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You are here: Home / Science & Technology / Despicable AT&T

Despicable AT&T

by $8 blue check mistermix|  March 27, 20119:18 am| 31 Comments

This post is in: Science & Technology

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Is there any possible way that AT&T doesn’t suck? After imposing 150 GB/month usage caps on customers, it turns out that they can’t even count usage correctly:

AT&T’s data appears to be wholely corrupted. Some days, AT&T will under-report my data usage by as much as 91%. […] Some days, AT&T will over-report my data usage by as much as 4700%. […]

AT&T’s data doesn’t add up. If I take AT&T’s data, and add up the individual day’s usage as provided by them the totals don’t add up to the automatically calculated total for that date range! For example, for my account from February 18th to March 17th, AT&T says the total usage is 221GB down, 12.8GB up, 234GB total. But if I actually add up the individual days from feb 18th to march 17th, the totals are 206GB down and 11.95GB up, 217GB total! That’s an 8% difference just adding up the daily totals!

The major cable ISP (Time/Warner) in my area is offering “turbo” and “extreme” download rates, where users can choose to have an additional 10 or 20 Mbps downstream bandwidth. The additional speeds cost $10 and $20/month. Paying more for more I can understand. Paying the same for less, well, that’s the AT&T way.

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31Comments

  1. 1.

    JPL

    March 27, 2011 at 9:31 am

    Can someone explain the usage meter to me? I just installed U-Verse a few months ago and had to sign a contract and now they want to change the rules of the game. Why do I have to honor my contract but they don’t.
    Any idea how many hours of netflix and hulu one can access without being fined?

  2. 2.

    BD of MN

    March 27, 2011 at 9:40 am

    I bet comcast won’t be too far behind this experiment…

  3. 3.

    piratedan

    March 27, 2011 at 9:42 am

    hey now, we all know that these issues have free market solutions, you need less well then you’ll pay more, you want more, then you’ll pay more. See, they have a plan for everyone! This coupled with teh AT&T ad campaign makes me want to be a complete “luddite” and just use my land line and comp at home.

  4. 4.

    rufflesinc

    March 27, 2011 at 9:46 am

    If it was really a capacity issue, you’d think they’d do something like they did with cell phones and institute night and weekend gigabytes.

  5. 5.

    Dan

    March 27, 2011 at 9:52 am

    Despicable AT&T is my rap name.

  6. 6.

    me

    March 27, 2011 at 9:58 am

    @BD of MN: Comcast already caps at 250GB a month. TW doesn’t but they tried two years ago to rollout absurd 5GB/mo caps that created a lot of backlash and I expect them to try again with not quite so low caps.

  7. 7.

    Linda Featheringill

    March 27, 2011 at 10:06 am

    I don’t know if Windstream is available in your area or if it would meet your needs, but it might be worth looking into. I have been very pleased with them.

  8. 8.

    maya

    March 27, 2011 at 10:11 am

    A friend came for a visit here in NorCal last fall. He had AT&T wireless and cellphone. Couldn’t call out anywhere. Apparently, AT&T doesn’t have a lot of celltowers outside of major population areas. Something to keep in mind if you travel a lot. He finally had to borrow someone’s Verizon cellphone to make contact.
    Also, too, Hughes net satellite system has been doing the same thing re their FAP {Fair Access Policy}. When I originally had Hughes there were few problems, but after a couple of years I noticed I was getting red balled almost on a daily basis. They claimed I was over their FAP of X amount of GB’s per day usage. I knew this was BS and when I had a new system installed, Wildblue, the same installer told me that Hughes was selling more bandwidth than they actually had satellite access leases for. Think of an ISPs available bandwidth as a time share condo that they decide can now be rented out for 104, 208, 416, weekends a year, but, you will be able to purchase a bathroom fast pass for a few dollars more. That’s the new business model. Get used to it.

  9. 9.

    Tokyokie

    March 27, 2011 at 10:26 am

    Sure glad the antitrust regulators stood by and allowed Southwestern Bell to pretty much put the former Ma Bell monopoly back together.

  10. 10.

    Keith

    March 27, 2011 at 10:33 am

    As an AT&T user with a WinPhone, I truly regret ditching my Verizon contract. The FIRST WinPhone has been ready since December, but AT&T has been holding it up for months. The concensus now is that while every other carrier either has signed off on the update for MS to deploy, AT&T won’t let it deploy until May at the earliest.

    PS: It is a great phone anyway, but the carrier blows

  11. 11.

    RobNYC

    March 27, 2011 at 10:41 am

    I know people feel that Verizon is better. I can’t really comment on that as I never had a phone with them but aren’t they instituting bandwidth caps on their smart phones too? It seems like that’s the way it’s going for cell phone data from the major carriers.

