" Does this mean that I can't:
- Make a skype phone call?
- Sftp a 200M file to my office?
- Play second life?
- Watch several videos on youtube???

What good is their service then?"

My guess is that you're OK on all those items except the 200MB file to the office. If your employer is expecting you to take a Geo Metro to the track on race day and win, they're doing it wrong. Hook up to some wi-fi somewhere if you need to play internet power-user. The wireless network just won't handle a large number of peeps trying to use it as they would their home or business land-line based connections. The situation won't really improve until either new tech gets rolled out or spectrum is expanded by the FCC.

As to what the service is good for, it works well for casual internet. Vote with your wallet if it doesn't suit your intended use.

Personally, I think it would be better to throttle rates than to ban any particular use, but like I said I don't make policy. I'm just the guy they page when someone lets the smoke out. Whichever way they deal with the issue, it's guaranteed to piss someone off. In this case, they chose to piss off the smallest number of high-bandwidth users.

The wireless network is relatively new technology, and it's still got limitations. Some of those limitations may never go away completely due to spectrum limitations, or technology may overcome. Right now, no amount of complaining will fix them.

Just make sure you don't let them block services when the wireless networks become as robust the land-line based networks.

Technically, yes. Practically, no. You'll be passing small amounts of data while gaming. That will be well below their radar. They'll be more concerned with large files that eat up bandwidth.

That's a valid point, really. Technically we ARE underprovisioned for demand. The point though is that the lack of capacity is not due to the telcos not installing infrastructure, but that the available wireless bandwidth is not available. After a dozen years working for ATT, I can honestly say that they will fill capacity in any way they can to make money. They're pretty good at that. Looking at the tech every day I might even say they excel at it (it will get better.. SBC nee SWB has a radically different approach to the way legacy ATT conducted business from an engineering standpoint). The choke is the amount of spectrum that can be used. No amount of hardware can increase that. the only way that I see as a tech to increase the capacity is to open up more bandwidth, and that is limited by what the FCC will allow. It's complicated, it's political, it's technical, and it's practical in it's limitations. Basically, it's not going to change any time soon, and there's really no target to lay blame on beyond circumstances. I agree we need more capacity, but it just isn't there right now.

Disclosure first (lest someone think I'm a tool): I work for ATT. I'm a technician, I don't make policy, and I think everyone got screwed with the immunity deal. I just turn the red lights green and keep the bits flowing. My wife worked for a company that builds and installs cell towers. And excuse my ignorance of HTML tags, I'm a tech, not a website designer. Someday I'll find time.

That said, let me cover some mentioned points.

Building new towers *might* alleviate the issue, but nobody wants a tower in their back yard. Telcos have to disguise the damn things as trees in some places just to get approval to plant them. We're not going to see more towers as a solution sadly (ok, I don't like the looks of them either, but I'm a granola nature freak anyway).

Since additional towers in populated areas are out, what does that leave? Towers are the keystone of the wireless infrastructure, so the only thing you can do is make more efficient use of them. Cost/benefit pretty much has dictated that the existing hardware transports as much information as possible. We could, say, add more transport facilities to each tower, but that's not really the choke point. The real issue is available over-the-air spectrum. It's limited, and really not a very large swath of the electromagnetic spectrum. The encoding and frequency-hopping that goes on to maximize the use of this bandwidth is already very complex and we're not likely to see much improvement in data compression. We could drop a huge mux at the base of the tower, but if we can't feed it, it's wasted space. The wireless networks are not underprovisioned as a whole (tho some locales may be), there are just too many users demanding high-bandwidth services.

Anonymous (#1 post): Great analogy. It sucks less than most. And stinks more ;)

Bardfinn: I'm unaware of any stipulation that one has to lease an OS from ATT. I'm running windows mobile 6, and looking to hack some linux action into the handset. No qualms about it. I don't bother with the fine print, so I could be wrong. They can feel free to terminate me if they want, I'll pay someone else. Loyalty is bought in today's world.

Shaggy: Nice loophole you got there. Would probably work if you want an iphone at a discount. The trick is getting them to actually cancel service. Right now I see the whole P2P issue as pre-emptive sabre rattling tho.

Zuzu: I wish I could give a definitive example of P2P, but I think Samf covered most of that. You're spot-on with the continuous streaming point. With non-tech limited bandwidth, P2P can be a legitimate crippler.

Samf: I agree.

Bottom line (and sorry this is such a long post) is that ATT had to make some kind of pre-emptive decision to make sure they could keep a viable wireless network operational. I don't like it, but I can't disagree with them. There is a "slippery slope" element here though, and I really have no answer to that.

Nice design, I like the look of the ceramic. I think metal would probably be a better choice of material, though. Ceramic is more of an insulator than say, aluminum and more prone to breakage. Ceramic may stay warm longer (and take longer to heat up) but my radiator in the place I used to live would stay on for quite a while on a cold morning before the place was up to habitable temperature and would keep several cups of coffee and Bailey's warm well through brunch.