Slashdot Mirror
AT&T Starts Throttling Heavy Wireless Data Users
tekgoblin writes "AT&T has started tossing out warnings for users that fall into the top 5% of data users on their wireless network. AT&T announced this change back in July and is now starting to actually enforce it."
if slashdot hadn't taken such a long time to load.
I hate you AT&T!
By contrast, Sprint doesn't even offer an unlimited mobile data plan - not without a steep surcharge on data over the limit, for which, a reasonable-enough 5 gits monthly is the top - so, I don't suppose there could be much to complain about, for the AT&T customer.
There will always be a "top 5 percent", sot they will eventually throttle everyone to 0.
"A 'person' is smart. 'People' are dumb, panicky animals and you know that."
if they do this it should be only when you hit your cap and then no fee for going over and if you want full speed then bill the $10 per GB.
This means that even if everyone uses less than their plan, someone is going to be in the top 5% and they'll get hosed. It would be better to throttle ANYONE who used more than their plan.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
To tell me how awful and pathetic I am for wanting to get unlimited data on phone plans when the cost of the running the network is miniscule and the path to upgrade is littered with egotistical claims. Seriously, this isn't surprising simply because the telecommunications industry has had such a long-held monopoly they know of no other way to operate. Even now Verizon is attempting to sue the FCC over net neutrality while getting the very thing it requested (freedom to discriminate on the wireless side as ATT is doing now). As it stands the Republicans are trying to pass a bill that would strip the FCC of their regulatory powers which is even worse. I can only hope and pray that 2012 sweeps the republicans out and limits their austerity measures to the already crippled economy and that the FCC re-evaluates their rules and puts wireless internet access in the same boat as wired.
Except that other carriers are doing the same thing. This sounds like groups of companies screwing their customers.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
But the top 5% hoarding all of the resources is the most effective way to run a limited economy! They know the best use of those packets and can distribute them better than all those poor saps that use lower QoS queues. This unnatural regulation is going to strangle the health of the overall network and everyone is going to suffer SEVERELY! And it's all the current administration's fault!
sprint is still unlimited and T-Mo is technically unlimited. fast data and then throttle after you hit your contract allotment
AT&T is also still unlimited for those grandfathered into those data plans.
Until i read it and know i use landline :-)
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
By multiplexing download bandwidth through their cellular antennae, AT&T can support more customers unlimited service fee schedules, even though it means they are cutting your service quality in order to maximize their profits. Remember the old days when AOL was oversubscribing their modem banks in order to maximize its profit? Same thing...
You have a smartphone that supports varible bitrate video, and the quality of the broadcast you paid to access will decrease when it makes sense for AT&T. It'll be an acceptable illusion for most people. Only they people who actually expected to use unlimited bandwidth and know the difference are hurt...
What's a little white lie anyway; After all, you are just a customer.
To expect nothing to happened (yes their should be high cost plans). These users negatively effecting other users performance and expecting the other uses to subsidise them. There are other fixed cost associated with a monthly mobile account and taking on large amounts of data at the end for fixed cost while other small users pay a lesser but similar amount and don't overload the service. I am assuming that in some areas the system is being overloaded/oversold and I do think $10 per GB is excessive.
I just don't get the exception of unlimited on a wireless service there is certainly not unlimited available. Whenever they offer it its because its a new service and they are encouraging rapid adoption so they can start to recouping the costs for the infrastructure quicker. There will always be ways to use the available bandwidth so in a your free market when you have limited supply in demand you keep charging more.
Well just hand me the dunce cap now, I had thought I was referring to Verizon though, for some reason, I wanted to say "Sprint" there. (Long night)
It was not a consciously intentional matter of inaccuracy - as I feel I should note - though, I must admit, I didn't really enjoy some of the customer service I got from Sprint, before switching to Verizon. Well, then. Maybe it was a freudian slip of some bad press.
I hadn't heard of the Sprint Unlimited plan, before - might consider switching back to Sprint, or over to AT&T. Still kind of like Verizon though, somehow - abject customer bias, probably nothing more than.
There are plenty of times when I'd like to throttle my lusers. Usually, though, I just solve the problem by changing the DNS resolution for their bank to a Russian phishing site, and following it up with planting some nice illegal content in their network share and calling the authorities when I "discover" it.
