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AT&T Clarifies Data Limitations On "Unlimited" Data Plans
MojoKid writes "Several months ago, AT&T notified customers that it would begin throttling network speeds for users who exceeded a certain threshold, with the definitive throttle point defined as an imprecise "the top 5% of mobile data users." The company has issued a statement clarifying this policy after irate customers with unlimited data plans demanded to know what the cap was and how the company determined who should and shouldn't be throttled. The magic number is 3GB, which conveniently happens to be the maximum amount of tiered bandwidth AT&T will sell you. So why would AT&T want unlimited users to move to tiered pricing when its maximum tier is also set at 3GB? Simple — the amount of money the company makes on customers who exceed that 3GB limit. The fine print reads: 'If 3GB is exceeded, an additional 1 GB is automatically provided at a rate of $10 for each additional 1 GB.' Anyone using above 3GB on an unlimited plan is a customer who isn't paying enough for the privilege (from AT&T's perspective)."
Hypocrisy thy name is "insert your choise company here" ?
Because it is enough for most customers. They do specify these limits too. IF you want truly unlimited, non-capped bandwidth, buy it yourself. But expect to pay 25x more!
In my experience, AT&T doesn't even deliver the data I bought. So when they throttle you at 3Gb, they may actually be throttling you at 1Gb (the difference is far larger than what can be explained by network overhead). Run a data counter on your phone to see what is actually going on, and compare that with the data they claim you used.
So then don't call it unlimited? it's not that hard -_-
It's not the plan that's the problem it is the entire concept, which is based on a logical impossibility.
So how much longer are ISPs going to be allowed to use this lie when promoting their products? It's not even misleading, it's a plain falsehood. Very little in life is "unlimited". We live in a world of limited resources. No company can sell you "unlimited" anything.
Or are we witnessing a lexical change to the language where "unlimited" merely means a vague "lots"?
There is something inhertly wrong with an unlimited plan that is not unlimited. It's not about what is enough and what's not enough for most customers, it is simply that in this cases some customers are beind decieved ( because they expected to recieve something they were offered), to remedy this issue is to just don't call it unlimited. No one is forcing them to offer unlimited plans!
They don't offer one. But they have grandfathered old unlimited plans so as not to piss off existing customers. It's a strange idea, though, because anyone still with AT&T at this point is already a certified masochist.
Bait and switch.
There is something inhertly wrong with an unlimited plan that is not unlimited. It's not about what is enough and what's not enough for most customers, it is simply that in this cases some customers are beind decieved ( because they expected to recieve something they were offered), to remedy this issue is to just don't call it unlimited. No one is forcing them to offer unlimited plans!
Generally, you cannot walk into a restaurant and just eat for as many days as you want, even when they advertise unlimited buffet. There are expected limits to unlimited offerings, and considering the state of the mobile network, it's not that surprise.
Better yet, get rid of the ridiculous idea of "data plans" in the first place. Charge users a certain per-megabyte fee on their bill for the data they use and offer them the option to pre-purchase data per-gigabyte at a discount.
One of the important prerequisites for a free market is informed customers. I have no problem at all with ISPs providing caps. If everyone saturated their connections 24/7 then they would not be able to provide the service, and the cost of actually providing that amount of bandwidth to everyone would be far greater than most customers are able to afford. The problem is not the capping, it is misleading advertising. If you are going to offer 5GB per month, advertise 5GB per month. If you are going to offer 50GB per month, advertise 50GB per month. If you are going to deploy a transparent proxy that resamples images, specify that. If you are going to block access to certain sites, or only permit HTTP traffic, don't say that you provide Internet access. Tell people exactly what service you will provide and allow potential customers to decide whether they think it is worth what you are charging.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
When I shop, I make a bee line for the charts that compare services and their agreements- after consulting Consumer Reports to see if they have anything.
Advertisements and sales fluff are just lies - to state the obvious.
Once I was in a very large home center. There was the guy with the table calling people over to buy their overpriced installation services (if you compare prices they charge 40% more than you local contractor - even though they too use local contractors.)
