AT&T Really? Part 2
This deal is no deal… AT&T’s bandwidth capping plan is a monster in the closet. As I wrote last week, it’s one thing to view web pages, emails and maps online. But once users begin to download and watch videos, they will reach the data limit, quickly.
AT&T’s $25-a-month DataPro plan, $5 less than the existing unlimited plan, offers two gigabytes of data, which amounts to 10,000 e-mail messages without attachments, 4,000 Web pages, 500 photos and 200 minutes of video.
200 minutes of video! An hour long TV show will use approximately 550 Mb, A streamed movie from netflix will use approximately 300 Mb. That’s 3.63 TV shows / month. So I guess you better hope your favorite show is on repeat or hiatus for one week a month or you’ll hit the limit.
Here’s a quote (my italics):
Sugar Inc., the blog network for women, has an app with videos featuring celebrity gossip and interviews. “Video for us is growing extremely fast — and it’s going to cost us and the consumer a bunch of money, because of the data going over the wire,” said Brian Sugar, chief executive and a founder of the company.
His company is already considering how to offer people lower-bandwidth video. “Back in the olden days on the Internet, you’d always have the high-bandwidth and the low-bandwidth version of your Web site,” he said. Sugar might ask users whether they want to view a high-quality video or a lower-bandwidth, more pixilated one.
This is progress?
We’re back to designing on line content for those with low bandwidth data caps and high bandwidth caps. Those of use who have been in the internet world for a while know that this isn’t hard to do – it’s just a lot of extra work that will evolve again (hopefully) to being unnecessary.
What a shortsighted bait and switch scam.
Link to: App Makers Worry as Data Plans Are Capped, via NYT by Claire Cain Miller and Brad Stone