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

Of course, it's AT&T, therefore they're being unnecessarily scuzzy about it.
Quote:
U-verse with GigaPower Premier offer is available with your agreement to participate in AT&T Internet Preferences. All AT&T GigaPower Internet traffic is scanned by IP address for billing and service purposes. With AT&T Internet Preferences, we may also use your Web browsing information, like the search terms you enter and the Web pages you visit, to provide you relevant offers and advertising from AT&T and its participating providers tailored to your online interests


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.


Edited by DWallach (16/09/2015 03:40)