic, and proposing a resolution for their ‘part of the problem’:

Since any data traffic that doesn’t induce congestion on a fixed cost network is essentially free; applications can voluntarily play a role in traffic prioritization. And since BitTorrent is a high percentage of global Internet traffic, we have a responsibility to be a part of the solution.

This was the primary motivator around our release of a new protocol a year ago, called µTP. The protocol essentially senses congestion and self-regulates to avoid contributing to Internet traffic jams.

Because µTP can never induce network congestion, it doesn’t contribute to an ISP’s cost. An ISP still has regular network maintenance expenses, but remember, with a fixed-cost network, traffic only becomes an economic burden if it contributes to congestion and forces the need for expansion.

As a result, µTP is exceedingly friendly to ISPs and their business model. µTP is open-source, and we invite application and cloud services providers to work with us directly or in the IETF’s LEDBAT working group in the ongoing innovation and usage.

Klinker

Some providers and their allied interest groups have disputed the diminished impact Klinker cites as a benefit of µTP, but in provider-world, the BitTorrent “problem” is rapidly becoming yesterday’s news anyway — online video is the new boogeyman.  NPD Research just released numbers showing peer-to-peer use has dropped from 16 percent of all U.S. Internet users to 9 percent over the last three years.

After making a spirited sales pitch for what he hopes will represent peer-to-peer 2.0, Klinker surrenders on behalf of everyone else, arguing the solution to America’s ‘broadband crisis’ is speed throttles during peak usage periods, and time of day pricing.  Klinker suggests broadband users might need to plan their “on-demand” viewing well ahead, or face the kind of “congestion pricing” Londoners face if they attempt a journey by car into the city center at high noon.  Klinker suggests Netflix customers should pre-schedule downloads of their movies the night before watching them, or else pay a fee for instant gratification.

That assumes, of course, you know what you want to watch the day before you do, that you can download Netflix content (you cannot), and that you didn’t remember you could accomplish the same thing if Netflix shipped the DVD out to you by U.S. Mail.

Are broadband rationing coupons far behind?

Klinker’s willingness to submit his own company’s peer to peer technology to provider speed throttles is likely to earn him a dressing down by investors wondering what the future holds for a protocol that can be dosed with Xanax at provider will.  Handing over the power to make your file sharing technology painfully slow and frustrating is likely not going to win new converts, either.

Before willing to subject everyone to solutions for broadband providers’ scary predictions of a broadband exaflood, would it not be better to actually obtain verifiable evidence there is a congestion issue in the first place?