Anyway, while he was giving me his BS spiel, I was looking at the brochure and noticed these asterisks by the "guarantees". When he asked if I had questions, I just replied, "See these asterisks? That means somewhere in the fine print you're going to screw me."
"Oh no no! "
"And under state law, whatever comes out of your mouth is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what is in writing."
*Big dopey grin from sales dweeb* While I walked away happily - I enjoy wasting salespeople's time when I have nothing better to do.
No, capping the monthly data volume is not fine. The total amount of data is not a cost to the provider. The cost of the network is determined by the maximum concurrent data transfers, i.e. peak load. You can construct the network for the minimum speed that users will tolerate at peak times, but no less. That is your cost driver. If you cap the total amount of data per month, the first to go is the bulk downloading, which is not timing sensitive and much more evenly distributed than typical "must have on the mobile" usage. In other words, caps are mostly ineffective at reducing a network operators costs.
So why are caps used anyway? It's price-gouging. Caps are not meant to reduce costs, they're meant to increase earnings per customer. If you accept caps, you have already accepted the price gouging. How they call the service is irrelevant. Suppose they stop advertising "unlimited" plans and start advertising "one price, no matter how much you use".
So then don't call it unlimited? it's not that hard -_-
The bandwidth is not capped though, it's THROTTLED. So you still get "unlimited" bandwidth.
People need to remember that companies are going to sell you with the most non-obvious definitions available to them. How often do you hear "it's a steal at less than 14 thousand dollars!" Meanwhile it costs $13,999... sure it's true, but that doesn't make it misleading.
Cynics however are in the know, and we're constantly looking for how they could be using these words to their best benefit.
Other people just don't seem to get it, and no less always act surprised every time they get burned by assuming good faith in advertising.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
I live in Finland and I can't understand what is going on in all those countries where they start charging more while giving less. I wanted to get an extra set of text messages in my mobile package. So the guy looks at my info and says "I see you have the '500 minutes + 100 text messages' package and a 3G package on top of that. Let's improve on that." The result was that I have those 2 packages for the price I used to pay for just the minutes+texts. Making my 3G (1/3rd of the price of the old agreement) 'free', really. And there's no data limit. Maybe it's the advantage of having a 'large' country with a big network, but very few people.
Here's the secret to immortality:
They're a phone company.
Time and again we've seen evidence that a telco's business model is "sign up as many customers as you can, gouge them for as much money as you can and provide the bare minimum service necessary to be able to claim that the customer was getting exactly what they paid for in the event you get into trouble. We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."
That comes with network congestion... or more precisely with congestion of the RF spectrum: more and more users are competing for a larger and larger chunk of what amounts to a finite resource. Maybe Finland's RF spectrum isn't congested yet as that of other countries?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Please read until the end of the post, because I'm going to be in the minority here. Some posters say that AT&T shouldn't use the term "unlimited" if it means 3 GB. Another poster says they declare that you have reached 3 GB when approximately 1 GB has gone over the wire -- which cannot possibly be accounted for by network bandwidth. I'm about to express a minority view here, but I will tell you why I'm doing it so please read to the end.
The minority view is: AT&T has a fiduciary and legal obligation to promise whatever will convince the most customers. If it's unlimited, it's "unlimited" if it's "ten times faster than fiber" they should promise that. Further, AT&T has a fiduciary and legal obligation to reduce its costs as far as the market will bear: in other words, if it were possible to keep its customers to THEIR promise (their contracts) while closing down ALL of their network towers, then AT&T should do that. AT&T has an obligation to the shareholders to promise as much and deliver as little as it can get away with.
Now let me explain why I'm expressing this minority viewpoint: out of sarcasm and irony. Go fuck yourselves AT&T, one day every one of the three hundred million Americans you attempted to fuck over will fuck you right back and you will have to deliver a coupon to each and every one of us, and every one of your leadership will be replaced. On that day I will look at that coupon and laugh at you, you sorry fucks.
