Real Life

AT&T axing the unlimited plan with a 25 dollar plan with a very small cap (2 Gb) had caused many AT&T customers to become outraged and even some ditching AT&T all together to other providers like Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile. I am against their decision even though I am grandfathered to the unlimited plan and I use quite a lot of bandwidth. 2 GB may be enough today, but with video streaming and video chats, this 2 GB won’t go that far. Even with wifi, its nearly impossible to stay connected to a hotspot when you are moving. With 4G coming, do you think these tiered internet service will go away?

Not a chance! It will get even worse with even smaller caps and higher overage costs. Also, Cable Internet and DSL is heading towards the same direction with Time Warner wanting metered Internet last winter. They revealed metered Internet plans in specific areas with outrageously small caps that caused subscribers to be outraged. Another thing is that Time Warner is the only service provided in the area and there was technically no alternative at all. Do you want a metered Internet future where you have to worry about how much videos you see on YouTube, downloading movies and music off legit site, streaming video and video conferencing, tasks that uses a lot of bandwidth… I think most don’t. Metered and tiered Internet stifles innovation and it will hurt businesses like Netflix, Voip providers, streaming video companies like Crunchyroll and others. The Internet should remain accessible as long people are paying a fair price. Not to mention, it doesn’t cost them anything to provide the bandwidth, so they are probably doing it to milk more of the customers on top of the high profits they are generating already.

If you think that Verizon is not going to do the same to the smartphone data plans like AT&T, you are dead wrong. They will and others will follow because you know they are greedy. FCC needs to regulate them to stop these companies from pushing anticompetitive practices that milk the customers with high overage bills. Cell phone providers are already charging outrageous fees for texting that cost them nearly nothing and voice, so why they should further milk the customers with ripoff data plans. It’s true that light users will benefit from it, but habits can change when technological changes occur. If so, get ready to pay extra for your already expensive phone bill.

Also, they need more competition, more competition means that if the Internet company for example forces a metered Internet plans on all the customers, a competitor can come in that provides unlimited Internet plans and take the customers away from the other company. As a result, they won’t put in place these plans. Competition prevents this and I’m sure cable, telecom and cell phone providers could use a bit more competition.