I’ve been hearing a bit of concern from cord cutters about data caps in the last few weeks.
It’s an interesting situation — all our local broadband providers also sell pay television packages.
As bundle customers tire of bigger bills, some decide to try cutting the cord and replacing their pay TV in favor of a combination of internet streaming and over-the-air antennas.
Internet providers like AT&T, Time Warner and Frontier have certainly noticed the exodus, and since they like making a profit, it just makes sense that they’re not going to go out of their way to make things easy or cheap for cord cutters.
Most of us have limited choices for broadband — usually the local phone company or a cable company — so when the cord gets cut, we do it by dropping the TV service and keeping an internet-only plan.
I received an email from a reader this week outlining her plan to call AT&T to drop U-Verse TV service.
She wanted to know what she might be overlooking in her planning, and I told her to be sure to inquire about the plan’s data cap.
AT&T recently announced a plan to provide unlimited data to U-Verse or DirecTV customers who bundle TV and internet. The same announcement mentioned that data caps would increase for internet-only customers. The amount of data included depends on the speed (and monthly cost) of the internet service, so it’s important to figure out how much streaming you expect to happen in your household each month and plan accordingly.
For AT&T internet-only customers, if the speed of your plan is 6 megabits per second or slower, your data cap is 300 gigabytes per month. If your speed is 12 Mbps to 75 Mbps the cap is 600 GB per month, and if your plan’s speed is 100 Mbps or faster, your cap is one terabyte per month.
The caps mean financial consequences if you go over your limit. If U-Verse internet-only customers exceed their cap, AT&T will charge $10 for each additional 50GB of data with a maximum overage of $100 per month.
By the way, if you happen to be in one of AT&T’s old DSL plans (pre U-Verse), your cap remains 150 GB per month.
AT&T will lift your cap completely if you pay an extra $30 per month for any plan.
Of course, the cap figures are pretty useless if you don’t know how much data is consumed by streaming.
AT&T estimates the 300 GB plans can stream 100 hours of HD video per month, or about three hours per day.
You can do the math for the higher caps, but it’s easy to see how a household full of internet users with two or three TVs and multiple phones or tablets could easily hit the cap each month.
Families with multiple TVs or lots of kids will likely be on a faster plan with a 600 GB cap, but I know people who frequently come close to the higher caps, too.
AT&T says approximately 4 percent of its U-Verse customers will exceed the higher data caps.
So should you worry?
Probably not. Go ahead and cut that cord.
AT&T will notify you during the month several times if you’re approaching the cap, and even if you do go over, an extra $10 or even $20 every so often isn’t the end of the world.
If you find yourself consistently over the cap, you’ll have to do some figuring to see if the extra $30 for unlimited data is right for your family.
As for the other providers, as far as I can tell, Time Warner and Frontier do not cap their internet plans, but check with your provider if you’re thinking of cutting the cord.
I’d like to hear about your experiences cutting the cord. Feel free to send me an email.
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Jim Rossman writes for The Dallas Morning News. He may be reached at jrossman@dallasnews.com.
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