AT&T Throttling Unlimited Plans after 2GB Data Use | Hacker News Reader

AT&T Throttling Unlimited Plans after 2GB Data Use

johncozen.com

124 pointsmediamaker70 comments

One particularly nasty thing about automatically throttling the top 5% is that it is completely divorced from costs and level of usage. Over time, if heavy users try using less data, that will just depress the amount of usage required to be the in top 5% -- but 5% of customers will still be affected by throttling.

On a side note, I wonder how the cost of supplying customer service to address the complaints of the top 5% compares to the cost of just letting people consume as much data as they like. I would guess even a few minutes of a CS rep's time is more valuable than letting someone download an extra gig of data per month.

That is why I made as much noise as possible about the (IMO) abusive throttling practices of my previous ISP. Don't take this cr*p lying down, call them and tell them youre unhappy, ask them to disable it on your connection (they won't) and when they refuse, demand to speak to the supervisor. Rinse and repeat. Make it cost more to throttle than it does not to.

It's more underhanded than nasty but you're absolutely right that this didn't mean what they portray and most people thought.

Regardless of whether a given user moderated his data usage voluntarily, because he was throttled, or switched plans, the vast majority of the top 5% likely leaves the pool every month. This means that six months after the change was introduced roughly one quarter subscribers will be removed.

Why would AT&T do this? To avoid the negative publicity associated with eliminating a plan so many people valued while maximizing profitability. This was quite cleverly executed: Offer cheaper limited plans to save customers money, which has the effect of offering new customers a more competitive price while existing customers will happily pay the higher price as insurance against potential overage fees. Then, by removing the highest data users, they could maximize revenue from them while continuing to collect the higher fees from the lower data users. Then once unlimited becomes a less attractive offer than the $25 plan, eliminate it to avoid revenue leakage. The strategy might not be optimal but its superior to the simpler alternatives in the short run.

Of course, the reason is works is that the majority of customers are sufficiently credulous to purchase an implicit insurance contract that AT&T never had to honor. Their actions are legally defensible since the customers did receive the uncertainty reduction in the present period but most of them likely knew they wouldn't go over and paid only for the option of maintaining that protection in a future period. That said, communication that is intentionally ambiguous so as to benefit from misunderstanding should constitute an unfair trade practice.

Disclaimer: I have no knowledge of the actual thought process behind these decisions.

I wish ISPs would just give up on the whole "Unlimited" concept. Clearly it's not practical for them to offer truly unlimited service, so let's just cut the bullshit and go to usage-based billing.

Unfortunately, the tech community hates usage-based billing about as much as they hate throttling. Baffles me as to why.

I think we need to make it illegal to advertise "unlimited" without it actually being unlimited. I would have thought that existing truth-in-advertising laws would cover this, but apparently they don't.

Make it illegal to promise what you never intend to deliver and this whole problem goes away. If unlimited is practical to offer, then it will be offered. If unlimited is not practical, then ISPs will no longer be allowed to pretend that it is, and will be encouraged to make the limitations of their offers obvious up-front instead of using shady nonsense like this.

I prefer a mobile data plan that’s throttled after a certain bandwidth use to paying overage fees. What I don’t like is marketing that as “unlimited”. (I think all carriers in Germany only have plans like that. Some market them as unlimited, some don’t.)

For example: I pay 13.50€ per month for 1.5GB of data (for my iPad). After those 1.5GB my speed is throttled, I do not ever have to pay more, though. I like that. I want it to be like that.

The only thing I don’t like is that I can’t yet buy additional bandwidth at full speed from my carrier. (One carrier recently started doing that. 5€ for every additional GB. But it’s not automatic, you have to manually initiate that. I would prefer that massively to overage fees.)

As I see it there are three reasons the tech community hates usage-based billing.

- First, any time a company tries usage-based data billing, they charge absolutely criminal rates. If you paid attention to usage-based cell service over the years, you'd know what I speak of.

