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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

I use AT&T’s 50mbs broadband as they don’t offer me fiber. Their cap is 1024GB/month and $10 for every 50MB over.

With multiple people in my home, I hit this limit with just streaming (granted running in the background pretty much all the time). It’s frustrating as most services don’t have a way to throttle and neither does my home router. I’d like to have something that can throttle devices to a particular speed.

But this seems like a pure cash grab for AT&T and fear how bad it will be when I get faster speeds.

My other alternative is Comcast and it’s even worse.

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Did you print that right? Most phone plans are $10 for every GB. I cannot stress how absurdly evil, how anti-person, how undefensible $10/50MB would be. Absolutely craven absurd obscene pricing. Any company charging that should not be left running.

its a typo, $10 is 50GB up to a cap of $200/m on non-FTTH, and if i recall correctly i was offered unmetered data if i purchased a full (non-basic) directv or att tv plan (which should be illegal, tbh)

How is Comcast worse? Their monthly cap is about 20% higher, and if you are willing to use their modem/router you can get add unlimited for around $11/month.

I'm guessing you are currently using AT&T's modem/router because you mentioned frustration that your router does not support throttling, which if you were using your own you could address by simply buying a router that does.

You do this by getting their XFi Complete plan. It's $25/month on top of your base plan, but it includes both the modem/router rental and unlimited so is only $11/month more than a non-unlimited plan with a modem/router rental ($14/month) on top of the base plan.

Well from a consumer POV, Comcast forcing you to lease their hardware that phones home to the cloud at all times, remotely set wifi password and all on the xfi gateway for a discount on rent seeking behaviour is incredibly bullshit.

That being said AT&T fiber at least doesn't allow you to use your own modem. You are required to use their equipment because they intentionally force no hardware to be "compatible" with their handoff. Last time I was using them you had to do some convoluted bullshit to even try (see https://github.com/MonkWho/pfatt)

Just to be clear you don't have to lease Comcast hardware to get unlimited. You can add unlimited to a plan that does not include leased hardware. It's $30/month last I checked.

Prepend said Comcast would be worse than what they have with AT&T, which is 50 Mbps, 1 TB data cap, and leased hardware they do not like.

He could get similar on Comcast but without leased hardware and with a 1.2 TB data cap, so Comcast seems to be an improvement for them since it would be better on every aspect of AT&T that they mentioned. Hence my curiosity as to why they think Comcast would be worse for them.

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