Unfortunately, even when they are up-front about their bandwidth management policy, sometimes they make it so complex that it's still hard to know if you're complying. Check out the policy for my ISP, Virgin Media. Props to them for publishing the policy, although you do have to keep checking that it hasn't changed while you weren't looking. But give me a break - two different periods during which traffic is metered, one including an upstream cap, one not, with different levels in each. Plus separate DPI-based management of P2P "between 5pm and midnight on weekdays and midday and midnight on weekends". And if you do exceed one of the caps, they throttle you to 25%, which would be fine, except that however they've implemented that throttling, it makes your connection almost unusable. Download a game from Steam at the wrong time, and you might basically lose the ability to stream video from the web for the rest of the day. Fun.
Oh no... it's the future.
I disagree. You're trying to rationalize away the definition of unlimited with a poor analogy. An all you can eat buffet is not advertised as "unlimited". Usually plainly just "all you can eat". It becomes obvious after a certain point you cannot eat anymore. That is your limit. They are not offering "all you can eat for the next week/month/year/lifetime", but for your current meal. So if you're sitting there after having pounded down several plates of food, they're perfectly within their rights to ask you to leave since they satisfied their end of the bargain.
AT&T once upon a time did offer completely unlimited bandwidth. It was of course at a time when there was very little to consume while mobile so if anything, it was little more than a marketing strategy. The problem came when there was a boom in mobile internet activity, where people had a reason to consume copious amounts of bandwidth. They realized they could get far more money by removing the unlimited plans and moving to tiered plans. Their "unlimited" plan outlived its usefulness and they've been trying to remove and cripple it as much as possible to get everyone grandfathered out of it.
It is, however, and always will be shady to still claim something is unlimited if it is inherently not. No amount of rationalization of "expected" or "obvious" limitations will ever change that. If you're offering a finite resource, do not claim it's unlimited with an asterisk explaining the limitations. Offer the service with a proper name. We should not be tolerating this sort of false advertising.
The bandwidth is not capped though, it's THROTTLED. So you still get "unlimited" bandwidth.
To be a bit pedantic, throttled is the exact opposite of unlimited bandwidth. What they are talking about of course is unlimited data.
Finland has Nokia and just across the border there is Ericsson. This means that the local telephone companies get to test a lot of new networking hardware before it goes into mass production, which lowers their costs. The problem in much of the rest of the world is that phone companies sold data plans for early smartphones that had tiny screens and could just about do web browsing if you had a lot of patience and just about managed email. An unlimited plan for one of these phones was well under 1GB - irrespective of how fast the network was, you just couldn't consume much data on them. Then people took the same plans and started using modern smartphones with them. A single YouTube video on a modern phone will use more data than a month with an early Blackberry, for example. The networks were very slow at adapting, and are now trying to readjust their prices to levels that actually make sense.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"The magic number is 3GB, which conveniently happens to be the maximum amount of tiered bandwidth AT&T will sell you."
that's funny because I am paying for 5Gb from them. It's available on the website and at any location. Sounds like the article writer did not know anything about it's data plans.
Yes you can get a business 5GB data plan on your phones, and it had better be outside that 3Gb data cap or they are refunding a lot of money.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The thing here in Finland is that usually the upload/download speed is limited, not the amount of data you can use. E.g. I'm Saunalahti-customer and they offer this mobile broadband-thing in various "sizes." The smallest one, the Mini, costs 4.99€ a month, has absolutely no throttling or data cap, but the speed is limited to 512KB/s. I think such pricing works great and there is absolutely no worries of going over the cap. Oh, and before someone asks: no, you're not required to sign a 2-year contract or anything, you can end the contract whenever you wish.
That said I have full package myself; no caps, no throttling, and I can upload/download at full available speed. It still costs only 15€ a month, so it's still tens of times better than anything those poor Amercans are gettin'!
They knowingly and willingly over sold their infrastructure (bait) and now that customers are trying to use the service they signed up for, their service is being throttled (switch). Period.
The real truth here is that they offered services which they knew they could not provide and rather than do the correct thing and increase their infrastructure capacity, they opted to increase shareholder profits and to purchase the other smaller companies who were coerced into selling selling off their business for lack of ability to compete with the unlimited plans. Now that they have a large percentage of the market share, their strategy is to punish the customer that they probably wouldn't even have if it was not for the unlimited plans. Basically they gambled that customers would not utilize the service and lost. However, unlike when we get our pockets emptied at a casino, they're somehow able to pawn their losses on the customers.
