AT&T’s CAF II Data Caps

AT&T recently launched its CAF II cellular data plan in a number of rural areas. This is being launched from the federal program that is giving AT&T $2.5 billion dollars spread over 6 years to bring broadband to about 1.1 million homes. That works out to $2,300 per home.

Customers are guaranteed speeds of at least 10 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. The broadband product is priced at $60 per month with a contract or $70 per month with no contract. Installation is $99. The product comes with a WiFi router that also includes 4 Ethernet ports for wired connections.

For a rural household that has never had broadband this is finally going to get them connected to the web like everybody else. But the 10 Mbps speed of the product is already obsolete and in the footnotes to the product AT&T warns that a customer may not be able to watch two HD video streams at the same time.

But the real killer is the data cap which is set at 160 gigabytes per month. Extra data above this limit will cost a household $10 for each 50 gigabytes (or fraction thereof). AT&T has obviously set the data cap this low because that was the cap suggested by the FCC in the CAF II order.

Let me throw out some statistics that shed some light on how puny the 160 GB month cap is. Following are some statistics about data usage for common functions in the home:

• The average desktop or laptop uses about 3 GB per month for basic functions like email, upgrading software, etc.
• Cisco says that the average smartphone uses about 8 GB per month on WiFi.
• Web browsing uses about 150 MB per hour.
• Streaming music uses 1 GB for 24 hours of streaming
• Facebook estimates that it’s average user uses the service for 20 hours per month, which consumes 2.5 GB.
• Video is the real bandwidth eater. Netflix says that an SD video uses 0.7 GB per hour or 1.4 GB for a movie. They say HD video uses 3 GB per hour or 6 GB per movie.
• The average online gamer uses at least 5 GB per month, and for some games much more than this.

So how does all of this stack up for an average family of three? It might look something like this:

3 computers / laptops                      9 GB

3 Smartphones                                24 GB

60 hours of web browsing               9 GB

3 social networks                              8 GB

60 hours of streaming music          3 GB

1 Gamer                                             5 GB

Schoolwork                                      10 GB

Subtotal                                            68 GB

This leaves 92 GB for watching video for a month. That will allow a home to watch 15 HD movies a month or 30 1-hour shows. That means one TV show per day for the whole household. Any more than that and you’d go over the data cap. The majority of video content on the web is now only available in HD and much of the content on Netflix and Amazon no longer come in SD. To make matters worse, these services are now starting to offer 4k video which is 4 times more data intensive than HD video.

Also note that this subtotal doesn’t include other normal functions. Working from home can use a lot of bandwidth. Taking online courses is data intensive. IoT devices like home security cameras can use a lot of bandwidth. And we are starting to see smart home devices add up to a pile of data that goes on behind the scenes without our knowledge.

The fact is that within a few years the average home is going to likely exceed the AT&T data cap without watching any video. The bandwidth used for everything we do on the web keeps increasing over time.

To show how ridiculously low this cap is, compare it to AT&T’s ‘access’ program which supplies broadband to low-income homes for speeds up to the same 10 Mbps and prices up to $10 per month. That low-income plan has a 1 terabyte data cap – over six times higher than the CAF II data cap. Since the company offers both products from the cellular network it’s impossible for the company to claim that the data caps are due to network constraints or any other technical issues. AT&T set the data cap at the low 160 GB because the FCC stupidly suggested that low amount in the CAF II order. The low data cap is clearly about money.

The last time we measured our home with 3 users we used over 700 GB per month. We are cord cutters and watch all video on the web. We work from home. And our daughter was taking on-line classes. Under the AT&T CAF II product our monthly bill would be $170 per month. And even then we would have a data product that would not allow us to do the things we want to do, because the 10 Mbps download speed would not allow all three of us to use the web at the same time. If you’ve been reading my blog you’ve heard me say often what a colossal waste of money the CAF II program is. The FCC gave AT&T $2.5 billion to foist this dreadful bandwidth product on rural America.