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."

Comments

It's all the customers' fault...

[Jafafa Hots]

...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.

Re:It's all the customers' fault...

[AmigaMMC]

Data throttling is happening after 1.5GB to people on an unlimited plan whereas it doesn't happen to people who have 2GB or 3GB plans. That tells me that AT&T is coercing customers with an unlimited plan to drop it and go with a limited plan. It would be just fair for Data Throttling not to occur before 2 or 3GB of usage, to be in par with the other consumers. I think the FCC should step in and stop this abuse of consumer rights.

Re:It's all the customers' fault...

[18_Rabbit]

Sounds like that's exactly what they were doing. UNLIMITED data plans, shouldn't, you know, have a LIMIT.

Re:It's all the customers' fault...

[BDZ]

I think the main reason they don't throttle the customers with the limited plans is that they very much wish to see those people go over the limit so they can then charge them for additional usage.

Re:It's all the customers' fault...

[ackthpt]

...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.

I'd mod this to +6 if I could.

AT&T is still running a lot of traffic, last mile/last feet, in copper and doesn't want to go through tens of thousands of neighborhoods and replace copper with glass. They also don't want to upgrade switches. It was such a shock to their crappy infrastructure when the first iPhones saturated their networks in New York City. Excuse me while I mock the blank, stupid looks on their faces, because some engineer, somewhere must have done the math and warned them it was coming. Dur. Got some great publicity out of that gaffe, didn't they?

And so little of that, if any at all, was dependent upon copper.

I sit and read about Euro telecoms running networks up to 100 Mb/s all over the place and see AT&T (among others) looking for ways to throttle the pokey 6 Mb/s I'm getting, or even figuring how to charge me for using it, effectively threatening the Golden Goose of the Internet for any company selling a product requiring high bandwidth, which really is the future growth direction. What do they want, a government subsidy? Of course they do, just like Big Oil, I bet.

Re:It's all the customers' fault...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can forgive airlines overbooking, to a degree. Most airlines only overbook a few seats, and it works out fine the majority of the time (I don't have exact numbers, but I'm a very frequent flier and rarely hear about people being bumped) And in the few case when it doesn't work out and too many people show up, the airlines go out of their way to accommodate people. They'll ask for volunteers, provide free upgrades, meal vouchers and anything else.

ATT on the other hand, has overbooked their network by a LARGE margin. They've invited easily double the amount of people they can handle, and all of those people are showing up. And in response to this problem, ATT says "just deal with it," I received no free upgrades, no discount on my bill, nothing to offset the fact that they didn't provide the service I payed for.

Re:It's all the customers' fault...

[Obfuscant]

Those elaborate models you cite make most flights into cattle cars, sardine cans, with overhead storage bulging to the bursting point.

What has made overhead storage bulging is not the practice of overbooking, which is a natural response to the tendency of people to book flights and then not show up, expecting a full refund, so the airlines would have empty seats that make no money.

The cause is the creation of baggage charges for every checked bag. This, naturally, makes the frugal among the fliers buy the biggest bag they can that will meet airline standards (and often those that obviously don't) and try to stuff it into the overhead for free, because it won't fit under the seat in front of them.

These are the people, of course, who would take advantage of the free gate checking of bags but they've managed to pack something valuable into the bag and don't want to let it go baggage class.

I do wish the airlines would enforce their policies on carryon bag sizes and number, which would go a long way towards easing the crunch in overhead space. Stop the people at the gate from carrying on the big bags (or bypassing the pay-to-check system by gate checking them) and force them to check everything more than 2.

Throttle sales

[sunderland56]

If their infrastructure wasn't up to it, why didn't they throttle sales of smartphones?

Alternatively

[macemoneta]

Alternatively, they could not sell a service they can't actually deliver. Crazy, I know.

IPhone

[the_Bionic_lemming]

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.

Bullshit

[swv3752]

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.

Re:Bullshit

[Dhalka226]

I agree completely.

I could maybe, maaaaaybe feel sorry for regular ISPs. There's undeniably a lot of piracy that goes on that inflates bandwidth usage beyond their predictions for reasonable.

But that's not a significant issue on phones. Instead the phone companies are complaining about users doing the exact fucking things they market their phones as doing! "Your phone now plays YouTube videos!" "Whoa whoa whoa! Why are you guys watching so many videos on your phone? How could we possibly have predicted such a thing?" "Hey, now you can review that PowerPoint presentation in the cab!" "Whoa whoa whoa, why are you downloading files and shit?!" Well let me think about that for a while guys. Clearly the thought I've given the matter in this post alone exceeds what AT&T and their billions of dollars of profit gave it.

Infrastructure is expensive. We get it. Hey, guess what? So are your phones, the mandatory data plan, smartphone fee and regular service fees over a multi-year contract. Nobody feels sorry for you for overselling your service even more than you calculated you were going to. Shut up and provide customers the service they bought with those billions of dollars of profit you make every quarter, even in one of the worst economies since the Depression. You'll find nobody here shedding a tear for you.

Re:Bullshit

[unity100]

I could maybe, maaaaaybe feel sorry for regular ISPs. There's undeniably a lot of piracy that goes on that inflates bandwidth usage beyond their predictions for reasonable.

no you cant be sorry for them. pirates pay for their bandwidth. period.

no opt-out either

[fred fleenblat]

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.

Wow, 20,000% eh?

[ledow]

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?

Re:Horseshit

[ackthpt]

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

They're plans for T-mobile probably included making a lot of money in bonuses and executive backslapping. It had nothing to do with improving service.