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Ladies and gentlemen, the days of unlimited broadband may be numbered in the United States, and we're not talking wireless this time -- AT&T says it will implement a 150GB monthly cap on landline DSL customers and a 250GB cap on subscribers to U-Verse high speed internet starting on May 2nd. AT&T will also charge overage fees of $10 for every additional 50GB of data, with two grace periods to start out -- in other words, the third month you go over the cap is when you'll get charged. DSLReports says it has confirmation from AT&T that these rates are legitimate, and that letters will go out to customers starting March 18th.

How does AT&T defend the move? The company explains it will only impact two percent of consumers who use "a disproportionate amount of bandwidth," and poses the caps as an alternative to throttling transfer speeds or disconnecting excessive users from the service completely. Customers will be able to check their usage with an online tool, and get notifications when they reach 65 percent, 90 percent and 100 percent of their monthly rates.

We just spoke with AT&T representative Seth Bloom and confirmed the whole thing -- rates are exactly as described above, and the company will actually begin notifying customers this week. He also told us that those customers who don't yet have access to the bandwidth usage tool won't get charged until they do, and that AT&T U-Verse TV service won't count towards the GB cap.

Update: What prompted this change to begin with? That's what we just asked AT&T. Read the company's statement after the break.

We are committed to providing a great experience for all of our Internet customers. Less than 2 percent of our Internet customers could be impacted by this approach - those who are using a disproportionate amount of bandwidth. We will communicate early and often with these customers so they are well aware of their options before they incur any additional usage charges.

The top 2 percent of residential subscribers uses about 20 percent of the bandwidth on our network. Just one of these high-traffic users can utilize the same amount of data capacity as 19 typical households. Lopsided usage patterns can cause congestion at certain points in the network, which can slow Internet speeds and interfere with other customers' access to and use of the network. Our new plan addresses another concern: customers strongly believe that only those who use the most bandwidth should pay more than those who don't use as much. That's exactly what this does – and again, 98% of our customers will not be impacted by this.

I fear the day they do shit like this in Sweden.

Stop complaining, I have high speed internet and a cap of 30GB a month, and for 1gb of extra GB downloaded I pay 8$

So your 250gb cap is fine...

Stop QQ'ing some people are much worse than you...

I'm sure it'll take trend sooner or later at least in the United States.

Welcome to Canada!

I'm sure it'll take trend sooner or later at least in the United States.



Considering I've been with AT&T for about a decade and they decide to pull this out of nowhere.. uhh yeah I'm going to QQ.

After seeing so much from Aussie friends (and maybe a few others) about their caps and such, I thought this would have happened a long time ago. 250gb is just fine anyways, anyone that DLs more than that a month is probably not downloading legal stuff anyways. They'd better impress on people about using security options on wireless routers though. Otherwise some jackass neighbor will do their major downloading on other people's routers when they hit their cap.

Don't you dare !

If they mention lowering the initial 250gb limit, there will be a shitstorm, and they probably would end up not doing it.

I really can't believe that you guys still have something like a caplimit for internet in the U.S. Things like that are unheard of in the Netherlands.

This is I believe the first time there will actually be a cap for a U.S. company.

Again I would like to state how much bs this is. They have 100Gigabit Ethernet coming out going on a Terabit and beyond.

How does that have anything to do with this? You do realize that even if you had a 50Mbps connection with a 100 Gigabit Ethernet card that you still can transfer at a maximum of 50Mbps right? You could send data to other computers on the network at 100Gbps if you had all the right hardware but that wouldn't affect your data cap.

250g is a lot though D:

erm... is there a way to tell how much bandwith ive used?