- Second, in an "unlimited" model, some users use more, some use less. In general the tech community will be the ones using more- so they benefit at the marginal expense of other users. They pay comparatively less by volume for their usage.

- Third, in my opinion there's at least a tiny bit of entitlement going around in the online community as a whole. Nobody wants to pay for anything. You know, because "information wants to be free!" and all.

AT&T's overage rates are pretty reasonable. They charge $10/GB, which is about what you pay for the initial monthly data plan anyway. Of course, there's probably leftover sentiment from times when overages were much less reasonable, and there are still plenty of such places remaining.

The second two I agree with, but they're sad reasons.

Rates have gotten better, I agree.

I think people object less to general bandwidth caps than to traffic discrimination. For example, Shaw Cable was accused of throttling Skype traffic but not their competing VOIP product.

As recently as 18 months ago, I routinely got solid customer service from AT&T. While the wireless service itself was really sketchy in NY and SF, any account problems were handled with competence and care.

Given the incredible blowback they'd received from their poor iPhone support, I always felt compelled to tell the people I ended up talking to that they were doing great jobs, and that in spite of what was said in the press about them not having their act together, I found them to be on their game, and that I really appreciated the effort they were making.

Then something changed. Intelligence and responsiveness went off a cliff. On the occasions I did have to call I ended up so deeply infuriated that I'd find myself becoming angry BEFORE having to call again - even months later. It almost seemed that they'd adopted a posture of calculated incompetence, specifically designed discourage people from calling them.

Within a year (and after a series of truly appalling encounters) I'd gone from publicly defending them to hating them with an intensity bordering on incandescent. Were their service any less vital to my life in general, perhaps I'd feel more sanguine. But given the central importance of wireless connectivity, a "service" relationship costing north of $100 per month and delivering nothing by dropped calls and furious anger quickly made it to the top of of my dump-judiciously list.

Part of the shock the OP had is their suprise at 2.1GB putting them in the top 5%. That seems believable to me. I worked in a residential ISP and once ran the numbers on about how much data people use. Something like 90% of people didn't go above 5GB or so. And this was on residential DSL, not on mobile internet.

Of course in theory this is going to reduce the average usage of AT&T users, since someone is always on the top 5% (by definition 1 in 20 customers will be affected). It also seems a little unfair to have a rule that you can't know in advance.

5 GB makes the 250 GB Comcast cap look overly generous, when I can tell you from experience that 250 GB with two people using the Internet on a daily basis is too little.

New games come in at 10 GB or more when you are downloading them from places like Steam, add in two people downloading new games and you can easily see 100's of GB's going to just gaming. If I rebuild my Windows desktop and have Steam re-download all of the games I tend to keep locally I myself use about 150 GB of transfer. On top of that comes watching TV Shows (on Hulu/NetFlix) and movies (iTunes/NetFlix/Hulu) and various other downloads. The latest Mac OS X update weighed in at a hefty 1.38 GB, split across 4 devices.

Granted, I am a technology person, I am a programmer, I spend more time behind a computer than doing almost anything else (including sleep). My usage pattern is going to be vastly different compared to grandma and grandpa that check their email. The thing is though that I want higher quality content delivered to me instantly, Hulu's 480 is nice and all, but I would love to have it in 720p or 1080p for my large TV. All of this uses up bandwidth/transfer.

As for mobile data, I don't tend to do a lot of streaming of music and the like, so far I haven't had any issues with going over the allotted 2 GB from AT&T, that and when I do want to stream I am near Wifi.

Yet as another anecdote, even when watching Netflix streaming basically every night, and downloading the occasional Steam game, I have never once passed my 250 GB Comcast limit. Much as I dislike these kind of caps, it is pretty damn hard to go over 250 GB. That's, what, 200 hours of reasonably high-quality streaming video? 300+ Linux ISOs (the only reason you run bittorrent, right?)?

