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AT&T To Start Data Throttling Heaviest Users
greymond writes "AT&T has announced that starting on Oct. 1 it will throttle the data speeds of users with unlimited data plans who exceed bandwidth thresholds on its 3G network. AT&T is following in the tracks Verizon and Virgin Mobile in reducing data throughput speeds of its heaviest mobile data users."
I signed up for unlimited back years ago. Not for unlimited with limits that reduce speed. This is an arbitrary change of contract.
Here in the UK, this has been already happening with British Telecom (BT) for years.
I remember being on 'unlimited' dial-up and getting a letter saying that my speeds are going to be throttled at peak times due to heavy bandwidth usage.
Misrepresentation at it's best.
So they plan to make their shit service even worse?
I hate how these statistics are worded to vilify these users. First, it's the top 5% vs the average of the other 95%. Hell, they don't even filter out the bottom 5% to balance that out who likely use close to zero data. By removing the top 5% from the average, the average is going to be reduced dramatically, unlike the median would be. 2nd, the services they claim as being the data hogs are the same services that are most heavily advertised. And when defined this way, even if top users find more efficient ways to get their content, eg pandora starts to cache up to 2 hours of songs in advance whenever connected to wifi, there will always be a top 5%. Without setting actual hard limits, eg 50x the median user's usage of the previous month, it's impossible to know where you stand without much greater transparency. It's also frustrating that off-peak usage and edge/hspa/lte are costed the same. 1GB on edge is obviously more destructive to the network than 1GB on LTE.
Overall, it's a system that is somewhat fair but doesn't offer the user the tools or opportunity to optimize their usage. It's in everyone's best interest to maximize available bandwidth. The networks need to make the users partners rather than enemies. For example, have an unlimited plan with peak-usage throttling and offer rebates, free music/apps/whatever bonuses to good network citizens. If there was an actual thank you and reward for downloading/pre-caching my music rather than streaming it, I'd certainly prefer that option. But if they only punish, I'm going to give them the middle-finger and abuse 'their' network.
AT&T has you by the nads. You have a hard time finding phone service where you don't waive your right to sue and the carrier can make changes any time they want.
There's always some pompous horses ass who jumps in to say, "If you don't like the terms, don't sign the contract." But when you can't get service anywhere without those stipulations, there is no consumer choice. The wireless carriers operate as a cartel, not a free market.
Markets are not free if they're not also fair. And when one side can change the terms of a contract at any time, it's not fair.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
...are relegated to tethered phones for internet access where we are so rural as to not have a choice other than satellite and they have similar restrictions. I am not on AT&T but I thought about writing my carrier's (the big V) CEO and issuing a challenge. Go a month with your "surfing habits" with only a tethered phone and your data service plan. No cheating now, tell me if you think it is fair, usable, and how far you get while on the web before you hit your limit. It doesn't take long trust me. Even then I cut back on what I do with it. Being a systems professional, it's not unheard of to download a MS Partner ISO, or a linux distro from time to time, but now if I did that it would either kill my data allotment or my pocket book. If you can't handle the data requirements that your product offerings require, don't you think there is a problem there? Oh, and the best that big V will do is 10GB plan at an additional $80 making my monthy bill equivalent to a small car payment. I can drive my phone!
It's always another ratcheted step in their race to the bottom. One of them pulls some kind of stunt, waits for backlash... if it's sufficiently small enough, they keep it and their increased benefits. The others will follow suit as they see they can do it and get away with it as well.
This will keep going on and on until we see some legislation to stop it. And before anyone says "but we don't need any more laws!" I would like to hear what ELSE could make them change their behavior? No significant numbers of people will stop using their services because of it. So what else is there but law?
I mean, I want my service to work, because it's not overloaded all the time, and this fixes that problem without
a. Hard caps
b. overages.
seems to me, saying you'll get 3g speeds for the first 2gb/mo, and edge speeds after that is the best way to solve the problem. SO long as it's publicized. if you don't like it, too bad, I'm tired of shitty service because some folks use their hacked Iphones to download torrents all day.
that said, if the service still sucks, or the cap it too low, leave.
-and occasionaly a giant moose.
or the CEO could go without his new jet this month and actually expand their spread so thin you can see though it decade old network ... many have signed into this thing as unlimited, not unlimted as long as it doesnt effect ATT, I went through the exact same thing with them on long distance and dialup, its their oldest trick
They offer you the moon for a penny and when it starts to catch up with them and bite them in the ass they change your contract and sometimes they might even bother to inform you, most of the time they just add charges and hope you wont bitch
I'm on an unlimited plan and recently I called AT&T to see if I could drop my plan to a lower usage plan and (hopefully) save money. The nice lady on the phone looked up my usage, laughed and said that I was "double" the usage rate of the next lower plan both in terms of voice as well as data. The thing is, yes I live by my phone. (I run my own business.) But really, I very rarely watch any videos with my phone. (Though perhaps every other month I'll watch a video on NetFlix) I mostly use my phone for e-mail and for reading various news websites -- being a news junkie -- and yet I'm a "heavy user".
So, from my point of view speaking as one who rarely uses high-data intensive applications, if you aren't a "heavy user", you don't use your phone at all ....
Wind Mobile does this in Canada. They say you have unlimited but if you go over 2GB, I think, they de-prioritize you and you get throttled if the network needs you throttled.
