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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."
Free Market! Free Market!
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.
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!
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 $10 per GB is excessive.
I just don't get the exception of unlimited on a wireless service there is certainly not unlimited available. Whenever they offer it its because its a new service and they are encouraging rapid adoption so they can start to recouping the costs for the infrastructure quicker. There will always be ways to use the available bandwidth so in a your free market when you have limited supply in demand you keep charging more.
Well just hand me the dunce cap now, I had thought I was referring to Verizon though, for some reason, I wanted to say "Sprint" there. (Long night)
It was not a consciously intentional matter of inaccuracy - as I feel I should note - though, I must admit, I didn't really enjoy some of the customer service I got from Sprint, before switching to Verizon. Well, then. Maybe it was a freudian slip of some bad press.
I hadn't heard of the Sprint Unlimited plan, before - might consider switching back to Sprint, or over to AT&T. Still kind of like Verizon though, somehow - abject customer bias, probably nothing more than.
They won't even warn you, but will just charge 125$ per every excess GB.
This poor blogger was asked to pay 1200$ by this devil company.
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.
Comcast and a few other ISPs will throttle your account without disclosing that they're throttling you, let alone why.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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?
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.
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
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]
"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.