The country’s largest broadband provider AT&T, announced a new business strategy similar to Comcast’s and Time Warner’s. The company is currently testing in Reno a monthly limit set for its subscribers’ broadband. If the limit will be exceeded, the users will have to pay extra.

"Our goal is to look at the best model for getting fair and affordable broadband service for everyone," said John Britton, AT&T spokesman, as the company is looking to deal with a rather small number of customers who keep recording huge downloads and uploads. He explained that 5 percent of the company’s users cover 46 percent of the entire network traffic and this is why the trial will not affect 95 percent of its subscribers.

The test is intended "to evaluate a usage-based model that could potentially help address today's trend of explosive bandwidth usage, [and] may be extended to one other market by the end of the year," added Mr. Britton.

Users will receive a different limit depending on the services received: if the broadband service is at 768 Kbps, the monthly limit will be of 20 GB; for the rest of 1.5 Mbps, 3 Mbps and 6 Mbps the limits will be of 40, 60 and 80 GB. Users will be charged with $1 for each Giga Byte used over the limit, but only after two months of warnings.

Comcast was one of the first companies to use this method of handling the traffic, implementing a 250 GB monthly cap for all its users. The explanation was the same, as a very small percentage of its users were covering way too much of the broadband without any sort of additional fees.