Anyone know if AT&T broadband throttles your connection for video?

[brant]

I have AT&T fastaccess DSL 6.0 @ work.

I've been doing some online training that required me to watch a lot of videos. last night, videos started taking a long time to load, and sometimes would lose the connection completely.


does anyone know for sure if at&t throttles your bandwidth if you use download a certain amount of data?

i've searched the at&t small business site but haven't been able to find an answer.

[WERA689]

I have the same service, in the same area, and I've not seen any indication of throttling here.

[BattleZone]

AT&T is conducting a market trial in Reno, Nevada to evaluate a usage-based model that could potentially help address today’s trend of explosive bandwidth usage. The trial may be extended to one other market by the end of the year.

Beginning Nov. 1, 2008, new AT&T High Speed Internet customers in Reno will receive a bandwidth usage amount ranging from between 20 Gigabytes (GB) and 150 GB, depending on their broadband speed tier. Later this year, existing AT&T High Speed Internet customers in Reno will become a part of this trial if their monthly usage exceeds 150 GB in one month. These customers will receive a usage amount of 150 GB per month.

Once they're a part of the trial, customers will receive a one month grace period the first time usage is exceeded. Thereafter, customers will be charged $1 for every GB over their determined usage amount. All customers in the trial will receive a bandwidth measuring tool so they can track their usage. We will let all impacted customers know about the trial specifics at least 60-days ahead of any overage charges. We’ll also proactively let customers know each time they reach 80 percent of their usage amount. We will not terminate service due to customer usage.

We have previously stated that some type of usage based model, for those customers who have abnormally high usage patterns, seems inevitable. A small group of customers are using the majority of bandwidth on our network. In fact, almost 50 percent of total bandwidth is used by just five percent of customers – customers, for example, who are uploading and downloading the equivalent of more than 40,000 YouTube videos or 40 million e-mails a month. This kind of heavy usage has an impact on all of our customers.

This trial will help us evaluate ways of dealing with surging usage trends while continuing to meet customer needs for a high quality broadband experience at an affordable price.

Not sure if this is in place system-wide yet.

[brant]

i hope they don't start putting caps on their business customers.


we send and receive massive amounts of data. i could tolerate usage fees, as long as there are no bandwidth restrictions.

[Lee L]

THey have not done anything to Business customers and have said that they are not planning on it. Also, teh trials have not moved nationwide. I am sure places around the net would light up if they had. It is probably just the fact that ATT just had some issues at that time.

[LarryFlowers]

You also have to consider the source for the video you are accessing... if a lot of people are accessing the same training video or the server it resides on you can see some slowing. If you are experiencing the slowing, open another tab in the browser window and go to speedtest.net and check your speeds while the video is running and then test it again without the video running.