Sadly, I don't think "unlimited" internet is a sustainable model, because generally speaking every bit you send costs the provider money, and the rise of things like Youtube mean that people actually use more bandwidth. However, 250 GB plus a reasonable per-GB charge after that should be reasonable for a very larger percentage of users.

I don't run bittorrent at all (nobody on the home network does), mainly has to do with my current employment. Between my room mate and I we do 200 GB on average, we've had one warning sent out for getting to 245 GB.

Here is our yearly usage chart: http://i.imgur.com/wZbU1.jpg (since the router/gateway was last rebooted). Do note that there is NO illegal downloading at all. NetFlix, Hulu, Pandora, Spotify, Steam, Dropbox, WoW and many others.

I see no problem with having the monthly plan include 250GB of data. Where it gets stupid is what happens when you go over. Rather than charge you extra, they give you a warning and then cut off your service entirely.

This completely baffles me. Why pass on the opportunity to collect more cash?

>Something like 90% of people didn't go above 5GB or so. And this was on residential DSL, not on mobile internet.

That's skewed to people who don't value a fast internet connection. Those that do have moved on from vanilla DSL to DOCSIS based cable, FIOS, U-verse, and other technologies. I'm not surprised that plain jane DSL is the home of retirees and people whose needs rarely go beyond a facebook/web machine.

Funny thing is that I'm with two providers the conventional "wisdom" here and at others sites like reddit consider to be garbage: comcast and tmobile. Comcast is honest with me and publishes its 250gb cap. I get 13/3mbps for that 250gb. Tmobile gives a 5gb cap on my S2 before throttling, thats 5gb on a fast HSPA+ connection. No games, no BS(well by corporate standards), and I can check my usage easily. I can't imagine having to deal with AT&T. Didn't they just unilateraly make everyone pay extra for text messages a couple months ago? Its horror stories all the way down. Meanwhile, I'm going pretty good with my supposedly "bad" providers reddit and consumerist likes to rant about.

I would suggest that 'Unlimited' has a very clear meaning to the reasonable person and that they are now breaching their contract as it was initially advertised to the public. Assuming it was initially advertised as 'Unlimited' with relation to speed and data.

Of note; Lets say you were in Australia you could take this case straight to the ACCC or the Communications Ombudsman and from experience I would be fairly confident of you getting what you want.

Are you sure? Most companies here offer "unlimited" home Internet plans that are still capped.

While the main thrust of the story is concerning, what really makes me feel ill are the scripted responses. The service agents are just picking responses from a list and hitting send. They appear to have no ability to apply thought to the process, and no authority to delegate up. I'm sure the staff are smart and frustrated, and I'm reasonably sure that they are constrained by their systems and processes. But how good would it be if the very first agent was able to actually address the question. My suggested answer would be "yes, this does seem very low, but that's what we are told - 95% of people use less than 2gb per month. It seems a little ridiculous. I can switch you to the 3gb plan of you like - it's cheaper as well (my guess). " No matter what the response it's time to stop this cruel and unusual punishment of both CS staff and customers.

All that sounds great and I agree with you 100%...however, since they're a public company, their first priority is to maximize profits, and that is exactly what they're doing here. Since USA citizens are so lazy that they let telco lobbyist groups write the laws and don't riot over them when they're passed by bought politicians, we have to deal with idiotic support as described above.

This is also the reason that the sales drones at Best Buy just read the product packaging when you ask them a question about it. Unskilled labor is cheap, and these days, almost all level 1 support is unskilled (think across industries, not just IT; IT still has some great lvl1 support if you look hard enough.)

I think it is unreasonable to expect the masses to "riot over" any issue that doesn't go their way. After all, the various industry associations didn't have to start any riots, blackout any web sites, or send hundreds of thousands of messages to get their laws passed. There must be a better way.

Is causing your customers to think you're ripping them of, and making them look elsewhere for service actually maximising profit though?

Given the cost of acquiring a customer they should be bending over backwards to keep existing customers.

