October 2008, AT&T announces bandwidth limitations on a very few bandwidth hogs in a small city in the middle of nowhere with little political clout. (Been in Reno - it sucks.)

March 2009, AT&T announces that the experiment in Reno was successful (no one switched providers, mostly because there are no alternatives) and they are expanding the anti-bandwidth hog caps to other areas.

July 2009, "other areas" definition quietly changed to "nationally".

September 2009, due to ongoing expenses of providing service to bandwidth hogs, the cap is lowered nationally to 5 MB/month.

December 2009, cap lowered again to 1MB/month.

March 2010, AT&T announces price increase of 200% to cover expense of supplying bandwidth to the "bandwidth hogs" (who they now define as their entire customer base).

July 2010, AT&T announces an automatic quarterly cost-of-living-adjusted-for-inflation increase of 50% per month, per megabyte, retroactive to August 1968, and payable in full in ten days.

September 2010, AT&T announces that any AT&T customer of ANY service who is also a customer of ANY other communications supplier will have two options - triple the price or terminate their AT&T service. Reason - "inefficiencies in the market because of multiple providers" (in other words, we want to be a monopoly again).

Remember that AT&T was once a monopoly, and Uncle Sam broke it up into seven regional and unaffiliated telcos. Since then, they have been regenerating EXACTLY like the liquid metal Terminator, and now AT&T is once again a monopoly. Their business plan is (and always has been) very simple - Screw over the customer as much as you can.

The tiger does not change its stripes - AT&T was a bunch of thieving bastards before their monopoly was broken, and they have slowly reconstituted themselves as the same monopoly again, and they are still a bunch of thieving bastards.

I guess we'll just have to bust them apart all over again - and this time make sure it sticks.