AT&T's DSL cap would just be a way for it to gouge customers with penalty charges and convince them to switch to U-verse. My advice is to avoid AT&T all together.

Apparently, AT&T is going to have to cap its DSL service at 150-250 GB/month, because there are some bandwidth hogs on its network. This is ironic, because in the early days of the cable modem versus DSL battle, the DSL folks (now owned by AT&T) used to run ads saying how terrible cable was since bandwidth hogs could ruin cable connectivity. These ads implied that DSL had no such issues, but now they're saying it does.

That said, I don't think there is a connectivity issue here. This is just a scheme to gouge the customers.

First of all, let me say that I would not get an AT&T DSL account in a million years, because AT&T is a terrible company. I've written and complained about this before and even tried to contact someone at AT&T about the years of fighting my household has done with the company, as we were over-charged and billed for services that we never received. Anyone who signs up with AT&T for anything service is asking for trouble.

If I lose my Comcast service, I hope that I can get a WiMAX connection from Sprint rather than do business with AT&T ever again. It makes me laugh when they call asking if I'd be interested in U-verse, its cable TV-like lash up.

This long-term beef I have with AT&T is the sole reason I refused to get an iPhone. I'm now considering it with the Verizon package.

But let's look at the 150-250 GB cap. I find the range interesting, since there is a 100 GB difference. I've been running a meter on my system over the years and rarely used 5 GB a day. I think I hit 7 the other day, but I was downloading ISO images of Ubuntu. I'm not doing anything like that on daily basis.

I was thinking about these caps and AT&T's complaints about bandwidth hogs, which are presumably people trading huge video files all day long on bit-torrent. When I'm downloading an ISO image, I rarely see full speed no matter what I try. The bandwidth is always choked off. I think this whole cap idea is a dastardly scheme to open the pipes and let people exceed the cap, so the company can gouge them with an enormous fee.

This formula is commonly used in mobile phone billing with great success. Mobile phone companies create a reasonable cap with the knowledge that over time people will use more and more bandwidth, until they eventually slip up and bingo, big money on penalty fees. That's what this is all about.

AT&T, according to reports, will be charging $10 per extra 50 GB on a monthly basis. This seems reasonable, but we'll see. I've watched this company operate over the years, and I can assure you that either the number will change or there will be some other "service" fee added.

There is one more thing to consider. Is this entire idea a ruse to get people to adopt AT&T's U-verse cable TV systems and dump cable? The pricing might be for 150 GB for normal Internet users and 250 GB data for U-verse users. Is this sort of bundling legal? The average user will never use 250 GB month under most circumstances, so that option would supply good protection.

Okay, so here is what will happen next, and this may actually be a good thing. AT&T will come out and says that too many of its usersthat can't be the brightest people in the world, because they're using AT&T in the first placehave infected machines that are slamming the network every night with millions of ping requests or spam e-mail or whatever. The fact is all the networks are contaminated with machines that go crazy at night and chew up bandwidth.

AT&T would be doing the world a favor if it put a stop to this plague, but will it? Or would it rather see the Trojans stay in place, racking up numbers, so AT&T can charge more? It would probably be in AT&T's best interest to plant some malware itself and blame the careless customer.

My advice is to stay away from AT&T and its offerings, so you won't have to deal with any of it.