I couldn't imagine a more clear example of a ponzi scheme than this.
-- L8R, guitardood
I have an unlimited 3G plan with Verizon Wireless for my smartphone, and this made me curious. Verizon has a nearly identical throttling policy: http://goo.gl/RIXbF
-- Who am I? How did I get here? My God, what have I done?!
The bandwidth is not capped though, it's THROTTLED. So you still get "unlimited" bandwidth.
To be a bit pedantic, throttled is the exact opposite of unlimited bandwidth. What they are talking about of course is unlimited data.
Indeed, but we all should know that unlimited bandwidth is physically impossible, anyways...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
So then don't call it unlimited? it's not that hard -_-
The bandwidth is not capped though, it's THROTTLED.
I agree that this is the definition AT&T wants to use, but it's not advertised as "uncapped," it's advertised as "unlimited." Throttling is limiting. I'm sure there are many synonymous ways you could define "bandwidth throttling" which doesn't include the word "limit," but by reducing the available bandwith, you are limiting. Something which is limited cannot be called unlimited.
When AT&T first started throttling, it was supposed to be the top 5% of users, who apparently consumed something like 90% of the overall data. Now this seems to have come to serve another purpose.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
'Network abusers'? You really did drink the coolaid. How about your duty to deliver what your customers have paid for?
The bandwidth is not capped though, it's THROTTLED. So you still get "unlimited" bandwidth.
To be a bit pedantic, throttled is the exact opposite of unlimited bandwidth. What they are talking about of course is unlimited data.
I owe you an apology... apparently, there are people who need this explained to them... :(
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Yeah like fucking Virgin Mobile Australia charging 2c per KB over.. which means you can clock up $thousands in a very short time.
Yes, Virgin Mobile, I am talking about you.
They are the damn pirates.
50MB over = $100. Ouch. For a lousy $600 phone on a $40 per month plan. You go over.. you PAY.. bend over boy.
My first over the cap bill was $5500. You can't kill me. Wife already tried and damn near succeeded.
When she asked you why you used so much data It was probably a mistake to tell her how much better the porn movies are in HD.
No, when they advertise unlimited bandwidth, what they mean is that they don't put any limits on it. If they put limits on it then it's not unlimited. The overly pedantic definition you're using is of no value to anybody ever.
If they're placing any throttling or limitations on it, then it's not unlimited.
[clipped]
It is, however, and always will be shady to still claim something is unlimited if it is inherently not. No amount of rationalization of "expected" or "obvious" limitations will ever change that. If you're offering a finite resource, do not claim it's unlimited with an asterisk explaining the limitations. Offer the service with a proper name. We should not be tolerating this sort of false advertising.
I have to disagree on this, to a point. Namely, I'm willing to let my current subscription to be called unlimited, with asterisk explaining limitations. No, don't yell at me yet, let me explain.
My current plan let's me download unlimited amount of data each month, no throttling, no caps. This truly is unlimited, but with an asterisk. See later.
My plan also doesn't cap my bandwith, at all, ever, but allow unlimited downloading each month, for the whole month. That, also, is truly unlimited, but with the aforementioned asterisk.
Okay, see here. The asterisk: Please note that these are limited with the current technology. The network available here is limited by the hardware and infrastructure to about 15-20Mbps, theoretical. It usually sits anywhere between four and twelve. So the amount of data, while unlimited in the meaning that no company limits your downloads, is still limited to a finite amount by limits in the hardware of the network and the device you are using. You cannot download 34579823475 TB of data each month, since the devices you own and the network provided are physically incapable of such speed that would be required for that amount of data.
If the company who sells the product/service to me does not intentionally limit the use in any way, I'm fine for them to call it "unlimited", even if it comes with an asterisk explaining the limitations of the underlying system.
The U.K. and E.U. do a god job with truth in advertising. Why can't the U.S.too? Maybe if we ban paid radio t.v. political ads (stations running only as much non-paid balanced public affairs programming as they choose), we would not have so many elected officials selling influence through those corporate campaign contributions.
