AT&T Announces U-Verse TV Streaming Plan

It's interesting how they don't have the bandwidth to offer paying customers internet without caps, yet they somehow have enough bandwidth to sell more cable style packages they directly profit from.

This is a u-verse add on feature, not a wireless add on feature... not sure what you are getting at...

Hes getting at that they have very small bw caps for their top tier U verse service yet anything "them oriented" is just fine..

As a U-verse customer I can attest that they don't seem to be enforcing their 250 GB limit. I haven't detected any throttling when I've exceeded the cap. AT&T wireless may be a joke, but U-verse is quite good.

Eh they aren't supposed to throttle.. They are supposed to bill you 10$ per 50 gigs.. Perhaps they only do it in larger areas..

Supposedly they have to warn you that you are exceeding your limit before charging you. I have not experienced this either. You may be right in that it may only apply to more densely populated areas where usage is higher. I live in a small city with a population of less than 30,000.

Here is the thing: Cable companies use a shared line from your house to their central office. Phone companies have a dedicated line from your house to the switching station. As a result, cable companies have caps for a different reason than phone companies. Cable companies don't want you to overload the network between you and their central office. Because phone companies already have a dedicated twisted pair from your house to the switching station, there is no effect on other customers by transferring excessive amounts of data between your house and the switching station. As a result, phone companies have caps because they don't want to overload their connection from the switching station to the internet backbone.

In other words, cable companies have a legitimate reason for having caps. Phone companies do it because they are greedy. The fact that it is not the connection between your house and the switching station that is what AT&T is worried about overloading is evidenced by the fact that they let 3rd party DSL ISPs offer uncapped DSL service.

AT&T U-Verse is not cable. Because cable uses a shared line, all of the TV channels, whether or not you are paying for TV, are coming down the line to your house. The cable company encrypts the ones they don't want to give away for free and then charges for access to a box that decrypts the TV signal. U-Verse, at least in my area, is just something that AT&T is running on top of the existing phone network. As a result, it is very likely that AT&T is only sending the channels that you are watching down your line if you have U-Verse's TV service. Because they only need one copy of each channel going to the switching station, there is not really any additional load on their network created by their customers watching TV.

Now, it is very likely that the phone company would at minimum have a caching server for their video service in their switching station. As a result, video on demand service would most likely not add much load to AT&T's network.