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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."
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."
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.
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
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.
Oligopoly! Oligopoly!
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.
This. This is why we can't have nice things.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Hey. Those 5% of the users are trying to use what they bought. They paid fair and square for what was advertised as "unlimited plan". If provider is unable to hold his end of the bargain then there should be consequences for false advertising. The only one you are subsidizing is your wireless provider, not those 5% of the users that actually tried to use the service.
Imagine someone rented you a room and said that you can use it anytime you want. And then you suddenly find out that it is rented to several other people are renting that same room and the witty landlord just decided to use the fact that all of you are at home at different times to sell rent it to all of you simultaneously. Who should you sue/roughen up, the other clients, that are "spending too much time in the room" or the landlord?
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.
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.
No. At AT&T you're not a customer. That implies that they value and respect you. You are actually a consumer. That implies you are there to be exploited and controlled.
I guess oligopolies are not free markets.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
We can't have nice things because a person buying a plan advertised as unlimited, and with no special clauses about caps etc, is actually using it as advertised?
Funny how it all devolves down to investors and capital and then this assumption that the vast profits they collect aren't subject to R&D or infrastructure improvements. Also for the record, the vast majority of our cellular traffic gets filtered back into the wired system for cost and efficiency reasons. Expansion of the network to support the traffic isn't as great an issue as the telecoms want everybody to think simply because there is no money in increasing internet data speeds or uncapping the lines. Fundamentally they're trying to figure out how to profit beyond their flat profit intake for being the support network but since there is no value-added profit to be had without tiers and thus creating a have and have not situation that is artificial they are relying on flim-flam to make the cellular tower network seem stressed.
Also, cell towers aren't high-powered compared to electrical substations. The kind of power they draw is no greater than a large box store or a small office building and that is probably a generous estimate. Radio frequencies have no ill effect on life as we know it, microwave frequencies do. Since the towers put out in the regular radio range their actual danger is limited to the occasional bird running into it. In fact if the telecoms shared their towers they would be able to multiply their coverage without expanding their footprint. But that would require recognizing that they're just utilities and thus the tiered plans of service would be called into question.
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 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.
A contract by its very nature is a set of terms by which two parties agree to exchange things of value. If one of those parties can change any provision of the contract at will, with no possibility for negotiation and no additional value provided in exchange for being able to change the contract terms, then it's not really a contract at all.
The problem here is that AT&T has all of the cards. It can force me to abide by the terms of the contract no matter how onerous, can prevent me from accessing the courts when I have a grievance, and then has the power to change that very same contract that you and I have to abide by no matter what, on a whim. If that seems fair to you, then you must be an AT&T shareholder.
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.
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".
that makes sense if at&t was some sort of collective run by the users. it's not. it's a system where users pay at&t to provide a service. i don't give a rats ass about fairness. i care about getting the service i paid for. regardless of how much bandwidth i consume, it's not my problem that at&t sold a service they could'd provide. oh, and my bill says "unlimited data".
i do understand this sort of thinking though ... this small subset of consumers wreaking havoc on at&t's network. however the other side of the story is that despite at&t raking in record profits (think 4+ years of iphone exclusivity) they are still running hardware in places that dates back to the 1970s. it's called reaping what you sow, and they've sown very little. they have a system where it only takes 5% of the users to use their maximum bandwidth (if that?) to bring down the network? that indicates a larger problem in the infrastructure.