FCC investigating data caps

Ars Technica reports. Summary:

Two prominent Washington DC tech policy groups have asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate Internet data caps in the US—with a special focus on AT&T.

Unlike competitors whose caps appear to be at least nominally linked to congestions during peak-use periods, AT&T seeks to convert caps into a profit center by charging additional fees to customers who exceed the cap. In addition to concerns raised by broadband caps generally, such a practice produces a perverse incentive for AT&T to avoid raising its caps even as its own capacity expands.

The fact that AT&T has just slapped a much smaller 150GB per month cap on its basic DSL subscribers seems strange to these groups, since the new cap is substantially lower than caps introduced years ago (and Comcast has been making plenty of cash since adopting the higher caps, so any economic arguments here are suspect).

The lower cap for DSL customers is especially worrying because one of the traditional selling points of DSL networks is that their dedicated circuit design helps to mitigate the impacts of heavy users on the rest of the network.