AT&T Gambles on Metered Use

AT&T is considering joining Comcast and Time-Warner Cable in metered usage. Quietly, last Friday, AT&T notified the FCC that it was starting a metered use trial in Reno, NV on November 1st.

We first wrote about this possibility in mid-June, you may recall. What's interesting is the caps will not be selectable via a tier, but rather based on your speed. The fast the speed, the higher your cap.

The caps will range between 20 GB for subscribers with 768 Mbps service to 150 GB for those with 10 Mbps service. Customers will be charged $1 for every gigabyte over their determined usage amount.

However, in the document sent to the FCC (.PDF), AT&T said:

AT&T also will send written notices to customers when they reach 80 percent of their monthly usage tier to remind them of the usage tier and the additional charges that apply for exceeding it. In addition, the first time a customer exceeds the applicable monthly usage tier, AT&T will send a written notice reminding the customer again about the usage tier, but we will not impose any additional charges at that time. Only after the second time the customer exceeds the applicable monthly usage tier will the customer be subject to additional per-gigabyte charges.

Don't like being in the trial? Too bad: the only way out is to cancel your service, but AT&T did say any such users would avoid any early termination fees.

Unlike Comcast and like Time-Warner, AT&T will provide customers with a metering tool, as well.

The continued experimentation and adoption of caps and metered usage comes at a time when media companies are continuing to push new services to consumers, such as "Instant Viewing" (Netflix) and such items As I've said before, things like that can eat up your cap pretty quickly, and basically, you can't have it both ways.