    I don’t think it will be too long before AT&T does away with their unlimited data plans for iPhone users who were grandfathered in.

  12. 12.

    Nylund

    March 27, 2011 at 10:42 am

    @JPL:

    Why do I have to honor my contract but they don’t.

    This increasingly describes the world. Cell phone, cable, internet, etc. It increasingly feels like I’m losing a game of Calvinball where they can change the rules whenever they want, but I can’t.

    We see it with how Fox News treats workers as well. When it comes to unions, they think the gov’t should be able to re-write the contract whenever it wants, but for our Wall St. overlords, contracts are sacred and we can’t dare re-negotiate their pay, even with the gov’t was picking up the tab.

  13. 13.

    BD of MN

    March 27, 2011 at 10:53 am

    @me:

    @BD of MN: Comcast already caps at 250GB a month.

    sheeee-it… I didn’t know this, but went and looked at our account and you’re absolutely right. Our highest usage in the last 3 months was 74gb, so as long as the cap stays high I guess I won’t be able to complain too much…

  14. 14.

    Jim Pharo

    March 27, 2011 at 10:59 am

    The point is that due to regulatory capture there’s no force to require minimum levels of service/maximum price.

    Another “innovative” corporation using the government to gain a legal chokehold on our pocketbooks.

    There’s no reason in the world why the government should provide the infrastructure and allow competition if needed. Like water service or sewer service is (though even this is now been monetized for private gain in many places).

    Arguing about AT&T inability to count is a classic example of our being diverted onto side-show issues that have the effect of our conceding the main point, which is that internet service is both poor quality and over priced.

  15. 15.

    befuggled

    March 27, 2011 at 11:02 am

    My worst IT training experience involved some guys from AT&T. They lived nearby and (since they knew everything) didn’t bother to show up until after noon on the first two days of class, and on the third day the instructor had to kick them out of class because they hadn’t gotten the billing straightened out (in large part because they’d missed most of the first two days). They spent the rest of the day whining about that. Most of the time that they were in class they spent chatting to themselves and playing obnoxious wav files. When I left class on the final day they were nuking their workstation (which to be fair would be reimaged later).

  16. 16.

    Corpsicle

    March 27, 2011 at 11:18 am

    Im stuck paying Wildblue Satellite $80 a month for 17GB. Why? Because I live in the ass end of nowhere. (To broadband companies living within 30 minutes drive of 4 universities, one of them Ivy Fucking League, counts as the ass end of nowhere)
    Sadly, our broadband infrastructure is a fucking joke.

  17. 17.

    Roger Moore

    March 27, 2011 at 11:34 am

    @maya:
    Overselling bandwidth makes more sense than you think. It’s a lot like deciding how many access passes to sell to a toll road. If you set a cap so that the road will still be passable if everyone who owns a pass is trying to drive at the same time, you’ll be well under capacity most of the time and the cost per driver will be very high. It makes sense to oversell your capacity a fair bit because not everyone drives at the same time. That way you can fill the road closer to capacity most of the time, bringing down costs. The downside is that you’ll get nasty congestion under the worst conditions.

    The ISPs problem isn’t that they’re overselling their absolute capacity. It’s that they’re overselling by so much that they routinely can’t meet their promises. It’s like the difference between overselling your toll road to the point that it gets crowded when there’s a major event people want to get to and overselling to the point that it gets crowded every day at rush hour. One is a reasonable attempt to make good use of your capacity; the other is being dishonest about typical use.

  18. 18.

    WaterGirl

    March 27, 2011 at 11:38 am

    @JPL: I don’t have the answer to your question, but i do know that with Verizon, if THEY unilaterally change anything in the contract, you had a certain number of days in which you could call them (30? 60?) and they would have to let you out of your contract without penalty. At the time, there was a lot of info about that available on the internet.

    The same thing might be worth a try with AT&T.

  19. 19.

    maya

    March 27, 2011 at 11:53 am

    @Roger Moore: I understand what you are saying, however, they are well past your first paragraph and were deliberately cutting back on the individual FAP amounts to compensate for the overselling. I talked at length with one of the Hughes service reps, Kevin from Calcutta, and their spiel is that, no, I am using more bandwidth. One particular discussion we had was about my using radio streaming occasionally. I was told that 20 minutes of streaming would put me in the red ball zone. What?!? Very interesting since part of their advertising brags about the ability to stream media. The point is, they were lowering the FAP GB counting game over a period of time. Same as mistermix is finding with ATT&T.

  20. 20.

    RareSanity

    March 27, 2011 at 12:30 pm

    After imposing 150 GB/month usage caps on customers, it turns out that they can’t even count usage correctly

    Dear AT&T Customer,

    BFD!

    What are you going to do about it?

