Sorry, It’s Time to Start Counting Gigabytes at Home, Too

Your home Internet will soon work a lot more like your phone’s data plan, if it doesn’t already. AT&T, the second-largest broadband Internet provider in the US, is imposing “data allowances” on its customers. U-Verse customers now face limits between 300GB to 1TB depending on the their existing plans, AT&T said. This should be enough for 100 to 400 hours of high-definition video streaming per month, the company estimates. That may sound like plenty. And AT&T isn’t the first to experiment with data limits for home Internet service. But it’s the kind of quiet change that signals a broader transformation.

In the near future, the Internet that you get at home is going to start looking a lot more like the Internet you get on your phone. And that could result in a massive increase in costs for broadband subscribers.