I am officially gone from
"Cellular" would be clearer than "wireless" in the /. headline; there's no ambiguity in the linked source. Yes, cellular is wireless but usually "wireless" connotes WiFi.
I wish.
They should just raise their prices. They should really stop offering something if they're not willing to deliver the service.
I say, the FCC should regulate the hell out of wireless data. no throttling, no penalties.
Let the market decide if we really want to pay their exorbitant fees for data.
It makes me wonder why smartphone manufacturers aren't lobbying congress to protect consumers of smartphones.
If the service dries up, the smartphones are useless.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Comcast and a few other ISPs will throttle your account without disclosing that they're throttling you, let alone why.
So.... I guess free market doesnt work like some sort of magical fixer.
It must be the Governments fault for all its oversight and "rules"... those bastards! o.O
Oligopoly! Oligopoly!
It's called collusion and even up until a decade or so ago it was viewed upon as a 'dirty tactic' for businesses to implement. Unfortunately corporate power has overtaken consumer/civic power and public policy that was at one time up to the White House and Congress is now shaped by the ultra-conservative, Christian-extremist Tea Party. If Big Telecom wants to set pricing across the board, there's nobody really stopping them from doing so. Same thing with capping and content filtering. Elizabeth Warren, now running for governor of Massachusetts, has become a major force in consumer protection rights but since the Tea Party is running things to serve their own interests, and they have more disposable cash than most third world nations combined, her chances are really slim at succeeding at anything. At one time here in the U.S. we used to look at Australia's online access as restrictive but between our poor government leadership and Big Telecom's greed (pocketing massive profits each quarter while neglecting to maintain our stagnating network infrastructure), it won't be too long before we're looking at Australia with envy.
WTF are you talking about? This news is about those grandfathered users.
No - the wireless industry is not a free market. Spectrum is a very closely held resource carefully distributed to 3 or 4 major players... so free market forces can't fix this. If there was an infinite amount of spectrum and anyone could jump in and make a new wireless company... then there could be proper free market forces.
I'm not saying we should just let people go crazy with spectrum either (spectrum chaos would be bad for everyone). How to handle wireless pricing going forward is definitely going to become a problem.
They called it an "Acceptable Use Policy", except they never quite defined "Acceptable Use". In the end our consumer watchdog the ACCC come in and said either you define what "Acceptable Use" is and put it in the advertising or you open yourself up to lawsuits.
I wonder what will happen here given the USA is in general a far more litigious society. How do AT&T's customers feel about using an unlimited service with a potentially completely unknown and moving upper limit that wasn't what they signed up for?
I don't have any problem with them doing this, unless, they call it unlimited. They should have to clearly state how much you can download before they throttle you. Anything else is false advertising.
Or have limited on-peak and unlimited off-peak data transfer, similar to the way they have unlimited nights and weekends on their voice plans.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
How is this the tea party's fault? They didn't even exist until a few years ago and this kind of behavior has existed on and off since the old "Standard Oil" days. It's nothing new except for the type of technology it's being practiced on. You act like greedy robber barons and lying corrupt politicians are something new. Every single time something goes off the rails people start screaming "tea party" over and over when it's nothing to do with them. The tea party really isn't even a party. It's main focus, such as one exists, is taxation as in "taxed enough already." I sympathize with them on this issue. I'm sure that there are some loons in the tea party group who feel that corporations should have more power to fuck us over but I'd bet they're in the minority there. Give it a rest already.
The problem is that the market does bear it. Plenty of people have no problem paying hundreds of dollars in wireless fees. I'm not doing it. I refuse to pay more for pitiful 3g service that costs more than my home 12MB service that actually IS unlimited. Unfortunately the market is driven by people who apparently have unlimited funds to provide to the greedy wireless carriers. Screw it. I'll keep my money.
They've been throttling data usage for several months already - this is not a new thing from them. They've been testing this for a while now. They offered an "unlimited" usage plan and then began throttling almost immediately after. I don't download movies or stream music - often it's messaging and looking up information. IOW data usage. The assumption it is "selfish" is ridiculous, and knowing there are ops who redirect people to phishing sites is inexcusable and predictably immature.