I agree with it completely, so long as they tell everyone exactly where the line is
I'm mostly excited about all the choices we have here in America and the fact that all of them give you the same bandwidth throttling option. In a world out there filled with choice it's important to know that we can go to any provider and get the same thing no matter what we want.
I wonder what 2 hours a night 3 nights a week of 480p content from youtube, hulu or netflix would add up to.
About 30 pounds.
This isn't interesting it's complete bullshit. I pay my ISP to provide the bandwidth and Youtube pays their ISP to provide bandwidth, the bandwidth has been paid for. I don't get money off my bill at the end of the month if my ISP was able to serve me up a cached version, so why on Earth should the ISP get to cheat me like that?
From your post the take home message here is that we need more regulation to clamp down on ISPs' and their fraudulent advertising practices. If they can't provide the advertised speed then they shouldn't be pretending to offer it, it's just that simple.
Their press release closes with:
"But even as we pursue this additional measure, it will not solve our spectrum shortage and network capacity issues. Nothing short of completing the T-Mobile merger will provide additional spectrum capacity to address these near term challenges."
So basically this is just a ruse by ATT execs to have the T-Mobile merger approved by the government posthaste, by trying to underscore how their poor widdle network is crumbling under the weight of the few people left on the grandfathered unlimited plan. It's ridiculous! You notice how they never define a limit, or put a range on what this top 5% is using. It's because the whole thing is malarkey.
When I started paying for internet, we were paying for time online, per minutes.
it's just bullshit. you're either selling bandwidth or not. what they'd like now is that we'd pay for access they sell as mobile 24/7 broadband, but would use it as if it were a dialup from late '90s. the free riders the ceo's see are actually _ANY_ service from which they don't get extra money from - while their whole business should be ignorant of what data is transferred, they shouldn't care, if they start caring they start acting as censors - and that's why walled garden mobile portals always sucked and NEVER gained much popularity, not even when you threw millions and millions at them and even let people stream few tv channels from them, people don't want to go to america online now, it's 2011 and internet is the norm - in some of these you could use unlimited amounts of data, if you stuck to the walled garden. unlimited amount of a very limited selection of data, that still would have placed the last mile network infrastructure at a strain(what a stupid idea to provide transcoded live tv channels over gprs, for a example).
bandwidth providing scales, the more it's used the more you get it, the more there's reason to put in more cabling. but if you've done some "expert calculations" on how much each customer would use of the bandwidth you sold them.. you can always twist those calculations to meet your existing infrastructure and pretend that customers are playing foul by actually using their broadband connections and that your "competitors" are playing foul by providing content(it's a stupid thought from isp side that companies which provide popular high bandwidth services, which make high bandwidth connections more valuable to customer, would be the bad guys).
and fuck, that one guys directtv argument is more bullshit than 100% original guaranteed authentic bullshit. wtf should it matter if the box has superTIVO or REALMEDIASUPERDOWLOADER or directtv printed on the box that's fetching content over the connection? it shouldn't - the connection provider should be ignorant of what's transferred, what they should have done from the start would have been to sell 0.5mbit/s connections if that's what they were actually only planning on delivering.they should at least be forced to market their connections with the information of how many gigabytes can you get transferred in a month and provide that data in mbit/s (from data_per_month/time in month) - that way, you could at least try to figure out what they've prepared to sell to you.
"When their receiver is hooked up to the customers internet connection and the customer trys to watch certain movies, the receiver starts downloading the movie from the home network FIRST to save the satellite provider bandwidth. So, what you have, in effect, is one ISP hijacking another ISP to deliver content. This threw the telecoms into a frenzy. All they could see was danger. If Direct TV or a local cable company had equipment hooked up to the telecoms network and the user had unlimited bandwidth and little incentive to pay much attention to how much their equipment was using, the competitor could quite easily cripple the telco." yeah a telco gets cripled if someone uses their connection. that's a pretty twisted argument - they're not HIJACKING, they're providing an USE for the connection - transferring data. if the isp doesn't want to be in business of transferring data, maybe they should sell their assets to someone who is.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
In Australia most ISPs have had systems like this in place for almost a decade now, and we call it "shaping" (a nice term for "use too much bandwidth and we'll jack you back down to ISDN").
The funny thing is that "shaping" is a change for the better in Australia, as before it became common place (it was initially marketed as "UNLIMITED BROADBAND!11!!*") users were either charged ridiculous rates for excess usage ($50+/gb on some plans) or had their service cut off until the end of the month.
AT&T's move may be seen as a step backwards, but the truth is that Americans are still lucky to have some of the lowest cost bandwidth in the world.
"The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." -- Eric S. Raymond
Has DirectTV really pain anyone much for their content?
Yes. If they are hosting things over the internet, then they will have a contract with an ISP (it's not magic- that's how things get on the internet). Their ISP will be charging them a certain amount for as much upload/download bandwidth as they want. If they find DirectTV are using "too much" bandwidth, they're free to charge them more in order to provide a better service.
You do the same, at your end.
What isn't acceptable is to say to you "yeah, you can have unlimited downloads at broadband speeds" and take your money, and to say to DirectTV "yeah, you can have [x amount] or uploads at broadband speed" and take their money, and then not do it (by throttling to a much lower speed than was promised once you cross some arbitrary mark). All parties have paid up, they should get what they've paid for.
If ISPs (at either end) are finding that their infrastructure can't cope with demand, they should either sell to fewer people, or improve their network (and charge more to cover it, if they need to), or offer the same number of customers lower speeds that they CAN cope with. They can't have their cake and eat it too.