    Tell you what, sue us! ROFL! Yeah, that’ll work. Can you afford to battle our multi-million dollar legal department? We’ll bleed you dry before the case even gets to a trial.

    Ok, here’s a better idea…complain to the Congress! ROFL! Do you know how often we “make it rain” in Congress? I’m not kidding, you’d be surprised how cheap those whores are. We spend a couple million a year for a few hundred people to let us make billions. Whaddaya gonna do, vote them out? We’ll buy their replacement too.

    But seriously, maybe you should complain to the FCC, FTC, DOJ, or one of the various alphabet organizations in Washington. ROFL! Have you forgotten that those are the same organizations that authorized us to be in the position to screw you so readily?

    Sincerely,
    AT&T

    P.S.
    Fuck you, pay me!

  21. 21.

    Mako

    March 27, 2011 at 12:35 pm

    @JPL:

    Read the bottom of this article.

    http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/is-atts-new-150gb-dsl-data-cap-justified.ars

  22. 22.

    Mako

    March 27, 2011 at 12:39 pm

    @RareSanity:
    “…you should complain to the FCC, FTC, DOJ, or one of the various alphabet organizations in Washington. ”

    State Attorney Generals often seek higher office.

  23. 23.

    me

    March 27, 2011 at 12:46 pm

    @Mako: Exactly. It might not be a big deal now but in the not too distant future it will be. Look how per-person bandwidth usage has increased over the last 10 years.

  24. 24.

    Peter

    March 27, 2011 at 1:00 pm

    Someone needs to explain “rounding error” to the guy in the quote. Adding up 30 daily totals which have probably been rounded down to the nearest GB (or tenth of a GB in the upload case) will not and should not add up to the same thing as the monthly total. If AT&T is rounding the daily usage totals down then those numbers make perfect sense.

  25. 25.

    Tim in SF

    March 27, 2011 at 1:35 pm

    This is a company that didn’t blink before handing over your emails and personal data to the Bush Administration, when simply asked.

    Anyone who does business with AT&T deserves what they get.

  26. 26.

    jheartney

    March 27, 2011 at 1:37 pm

    @JPL:

    Why do I have to honor my contract but they don’t.

    Just got this in my email:

    Dear AT&T Internet Service Customer:

    We are updating the AT&T High Speed Internet Terms of Service. We are making these changes to provide greater clarity around the terms of your service and…

    (snip)

    Service/Site Changes: We have added language stating that AT&T may need to modify or discontinue your service, either temporarily or permanently.

    (snip)

    Collection Agency Fees: We have added language that you are responsible for paying collection agency fees AT&T incurs when recovering any money owed to us.

    And the kicker:

    Abusive Treatment: We have added language that allows AT&T to terminate the service of customers who repeatedly harass or abuse our employees.

    I think they were wise to add this last provision.

  27. 27.

    koalaholik

    March 27, 2011 at 1:54 pm

    Abusive Treatment: We have added language that allows AT&T to terminate the service of customers who repeatedly harass or abuse our employees.

    Now that is irony – I have worked on the land line side of AT&T (starting with Pacific Telephone in the old Ma Bell days) for 30 years. Since SBC bought us a few years ago, employee harassment has been the standard method of operation. The undelying business philosphy of the “new” AT&T seems to be “distrust everyone”.

    SBC has always had a reputation for being an SOB to work for or deal with and they continue to burnish that reputation.

  28. 28.

    superdestroyer

    March 27, 2011 at 3:24 pm

    I wonder if everyone on the left realizes that AT&T is the only unionized employer in the cellular communications business. Is Mistermix just being greedy because he does not want to help fund the higher wages and benefits that the union workers at AT&T receive?

  29. 29.

    Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal

    March 27, 2011 at 5:32 pm

    @koalaholik:

    i remember when pac bell and nynex used to compete for meanest sobs in the business..i never understood how nynex stayed in business until my job included dealing with nynex customers as well as employees, then i got it, it was a lions and hyenas type thing….

    of course, if you really wanted to mindfuck your world view, deal with nynex before lunch, then bell south afterwards, bell south was as charming as could be, and as helpful to a ld carrier as you could ask for, but you better know your job, and theirs, and be able to explain it while passive agressively putting on your best manners.

  30. 30.

    Angry Black Lady

    March 27, 2011 at 5:42 pm

    The major cable ISP (Time/Warner) in my area is offering “turbo” and “extreme” download rates

    are you required to drink mountain dew whenever you download shit?

  31. 31.

    pjcamp

    March 27, 2011 at 10:10 pm

    “Paying the same for less, well, that’s the AT&T way.”

    And it is the reason I’m going to Comcast business.

    All of these data caps are just ways of trying to monetize streaming video and online games by the bandwidth provider. Piss on that. If you do much of either, you’ll blow through 150 GB in a matter of hours.

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