AT&T's Broadband Caps Start Now

AT&T's new broadband data caps take effect April 2, 2011, affecting more than 16 million U.S. broadband users. The new limits include 150 Gigabytes of consumption each month for DSL subscribers and 250 GBytes for UVerse users.

The typical Comcast residential broadband user consumes 2 Gbytes to 4 GBytes of bandwidth per month, Comcast's own studies have shown. See http://ipcarrier.blogspot.com/2010/12/typical-comcast-user-consumes-2-gbytes.html.

So the reason ISPs are worried about the impact of increased online video consumption is that the current level of usage is roughly equivalent to two or three or iTunes-sized movies per month. But everyone expects video consumption to keep growing.

A widespread shift to significant movie viewing online would disrupt usage patterns fairly quickly. But is probably fair to note that a typical consumer is two orders of magnitude (about 100 times) away from having to worry about the current caps.

AT&T's broadband data caps start today