At the end of the day it's a service offering AT&T and many other cell providers made available - then when they saw how big the demand was backed out of their promotions and advertising. It's exactly like them offering text for free since it is a side-band by-product of cell signals and costs them nothing until the demand was increased and they realised there would be another revenue stream.
it's called business.
Great Scot!
How do they know how much I weigh, and why are they suddenly picking on me?
Ah, but they won't tell you. If you are in the "top 5%" you get throttled. What amount of usage puts you in the top 5%? Who knows?
I guess oligopolies are not free markets.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Seems criminal to me...
When they get rid of them, there is a new top 5% to send warnings to....
The FCC released its net neutrality guidelines recently. One of the items in there is that providers are allowed to throttle high-bandwidth users, but must make their policies public. This move is probably in reaction to that.
I have a t-mobile unlimited plan and I use a ton of data and they never throttle me so fu at&terrible I hope that your deal with t-mobile falls through because you suck!
This is old news to rural households in the midwest, whose only unlimited bandwidth option was AT&T before they slammed everyone onto metered plans. Never mind they're getting federal rural broadband dollars to supply flat-rate unlimited broadband to rural America. They should have to either hold up their end of the bargain or pay the government back the money they received, plus interest.
Furries make the internet go.
The whole thing regarding your description seems rather disingenuous. I am sure that you must realize that the primary tenant of the Tea Party is that the Federal Government is too large, and by shrinking it your taxes will be reduced. Well huzzah another large part of that shrinkage will include elimination of much regulation of large corporations.
sounds like a way to lose your most loyal customers. People who pay their bills on time are going to be more likely a heavy user and thus more affected by this rule.
This might make sense for an unlimited plan. But if I am paying for 2GB, why should I be throttled for using close to 2GB?
And since AT&T only sells limited plans, it seems to me that AT&T is just outright cheating their customers.
I thought they started that ears ago by simply making their 3G service utterly crappy.
Chicago - 3G is crap.
Detroit - 3G and coverage is crap.
NYC - 3G is crap.
hell most places their "3G" on AT&T is slightly better than ISDN speeds. They are throttling everyone by simply delivering bandwidth that is a joke to begin with.
Problem is, NO OTHER provider is delivering anything but a joke for bandwidth in major cities.
The Tea Party is the Left's new Boogie-man.
Should not the grand fathering also apply to data rates then?
... switch carriers. Once AT&T starts losing millions in revenue, they will change their policy or go out of business... Whoops, I forgot - that is predicated on Obama not being in office, since he'll declare they are "too big to fail" and bail them out...
Just pay for blocks of data. If you are heavy user then you use more blocks and pay more. Simple, effective and useful for rich people who have time to watch movies all day on wireless devices. I'm wondering when the bean counters at AT&T will figure this out and start putting up more towers so we all use our blocks up faster.
Precisely. If unlimited is genuinely unsustainable, it's much better to do what other countries/carriers do and state a figure for the limit. Also: offer multiple plans with different sized limits so those that need a high amount can still pay for it and get it, rather than have no option whatsoever (this also benefits light users, who can be happy saving a bit of money on a lower-limit plan).
Limits suck compared to unlimited, sure, but if they have to exist, it is better to be transparent about them and give the consumer a range of choices. "Top 5%" is a completely stupid method of doing it, since you can't predict what this figure will be and it will fluctuate from month to month anyway!
Top 5% makes sense if you want to punish customers for actually using what they paid for :)
However light the usage of the users will be, there will always be 5% of users in that group to punish...
So, from this, we can derive the long term business goal of the carriers cartel, which is to get paid and not provide any service in return!
The whole thing regarding your description seems rather disingenuous. I am sure that you must realize that the primary tenant of the Tea Party is that the Federal Government is too large, and by shrinking it your taxes will be reduced. Well huzzah another large part of that shrinkage will include elimination of much regulation of large corporations.
I'm good with that. Compared to expanding government. I will take ultimate freedom over being locked into having the government own everything, run business, tell me when i'm too sick to bother treating, etc. Yes, insurance companies TRY to do it too, but you can sue, and you can even use the government for that.
