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AT&T Exempts HBO Max From Data Caps but Still Limits Your Netflix Use

posted by martyb on Saturday June 06 2020, @06:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the to-fee-or-not-to-fee dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

AT&T exempts HBO Max from data caps but still limits your Netflix use;:

AT&T's new HBO Max streaming service is exempt from the carrier's mobile data caps, even though competing services such as Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+ count against the monthly data limits. This news was reported today in an article by The Verge, which said that AT&T "confirmed to The Verge that HBO Max will be excused from the company's traditional data caps and the soft data caps on unlimited plans."

The traditional data caps limit customers to a certain amount of data each month before they have to pay overage fees or face extreme slowdowns for the rest of the month. "Soft data caps on unlimited plans" apparently is a reference to the 22GB or 50GB thresholds, after which unlimited-data users may be prioritized below other users when connecting to a congested cell tower.

"According to an AT&T executive familiar with the matter, HBO Max is using AT&T's 'sponsored data' system, which technically allows any company to pay to excuse its services from data caps," The Verge wrote. "But since AT&T owns HBO Max, it's just paying itself: the data fee shows up on the HBO Max books as an expense and on the AT&T Mobility books as revenue. For AT&T as a whole, it zeroes out. Compare that to a competitor like Netflix, which could theoretically pay AT&T for sponsored data, but it would be a pure cost."

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2020, @07:48PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2020, @07:48PM (#1004296)

    Facebook and Twitter are not the bad guys here. There is plenty of competition and potential for more competition.

    The bad guys here are the ISPs, the cable providers, the sports leagues, and companies that keep lobbying to expand and extend IP laws. Lets not distract ourselves from the true bad guys here.

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2020, @08:02PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2020, @08:02PM (#1004305)

    ISPs have competition too. Pull your head out of your ass.

    Oh no! you exclaim. ONLY FIBER INTERNET IS TRUE INTERNET.

    Well I say fuck you. I'm using LTE right now and it gets me on the fucking internet so I can say Fuck You Asshole and that's good enough for me.

    I'm sick and tired of you fiber internet bigots. Go fuck yourself.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2020, @12:43PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2020, @12:43PM (#1004478)

      In the near future, military police will be asking at every corner, «Papieren bitte,» and the right-wingers will love it because it's their guy der nach den Papieren fragt instead of Grand Emperor Baraq Hussein Soetoro.

      Why couldn't we have had taco trucks on those corners instead of Stasi?