But I could pay them an extra $10/GB (their definition of "GB") to have better connectivity.
With multiple people in my home, I hit this limit with just streaming (granted running in the background pretty much all the time). It’s frustrating as most services don’t have a way to throttle and neither does my home router. I’d like to have something that can throttle devices to a particular speed.
But this seems like a pure cash grab for AT&T and fear how bad it will be when I get faster speeds.
My other alternative is Comcast and it’s even worse.
I'm guessing you are currently using AT&T's modem/router because you mentioned frustration that your router does not support throttling, which if you were using your own you could address by simply buying a router that does.
You do this by getting their XFi Complete plan. It's $25/month on top of your base plan, but it includes both the modem/router rental and unlimited so is only $11/month more than a non-unlimited plan with a modem/router rental ($14/month) on top of the base plan.
That being said AT&T fiber at least doesn't allow you to use your own modem. You are required to use their equipment because they intentionally force no hardware to be "compatible" with their handoff. Last time I was using them you had to do some convoluted bullshit to even try (see https://github.com/MonkWho/pfatt)
(thank you to the people who kept that working btw)
The cable coming from the street to my home is RG-6. There is some disagreement between different things I've found Googling as to the maximum data rate RG-6 can handle, but it seems to not be over 1.5 Gbps.
That would put an upper limit of a little under 500 TB on how much data it could handle in a month.
The cable going from the equipment on the pole that my cable is connected to doesn't look to be any different. I can't get a good look at it to tell what it actually is.
Looking around my neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods that's all I see. I don't see anything different connecting my area to whatever is upstream of all of us.
That suggests that a whole bunch of us as a group have a physical limit of 500 TB internet data per month. (Actually less because those cables are also carrying cable TV).
Obviously they can't serve a whole large city or region on just 500 TB aggregate data per month, so they must have something with higher capacity going out to some kind of nodes that split out into multiple connections to the lower capacity part of the network, probably a multiple level tree topology with decreasing node capacity the farther you get from the root, but I've not been able to actually find any of those nodes.
Presumably when they need more than 500 TB per month for some area they have to replace the top node in that area with a node with a higher capacity connection to its parent, and then have that node serve two or more 500 TB per month nodes. How easy or hard and how cheap or expensive that will be likely varies a lot from neighborhood to neighborhood.
This might raise the price of basic internet service.
I would say to put an end to all data caps. Instead state what speed you get for how much transfer, and what speed you get after that. There should never be charges for 'going over your limit'.
