Surveying the broadband landscape in this country, It's either caps or slowdowns or filters. (Unless you're on Comcast, then it's a two-for-one.) Caps seem like the lesser of the three evils, if only because they're fairly transparent—filtering and slowdowns are more insidious, since you might not be immediately aware it's happening. They're essentially legitimized forms of sabotage. Verizon is the only major ISP leaving traffic totally unfettered, but I wonder how long that will last.

AT&T is conducting a market trial in Reno, Nevada to evaluate a usage-based model that could potentially help address today’s trend of explosive bandwidth usage. The trial may be extended to one other market by the end of the year.

Beginning Nov. 1, 2008, new AT&T High Speed Internet customers in Reno will receive a bandwidth usage amount ranging from between 20 Gigabytes (GB) and 150 GB, depending on their broadband speed tier. Later this year, existing AT&T High Speed Internet customers in Reno will become a part of this trial if their monthly usage exceeds 150 GB in one month. These customers will receive a usage amount of 150 GB per month.

Once they're a part of the trial, customers will receive a one month grace period the first time usage is exceeded. Thereafter, customers will be charged $1 for every GB over their determined usage amount. All customers in the trial will receive a bandwidth measuring tool so they can track their usage. We will let all impacted customers know about the trial specifics at least 60-days ahead of any overage charges. We’ll also proactively let customers know each time they reach 80 percent of their usage amount. We will not terminate service due to customer usage.

We have previously stated that some type of usage based model, for those customers who have abnormally high usage patterns, seems inevitable. A small group of customers are using the majority of bandwidth on our network. In fact, almost 50 percent of total bandwidth is used by just five percent of customers – customers, for example, who are uploading and downloading the equivalent of more than 40,000 YouTube videos or 40 million e-mails a month. This kind of heavy usage has an impact on all of our customers.

This trial will help us evaluate ways of dealing with surging usage trends while continuing to meet customer needs for a high quality broadband experience at an affordable price.

[AT&T]

The cap is being put into place to control a small number of users who have set up file sharing servers and are pumping out far more than that a day. If you're a downloader, don't you worry, no download cap is going to be put into place, so feel free to continue using the hell out of that gorgeous 100Mbps connection of yours.

Sure makes that Time Warner download cap of 40GB per month seem stingy as hell, doesn't it? Stupid jerkface American ISPs. [Ars Technica]

Supposedly, consumption-based billing is aimed at all you assholes downloading movies from BitTorrent—"heavy users of large downloads," the purported 5 percent that swallows "up to 50 percent of network capacity" in order to improve network performance. But this is, at least partially, BS.

Everybody is using more bandwidth than ever, and that is going to continue ramping up with services like Netflix and iTunes that keep pushing these "large downloads" into the mainstream. So, it might only hit a small percentage of users really hard right now, but soon enough it'll be hitting everybody, which is the real point.

At the same time, ISPs and telcos are lobbying hard against network neutrality, largely so they can slap the content providers themselves with higher costs for equal priority on the network with the ISP's own services. In other words, they're reaching into the cookie jar with both hands—from the top, and a hole they're trying to cut into the bottom.

For now, Time Warner's plan will only affect new users starting sometime in the next couple of months, and they actually give you tools to monitor your data diet, but if there isn't a total revolt and pillaging of their home office, expect them to roll it out nationally and other providers to follow suit. [AP/Wired]