"Unlimited" here means "without artificial limitations." At least that's what it used to mean when they first advertised it.
No, when they advertise unlimited bandwidth, what they mean is that they don't put any limits on it.
I don't think you understand what "bandwidth" means.
Do you have any idea how much people actually use and want to use with their current devices? You may as well have said "X only works because no one is using it to download an infinite amount of data in an infinitesimal amount of time." for all the sense that what you did say means. Unlimited on the other hand, does not work, and can only work when the networks are upgraded to handle the amount of data the users want to use at the speeds they contracted for. The gall of AT&T for thinking they can abuse the English language by using the term "unlimited" without actually meaning it, and for thinking they have monopolistic ability to dictate prices to users instead of participating an a marketplace where others are offering similar, better contracts.
The magic number is 3GB, which conveniently happens to be the maximum amount of tiered bandwidth AT&T will sell you.
BANDWIDTH is the RATE at which bits are transferred.
USAGE is the AMOUNT of data that has been transferred.
After 3GB of USAGE, AT&T will limit your BANDWIDTH.
I'd expect this kind of confusion on CNN, but Slashdot?
Not the way I read it. You want to sell me unlimited data, it'd better be unlimited. As in, no limits at all. Not "no limits on the amount". I'm talking "no limits on the amount, no limits on how you use it, no limits on how fast you can use it."
Otherwise, you'd better stop calling it unlimited.
Granted. So, that means either (a) AT&T is lying and hence committing fraud* or (b) they're using a more limited definition of the word "unlimited".
That's a bad analogy. The "restaurant" closes at the end of the month for everyone. If it closed early for you, it'd be a limited plan.
So long as it's the standard convention that you only get one plate at a time, then it can still be called unlimited. However, if after eating n plates of food, they take away your plate and give you a tiny cup saucer, they're clearly limiting your ability to eat.
Hardly. If the standard bandwidth for the first 1/4th of the month allows you to download 3GB, but after that point you're throttled to 1/10th the standard speed, you can only d/l an additional ~0.9GB. No amount of waiting will grant you d/ling 4GB in a month. And it's not like the discussion is merely about granting a "fairer", higher priority to other users who have used less bandwidth because that would at least hypothetically grant you the possibility of d/ling even up to ~12GB/month if there's few enough other users sharing the bandwidth. Throttling, after all, is a different beast than simply QoS or other prioritizing.
*Well, I guess that falls into the area of "a company can lie as much as it want, be as deceptive as it wants, etc, so long as the lie is so grand or the deception so vast that no reasonable person would believe it". That's obviously stupid because there's a clear intent and that's the critical aspect of why they'd even bother to advertise the plan as "unlimited". If you can't physically have unlimited bandwidth, then a reasonable understanding that unlimited in the stated context means the dictionary definition of unlimited mean unrestrained. Well, throttling is clearly a restraint. I can only imagine that as others have stated, the unlimited plan came first and the heavy bandwidth came later, which lead to those in charge thinking more of how in some vague, twisted way a plan may be interpreted as "unlimited" while still in a common and obvious way not be.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
The majority of the "profit" telcos make is from their business clients. Residential customers are not profitable at all. The only reason they care in the least about resi customers is because, in order to own the territory you have to service both. What little money they do make in the residential market is usually due to large government subsidies, like Obama's recent DSL expansion project. And trust me, all that money went strait into the bank. The telcos just listed projects they had already had on the books in planning for years, and then collected the money. Thank you uncle sam.
>One of the important prerequisites for a free market is informed customers
No. Informed customers is a result of regulation of a free market.
Free market is when somebody sells you a snake oil and you are responsible for figuring out if it is snake oil or not.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I agree that this is the definition AT&T wants to use, but it's not advertised as "uncapped," it's advertised as "unlimited." Throttling is limiting. I'm sure there are many synonymous ways you could define "bandwidth throttling" which doesn't include the word "limit," but by reducing the available bandwith, you are limiting. Something which is limited cannot be called unlimited.
