In the past, when I’ve written about dropping cable TV and getting television services strictly over the Net, I’ve always included the warning that those folks with Internet providers who have bandwidth caps will need to monitor their usage.
For Houston, that warning comes with an caveat that Comcast’s Internet service does not include a data cap. In this market at least, Comcast’s 250-gigabyte cap is “suspended”, according to the wording that appears next to customers’ bandwidth meters.
AT&T has data caps for its two types of Internet access. Its newer U-verse service has a 250-GB cap, while old-school DSL has a 150-GB cap. I always thought that, while Comcast was suspending its cap in Houston, AT&T was not.
It turns out, that may not be the case.
In a conversation Sunday on the Facebook page of a friend who had just dropped cable TV to become a cord-cutter, I mentioned that Comcast wasn’t enforcing a cap while AT&T was. That assertion was challenged by another participant in the discussion, who said AT&T also was not enforcing its U-verse cap. To provide evidence, he offered up this screenshot:
I did some research and it does seem that this claim is true. As this thread on AT&T’s own customer forums indicate, the 250-GB U-verse cap is indeed not being enforced (and may never have been). That doesn’t appear to be true for the 150-GB DSL cap – customers who go over that are dinged $10 for an additional 50 GB of data.
If this is indeed accurate, then U-verse users who are cord cutters don’t have to worry about broaching the 250-GB limit, at least for now. I’ve reached out to AT&T for clarity. I’ll update this blog post if I get it.
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