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AT&T Moves Closer To Usage-Based Fees For Data
CWmike writes "AT&T has moved closer to charging special usage fees to heavy data users, including those with iPhones and other smartphones. Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, came close on Wednesday to warning about some kind of use-based pricing while speaking at a UBS conference. 'The first thing we need to do is educate customers about what represents a megabyte of data and...we're improving systems to give them real-time information about their data usage,' he said. 'Longer term, there's got to be some sort of pricing scheme that addresses the [heavy] users.' AT&T has found that only 3% of its smartphone users — primarily iPhone owners — are responsible for 40% of total data usage, largely for video and audio, de la Vega said. Educating that group about how much they are using could change that, as AT&T has found by informing wired Internet customers of such patterns. De la Vega's comments on data use were previewed in a keynote he gave in October at the CTIA, but he went beyond those comments on Wednesday: 'We are going to make sure incentives are in place to reduce or modify [data]uses so they don't crowd out others in the same cell sites.' Focus groups have been formed at AT&T to figure out how to proceed."
The problem is that ATT doesn't really want metered access either. Based on the statistics they are putting out, a huge majority of the iPhone users end up using very little of their data connection. If ATT moved to a metered access they would lose money because people would end up not using enough to add up to $30/month unless ATT priced the data at some astronomical rates. If they did that, they would simply be shooting themselves in the foot because people would quit using data (that's one way to fix the network problems lol).
So, the solution is to keep everyone on 'unlimited' at $30/month and issue press releases blaming these 'heavy users' for the network problems without actually doing anything to fix the issue. It's not really ATTs fault, it's these mysterious heavy users fault. Don't blame us, blame them while we keep laughing all the way to the bank and you (att users) keep dropping calls and getting crappy service. Brilliant plan actually.