To be completely and utterly pedantic, I feel the need to point out that it's not advertised at all. They don't still sell the "unlimited" package, it's a legacy package that people who were subscribers to another carrier were grandfathered in on when they took it over. It was advertised as "unlimited", and for a while it was "unlimited", but this is not a service they still sell.
It's also worth mentioning that I have not seen their contract in writing, so I have no idea how they define "limiting". It could make it very clear that they're talking about data usage caps, and not bandwidth... in fact, while they may use different nomenclature, I would be very surprised if they didn't point out that they're not talking about bandwidth, because they have no way to ensure that there will be enough bandwidth available on a given cell at a given time of day to handle your data use.
Ultimately, I don't care. ATT shafts their customers. Ok. Thanks for the warning. Next time I'm shopping for a carrier, I'll keep that in mind. But the carrier I'm on has a flex data plan, and my usage is so low that I'm on the bottom tier of it ($5/mo for data on my smartphone), so I doubt that I'd be all that worried about the upper limits of data tiers: no other carrier has a data tier as low/cheap as the one I'm using right now.
If you pay for all-you-can-eat soup and they make you start waiting 30 minutes between each bowl after your 3rd bowl, you'd still feel cheated, wouldn't you? That is some thing that really should be a PART OF the advertising, and not some fine print.
Plenty of people would pay more for (and make use of) throttling to start at 5 GB instead of 3 GB or 1 GB, so it should definitely be clear that this is happening.
It's easy - just do what ISPs do in many other parts of the world. You have a monthly subscription fee and a monthly cap. The better plan you're on the bigger the cap and better value-for-money you get, but the more money you pay overall.
If your cap isn't enough for the current month you can top up at a rate that's better than the price-per-gig that you pay for the cap on your plan but not quite as good as the more-expensive plans. That way you are encouraged to upgrade your subscription if you go over your limit regularly.
When you hit your cap you are either cut off or throttled heavily depending on your ISP's policy, but you can top up manually or use an optional auto-topup with configurable thresholds. The customer should never be charged for anything involuntarily or be punished for overage.
Well, without getting into the problem where "bandwidth" isn't the same as "data transferred", bandwidth in my mind describes a bit rate, not amount of data transferred, even unlimited has a theoretical limit.
If a mobile customer transfers data at say 1.5 Mbps (assuming that is their speed) continuously for 1 month then that would be a theoretical limit to what "unlimited" would be, my quick calcs show that to be 486 GB.
I've heard that comcast has a threshold of 200 GB a month or so. THAT could be a problem given that a cable connection is typically way faster than 1.5 Mbps.
Assuming a 12 Mbps cable connection that's 3.88 TB/month maxed out 24/7, where 200 GB is about 5% of theoretical max. Which makes sense with how many heavy users get "the letter" saying "stop using your unlimited bandwidth, you're using too much."
Right...
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Exactly, and it's illegal. Why are they not being prosecuted for consumer fraud? Of course, when Sony removed OtherOS that fraud was even worse. Maybe it's got something to do with the fact that in the US, corporations are above the law?
Free Martian Whores!
Big point missing here is that unlimited plans are no longer offered to new customers. They exist solely as grandfathered plans. So this brings up the question, why offer grandfathering anyways? Can't they issue a sunset clause a year in advance and then gradually fade them away? I'd wager not that many of the unlimited customers would leave.
The letter would say, "You are currently on an unlimited plan. Your actual usage is $$$. Under our new plan starting next year, your new cost would be $$$." By far the largest fraction of their users would stay.
(Yes, I'm disgruntled that I can't get an ATT unlimited plan because I joined too late).
I really don't like AT&T but what other service in the states offers GSM capabilities that work with the iphone. T-mobile uses gsm but at 1700MHz, iphone is 850/900/1800/1900 MHz.
That is the one circumstance I agree with using the phrase unlimited, since they're offering everything they have. It's not so much the asterisk that I have a problem with, but the conditions tied to that asterisk. "Unlimited bandwidth* *3GB cap, further bandwidth will be neigh unusable" is not unlimited. It's a bold faced lie.