I saw this story on Attack of the Show on G4 today and went over to Engadget to find more information on this oh so glorious (NOT) news. Apparently, AT&T has decided to give all of us DSL and AT&T U-Verse users a monthly data cap.

AT&T will cap DSL and U-Verse internet, impose overage fees – Source Engadget

So if you have regular DSL from AT&T, you have a cap of 150GB per month and if you have U-Verse you get 250GB which somehow doesn’t include video for U-Verse customers which I assume means they stream from the internet. I wouldn’t know, it’s not available in my area.

So I guess it had to happen sooner or later and I probably don’t have anything to bitch about considering I don’t even play online games anymore. Although, I had planned on starting again, this has squashed that idea.

The Engadget article says that AT&T will be sending emails to their DSL customers next week telling them of this new suckfest with instructions on how to check your data usage so you will be able to tell how much bandwidth you are using so you don’t go over. If you do go over you get charged a penalty of $10 per 50GB you use over your cap.  They send you an email warning you that you are about to go over a certain percentage so you can either turn off your computer or switch to the Verizon 3/4G on your phone or CR-48.

They say that 98% of their customers won’t have an issue with this because they only use maybe 17GB per month. Well, to that I say that those people must only check their email and maybe go onto facebook and twitter once per day unlike those of us who like to play online games for hours, watch movies, YouTube videos, tv shows on Hulu and Tweet about it all about the same time.

Since they haven’t emailed me the data usage tool, I won’t know where I stand but I’ll bet it’s almost at the data cap. I have my Desktop going for TweetDeck, Lord of Ultima (online game), MS Money and whatever else and my CR-48 netbook for email, FB, Blogging and looking at websites with.

And to think, I was going to cancel our cable for internet TV via the Roku box to stream our tv shows and movies directly to our TV’s. So much for that idea. I’m sort of glad it didn’t pan out for us now because I’m sure we would have gone over our 150GB data cap the first week of the month.

Ugh, I feel like we’re living in the electronic age depression now lol. I’ll be standing in the data lines instead of the 1920’s depression bread lines. Then in about 40 years, if I’m still alive, I’ll tell kids “why when I was your age we had to wait in line for our data and we had to walk 5 miles to school uphill both ways in the snow.”

I can’t wait to see my data usage, I will update this post when I get my email from AT&T.

News and Image Source Engadget.

Update: I finally got the email today and this is the url that they gave me to see my usage www.MyUsage.att.com but they say in there that my usage will not be calculated until I’ve gone over 70% so that doesn’t show me anything.

I’ve installed the “Lord of the Rings Online” MMORPG game so I’ll play that for a few days and see what happens.