AT&T weighs extra fee for Web's bandwidth hogs

AT&T, the country's largest Internet provider, is considering charging extra for customers who download large amounts of data. "A form of usage-based pricing for those customers who have abnormally high usage patterns is inevitable," spokesman Michael Coe said this week. The top 5 percent of AT&T's DSL customers use 46 percent of the total bandwidth, Coe said. Overall bandwidth use on the network is surging, doubling every year and a half. AT&T doesn't have any specific plans or fees to announce yet, Coe said. Most cable companies have official or secret caps on the amount of data they allow subscribers to download every month.
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