Originally Posted By: DWallach
I just got a flyer from AT&T in the mail. It seems that they now support gigabit speeds to my house. I'm currently using 12Mbit U-Verse DSL, so this would be a significant speedup.

The pricing plans they're offering me are:
$110/mo: gigabit network, free equipment / installation, 1 year commitment / price lockin
add $30/mo for unlimited voice calling, U.S. and Canada
subtract $30/mo to drop to 300Mbit/sec
...
Those prices above are for AT&T's "Premier Offer" which includes the AT&T privacy violation engine. It appears the alternative is to spend an extra $29/mo to get the "Standard Offer". You don't get the one-year lock-in, but you pay a $99 "installation fee" and a $7/mo "equipment fee". (More details at Ars Technica, among others.)

Clearly, they're pushing you to the privacy violation engine. The question is whether I really care with most of the world going to HTTPS and, I suppose, with the ability for me to just build a tunnel to my office and hide all of my traffic.
HTTP happens. SMTP too. Visitors, mobile devices, lazy browsing practices, etc, can all generate unencrypted traffic.

The $30 fee reduction for 'downgrading' to 300 speed appears to nicely offset the $29 'privacy maintained' cost.

Another $7 for the modem rental, you get 300mbps speed and less worry about non-HTTPS traffic snooping.

In my region 300mbps is about as fast as it gets for most people (~300 down, 20 up).