You can soon get unlimited data on AT&T U-verse — but it comes with a big catch

AT&T is rolling out some big changes for its home Internet subscribers, with potential implications for broadband users everywhere. Starting in May, AT&T's U-verse customers will be able to use more data on their fixed, residential connections before hitting their data caps. Depending on a customer's purchased speed tier, the new established caps range from 300 GB a month to as much as 1 TB a month. In general, faster plans will benefit from larger monthly allotments. Going over your cap is going to hurt your wallet — just like using too much data on your cellphone. Blow past the limit, and you'll be charged another $10 that month. That gives you another 50 GB to use, but exhaust that too and you'll be hit again with a second $10 overage fee, and so on. (AT&T says that on average, its residential Internet subscribers use 100 GB of data per month, while based on their current usage habits, roughly 4 percent of customers today would run afoul of the new caps.)

There are two main ways you can escape the caps: Either pay an extra $30 a month for an "unlimited" plan, or make sure you're paying for a double-play consisting of U-verse Internet service and one of AT&T's two television services, DirecTV or U-verse TV. This gets us to AT&T's underlying strategy: Drive more customers to its pay-TV products as the company tries to execute a shift to digital and mobile video (and beyond that, to targeted advertising).