Yes, since they know customers have nowhere else to go.

AT&T is vile garbage. I'm grandfathered into their unlimited plan, but throughout NYC, at work, and at home, my reception is spotty at best. As discussed in this thread, their customer service is non-existant.

With an unlimited data plan at worse than dial-up speeds, the data service is useless. I'm planning on switching to Verizon when my iPhone 4 AT&T contract is up, but I'm not holding my breath for any better customer service from Verizon. There really is no cell phone company in the US that I want to give my money to.

If you don't mind me asking, why are T-Mo/Sprint/US Cellular/etc not options for you?

I tried to finish - but the author was either being dense or argumentative. I think AT&T has made their position pretty clear - Unlimited doesn't have overage charges, but you get rate limited when you hit the top 5% of usage (currently 2 Gigabytes). AT&T also offers 2 Gigabyte and 3 Gigabyte plans, with overage charges.

Happily, AT&T has been prevented from taking over T-Mobile, so we still have at least four providers for wireless data in most major markets - let's hope it stays that way.

While oligopoly still > than monopoly or duopoly, it's still < free market.

You think the wireless ISP biz is a free market? Try to start one. Try to get cities and tower owners to give you permission to put your gear up. Who will you get fibre interlinks from for those towers? Who will issue permits to dig trenches to lay fibre all over the cities? Wireless ISPs ("wireless telcos" but I consider them ISPs because ALL their calls, SMS, MMS, and data is now digital) know the game and make no mistake, it is this way on purpose. They have done everything they can to ensure an anti-competitive market.

EDIT: I'm sure someone will mention that you could just resell service as many regional WISPs do. Again though, WISPs know the score here, and they price reseller service so that it basically matches what they're offering direct to consumers. At my old company, we'd resell SBC-ATT-Yahoo-Cingulair-Bell-BellSouth-Ameritech-Edge Wireless-Cellular One-Centennial-Wayport DSL (yes, those are all just known as "ATT" today) and the cheapest we could offer 1.5mbit DSL service was $25/month.

I've never suggested it's a free market. I'm just saying there are four vendors who you can chose from based on your feelings about price and quality. I'm just happy it's not three.

The use of limiting the top 5% is quite disingenuous. As over time the limit will shift down to a lower amount as customers become annoyed and move to other plans. Clearly 2gb is not an excessive amount of data either as ATT sells larger tiered plans.

So, this is clearly a breach of the spirit of the contract. A claim with the small claims court and/or FCC seems to be in order.

There's a 3 gig plan for $30 and he's being throttled at 2.1G. I think he makes a good point. Are 3 gig plan users also being throttled when they hit the "top 5%"?

3 Gig Plan users pay $10/Gigabyte of overage. I'm pretty sure AT&T has priced the overage such that they don't mind if you use more bandwidth.

My virgin mobile (35 per month) unlimited data plan will start getting throttled in march - after 2.5gb.

I'm so glad I left ATT behind. Sure it's a little slower, and I can't get an iphone or the latest or greatest android phone. But it's one of the best values out there, and I didn't need to sign a freaking lock in contract.

So it starts throttling at a half gig later? And you have to deal with crappy phones? Great deal you got there.

At a third of the price. Price-to-value ratio is much better.

And while the LG Optimus Slider has a smallish screen, it still runs android 2.3. And with a slide-out keyboard, SSH sessions are a lot easier. It's "good enough."

They didn't throttle mine, they simply changed my plan to the 4GB plan and told me after the fact. They did this to my wife's account as well.

And if I change it to the 2GB plan and then tether using an unofficial tethering app, they automatically change my plan back to the 4GB tethering plan.

And there goes my last remaining reason not to switch back to Verizon.

Anyone have any experience in the process of switching an AT&T iPhone to Verizon? Worth it? Any gotchas?

Won't work. Different network and different hardware.

The 4S has CDMA and GSM radios built in. You could just unlock it and move it over if you can find the right CSR to add your IMEI to Verizon.

