AT&T's 150GB data cap for its DSL customers goes into effect today.
Users who exceed 150GB will be charged $10 for ever additional 50GB they consume. AT&T, however, said that less than 2 percent of its customers will be affected because the average DSL customer user about 18GB per month.
AT&T said it will notify customers when they have exceeded 60 percent, 90 percent, and 100 percent of their monthly data allowance. The provider will also provide access to a usage report as well as tools like a usage calculator and examples of the kind of activity that will eat up data.
U-Verse high-speed Internet customers, meanwhile, will have a 250GB cap.
AT&T first announced plans for the caps in March, and has been notifying customers of the impending changes since then.
Reports of a 150GB data cap for AT&T customers dates back to 2008. At that point, AT&T kicked off a test for new customers in Reno, Nevada, allowing them to use between 20GB and 150GB of bandwidth per month depending on their speed tier.
That came one month after Comcast announced that all its residential customers would be subject to a 250GB per month data limit. Comcast had come under fire in 2007 for cutting off service to customers who consumed a large amount of bandwidth but refusing to provide those customers with information on how much bandwidth they were able to use. That led to accusations of Comcast cutting off access to P2P services like BitTorrent, an FCC enforcement action, and a net neutrality debate that continues today.
That year, Time Warner Cable also experimented with bandwidth caps, but a public backlash prompted the provider to scrap the test in April 2009. Time Warner took some heat because its caps were relatively low – between 5GB and 40GB. The company eventually announced it would also offer a 100GB "super tier" and unlimited service for $150 per month, but by then, Congress was already up in arms and interest groups were circulating online petitions against the caps.