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AT&T On Data Throttling: Blame Yourselves
zacharye writes in with a story about Senior EVP of AT&T technology and network operations John Donovan's blog post detailing why customers with unlimited smartphone plans are getting throttled. "In an effort to justify its policies surrounding data service throttling for subscribers with unlimited smartphone data plans, AT&T on Tuesday issued a brief report regarding data usage on its nationwide wireless network. Senior EVP of AT&T technology and network operations John Donovan wrote on a company blog that data traffic on AT&T's network has grown a staggering 20,000% over the past five years. Usage has doubled between 2010 and 2011 according to the executive, due in large part to the proliferation of smartphones. AT&T sold more smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2011 than in any other quarter in its history. And because its smartphone subscribers use so much data, AT&T seems to suggest it has no choice but to put measures such as data throttling in place."
...for trying to use the product they bought.
AT&T needs to learn from the insurance companies - the REAL profit is in selling a product you never intend to deliver.
This space available.
If their infrastructure wasn't up to it, why didn't they throttle sales of smartphones?
Alternatively, they could not sell a service they can't actually deliver. Crazy, I know.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Looks like ATT didn't plan or execute their long term strategy well. And they wonder why they weren't allowed to buy T-Mobile
I agree with him. They only have themselves to blame for picking AT&T in the first place.
If they wanted good honest service then they had every reason to believe that AT&T was the last place they would find it.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is like selling 5,000 tickets to a show that can only host a thousand people, and blaming the people who complain about not getting what the paid for.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
It is called build up your damn infrastructure. Stop taking our money and using it to give the excutives bonuses, and start investing in infrastructure. They get gobs of tax breaks and straight up funding to build infrastructure.
Now they have the gall to complain about folks actually using the unlimited data plan they get sold, because they have not properly built up their infrastructure. Fuck them. Fuck them in the skull.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
I like the way AT&T mandates that all smart phones on their network have a data plan. God forbid someone have a smart phone, do smart phone stuff over wifi, and just use it as a regular phone the rest of the time not eating into AT&T's precious bandwidth.
The problem is not throttling per se, but that the threshold for reaching throttling on an "unlimited" account is *lower* than on a tiered plan (the top 5% is allegedly between 1.6 GB and 1.8 GB), and that using a sliding metric will trend usage downward over the long term. People will be fearful of reaching the throttling threshold, and so they will be unreasonably conservative in their use, which in turn lowers the bar for what constitutes the top 5%. Theoretically, "unlimited" could eventually be even more limited than a 200MB plan.
Obviously the best (and only) way to push back is to use as much data as possible on an unlimited plan, driving the ceiling upwards.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I'll do it. If the government weren't so tightly regulating the spectrum making the barrier of entry into the market unbearably high, we'd see more competitors, some of which would understand that "selling the customer what they want" and "following through on contractual commitments" would net them a fair chunk of the customer base. And then AT&T would have to compete for customers instead of dictate to them.
Now, I get that regulation of the airwaves has some benefit. But here is one of the costs.
20,000 % is 200 times. That's not a lot when you're considering total data, and not just maximum theoretical speed. For a start, if I use something everyday now that, five years ago, I only used one a month, that's 30 times more data already.
But it would be a lot in speed capability. The mobile I had when I was a kid years ago could only handle GSM data (i.e. 9600 bps at best at the time). If that speed had increased 20,000%, I'd have a 230Gbytes/s phone today.
I'm sorry but it's just poor planning. You know exactly how many customers you have and are likely to have. You know exactly what the theoretical maximum of those phones are. You know exactly what the average person will do (slowly use it more as time passes and upgrades pass by). Yet you still sell an unlimited package.
It's just bad business, but they don't want to admit that, like the small businesses that let Groupon sell 20,000 coupons for a free cupcake, etc. You didn't plan. You didn't extrapolate. You didn't price your products properly. You didn't expand the capability of your network. You didn't do anything that I would expect a large business like AT&T to do.
Ramp your prices up. Then wait for your customers to see all those Japanese telco's that give everyone huge allowances at top data rates for manageable prices on both mobile and fixed-line broadband. I don't care about your bad business planning, all I look for is value-for-money. If you can't provide it, I won't buy from you. If I do buy from you, I expect to get what I bought without any wording-tricks and revisions of the contracts. How hard is this to understand?
You DO have unlimited data......
Just not at unlimited speed
Am I missing something here?
Burma?