Removing garbage like welfare for life, bullshit bailouts and free money for failing, well that would be a good government shrink. The EPA? too much power. Unions..... WAY too much. We even lock up drug dealers for longer than rapists, because the government propagates the lies about drugs ruining the world.
Let me ask this:
How do we compete with China, if our work environments are wide open for safety, pollution, discrimination, and numerous other lawsuits frivolously filed, and subject to union threats of shutdown if assembly line workers don't make the same as well educated IT workers?
How can we continue to give away billions for aid to other countries, while we spiral out of control into debt?
Why are we giving away money to support research into pointless endeavors like electric cars? Solar? While we are not balancing the budget? Extending unemployment so far out that between that and welfare people can live most of their life in government CONDO housing, and still have a big screen TV.
Why is it that minorities MUST make up about 46% of any federally backed loans, regardless of ability to pay, if a bank wants to qualify for federal backing?
Do we really need a government to be so large that it perpetuates funding for bad ideas like treating races of people as "different"?
Do we need government to prevent businesses from failing, yet keep unions in force, therefore keeping labor costs ridiculously out of scale?
This same big government is not raising capital gains. Obama had 2 full years to do anything he felt was important. He crammed his garbage money pit health care through on a "budget" vote, instead of increasing cap gains, as a priority.
The TEA party isn't a 100% answer. It is much farther down the road than the two parties that run things as one mind.
The government really isn't regulating large corporations now. It's helping kill off their competition. Most regulations stifle any true competition much like the new patent "reform" nonsense. I too feel that some reduction in the size of government would be nice. I would settle, however, for it to just stop growing. If it's not too big it's damn sure big enough. If it gets much bigger it'll run everything for real and the corporations you fear and loathe so much will be running it.
It's good work if you can get it.
Perhaps I'm not quite understanding this, but is AT&T saying that a mere 5% of its customers (who we can pretty much assume are not all in one place) are able to use the network in such as way that it can bring it to it's knees, such that they need to throttle them back? Really? Mind you, any one of those 5% only have to get from their phone to a tower... ONE connection. After that, it's at least copper, right? So at any one cell point, these magical 5% are causing huge issues? Aren't our phones connected to two or three towers at a time? I realize that there is only a certain amount of spectrum at any given time in a given area, but is their network THAT sensitive?
The market is only "bearing it" because people aren't given any other choice in an oligopoly. Case in point: you used to see airlines wage price wars against eachother. But after rounds of consolidation, when one airline added baggage fees, the rest started to add them as well instead of taking their lunch.
If Verizon offered across-the-board free text messaging as an aggressive move against AT&T, the latter would be forced to follow suit. If Sprint offered 20 gigabytes of data for the same price that T-Mobile wants for 2, etc.
I swear Veizon is capping the shit out of my tethered Android usage. I need to download a 4GB ISO, and I can't because, like clockwork, everytime I get about 100MB in, the fucking device resets, and then performance degrades on subsequent resets, such that I get fewer, and fewer bytes in before "something" triggers a reset.
Mind you, I have wiped the device, and tried even the native Verizon-approved software, and it is consistently coming back to "use too much bandwidth, and your device gets reset".
Further investigation proves, that it's not just the large individual files, it is assuredly my banwidth usage. Even if I visit 20 different completely different websites, and force through heavier loads, despite the fact that there's no relationship between these various entities, "something" knows that I've requested a lot of data.
Why, whatever do you suppose that could be?
So they're choking fat people on cell phones?!
They call it "Fair Usage Policy" or FUP. Quite frustrating with 'unlimited' plans, once you cross their unknown-limit and boom.. your speed goes down like hell.
I have a HSPA plan which includes a data-enabled SIM card for my phone as well as an extra SIM card + USB modem, all for 13,90€ per month. One of my friends doesn't have an own Internet connection so he uses my USB modem as his main connection. Last month my data transfer totalled about 64GB, although usually it averages around 15GB. Guess who cares? No one. And guess what? Speeds are still good, and there is no congestion on the network.
This is a mostly artificial limit brought on by a monopolistic market, and anyone who thinks differently has probably never been outside of the states.
The people should all use more. That will increase the amount you use before you get in the top 5%. Use more, get more. When everyone uses 1 TB per month, then those few at 1.05 TB will be the only ones throttled, and not for that much.
Learn to love Alaska
For a start, it's bogie man. The Boogie-man dances at discos. The bogie man is used to scare children to sleep (yes, I know, an oxymoron, I don't do it to mine!)
Also, the "Left" is the only reason you have ANY rights left whatsoever, you know, the elected representatives who have prevented further abuses of your civil rights in the name of "counter-terrorism", whichever side of the Pond you live...
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
I bought an HTC Inspire 4G through ATT about 5 months ago only to learn after the fact that ATT hadn't even launched a 4G service. So now I have a 100 dollar a month contract with a 2GB cap. Yikes. I could buy a new Macbook Air every year for what this phone is costing me. It seems like there isn't any regulation of the sales tactics the cell phone companies use. Their TOS say that they can change the terms of the contract in their favor anytime they want and they always change the terms to give users less service for more money. It's a swindle... a seemingly totally unregulated swindle using bait and switch tricks
if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?
Not to worry, its not like ATT actually connects anything for long, if you can even get a connection, lol.
I can understand how silly this seems to a lot of people from a lot of different points, but I see a positive at the end of my thought train.
Instead of throttling all users or imposing limitations, they're allowing decent usage and simply issuing a kind warning to the top 5%, at THIS TIME, that they should think about alternatives to eating up so much of the distributed OTA bandwidth.
What I'm getting at is that it's better to try and poke the heaviest users to put a little thought into finding another source rather than instantaneously throttling all users as a means of being "fair".
Just my $0.0002.
they are sandvining the shit out of me. i can't even seed the bible right now
> What amount of usage puts you in the top 5%?
Doesn't matter - by definition they are mis-selling this plan to 5% of the users. That might be normal in the telecom industry, but in general it a pretty bad record. And once the 5% have left because of the changes, the next 5% are in trouble...
how can companies sell products that are able to use bandwitdth-hungry features like streaming netflix, then get mad when users do that? if i am sold a phone capable of using netflix, i expect to be able to get the highest quality stream, limited only by hardware and connection speed. these companies are always putting the horse before the cart. maybe make sure all your users can fully use all the features of the product you are selling them, before you sell them. fail infrastructure is fail.
...
Wasn't this AT&T's ad? For their
..."High-Speed Internet - On the Go! Wooo!"
Now, they nail you for doing just that?
I just watched an old "Dennis the Menace" episode OTA on "Antenna TV". He was selling "All you can drink root beer for a penny". Once surrendering your penny, he would pour out about 1/4 inch of root beer in a glass. Upon questioning, he would reply that was all the root beer you could drink for a penny..
I figured AT&T must have seen the same episode.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
If Verizon offered across-the-board free text messaging as an aggressive move against AT&T, the latter would be forced to follow suit. If Sprint offered 20 gigabytes of data for the same price that T-Mobile wants for 2, etc.
Precisely.
AT&T doesn't even consider Sprint and Nextel to be competitors in most markets, anyway.
T-Mo has been pushing the "2 Lines, Unlimited Everything for $50/line (100.00+Tax monthly bill)+ free smartphone w/2yr contract" deal lately. I have an Unlimited AT&T plan that I pay 132.00/mo. per single line.
I went into the AT&T store and asked about their competing plan...
Surprise... They don't have one.
Competition my ass.
The cellphone business is just Collusion that our government is supposed to protect us from. It's Big Corporation and Big Government fucking each other right in our front lawn for everyone to see.
You're not paranoid if they really ARE out to get you...
"AT&T Starts Throttling Heavy Wireless Data Users" is a bad way to word things. As others have pointed out, there will always be a top 5% even if there is only 1 person. The top 5% may not always be heavy data users, they're just the 5% that use the most.
This is awesome, if they use this to reduce the data usage fees or restore the unlimited plans. Otherwise if they pay for it then what right does ATT&T have to pester their customers?
The only thing that surprised me is that AT&T actually admitted it. I've been throttled by AT&T back when I had their DSL. I could trigger their throttling at will by a certain usage pattern, at which point the internet would slow to dialup speeds for 1 week, then magically return to normal. What's even worse, is that they denied that they had ever throttled anybody when I called them on it.