The CDMA radio is disabled on iPhones originally sold to GSM providers. Apple's just as complicit in the lockin as everyone else.

You can't "just" unlock it. Unlocking is risky: it voids your warranty, makes the process of updating your OS difficult or impossible, and has a very real chance of bricking your phone.

Unlocking does not void your warrantee. I've had many unlocked iPhones replaced under warrantee. That said, if you brick it while unlocking (and the 4S tools are very new), you won't be covered.

Perhaps your local Apple Store doesn't check for unlocks before warranty replacement, but unauthorized unlocking absolutely voids your warranty in principle and Apple would be well within their rights to refuse service. If you don't believe me here's the relevant section of the warranty (written by Apple in bold):

"This warranty does not apply: [...] to an Apple Product that has been modified to alter functionality or capability without the written permission of Apple".

(For what it's worth, while software unlocking is usually not a huge or dangerous affair, there is not currently a software unlock for any iPhone beyond the iPhone 3G.)

Unless you have a 4S.

Even though the 4S is supposedly a GSM/CDMA combined phone, its still locked to individual carriers, unless you happened to buy the unlocked version at nearly $800 USD.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/marcwebertobias/2011/12/22/how-u...

I would suggest Sprint as they offer unlimited data and voice (text too) for $80 a month.

I have switched to Sprint in Oct. from AT&T. I've had little to no issue with them here in the Mid-Atlantic region.

I chose Sprint as my smartphone carrier after seeing a TV ad talking about how they don't throttle their data at all.

I have the unlimited data plan for my mobile device, and am quite happy with it. I also purchased from Sprint a netbook with an embedded WiMax (4G cellular) internet connection, and unfortunately, there's no unlimited data plan available for it. I have to settle for a 12GB/mo. plan for about the same price as my Blackberry's plan. It's now the first month I've had my netbook, and after bringing all my offsite files in locally, I'm stuck using public WiFi for the rest of the month since I already used up my 12GB, + $250 for an additional 4GB.

The only problem I've had with Sprint so far is that the netbook's WiFi didn't work out of the box, and I couldn't use it to do my big offsite backup's download. I eventually got the corrupted apps reinstalled & afterward contacted Sprint support to try to get a credit on my overage charge, but they would only credit a third of it citing that I should have waited until it was resolved before finishing my big download project.

Go to verizon ask them if they have a switch bonus..google for the right term to use before talking to the CSR person..that might get you anew iPhone and keeping your same number as part of the free gifts on coming over to Verizon..

I received the dreaded text from AT&T at around 2GB of use. I have an unlimited plan, and believe that it should be "unlimited" without any throttling. I am upset about this situation, but feel a bit helpless.

I applaud the comments and the post. Perhaps enough outrage will spark a revolution.

Unfortunately, this is "standard industry practice" for most mobile providers...

Ouch. They wouldn't like the 3.9 TB of my last 16 month...

That's almost 250 GB a month. How do you use that much on a mobile device? That's more than most people use on their regular Internet connection.

Tethering. cough. You can do that with many non-thethering plans on some jailbroken devices to save money or get around no-tethering allowed companies. I'm not going to lie and say that more than 10% of that traffic accounts to youtube videos and torrented linux distributions...

Can anyone think of any rational behind this? Why would they want to switch people to tiered data plans when there is no effective difference to them?

Why?

> …You may also consider switching to a tiered data plan if speed is more important to you [...] Customers on tiered plans can pay for more data if they need it, and will not see reduced speeds. (from the blog post)

That's why. AT&T has shown that nearly every move they make is for the sole purpose of squeezing out all the money they can from their users.

They are a company and as such is in the business of making money. Of course they want to squeeze every last bit out.

In this case the problem is that they offered an unlimited plan and then did stick with their offer.

They didn't stick with the offer. I've been paying for unlimited data for years without throttling. They are changing the deal. They should be forced to give everyone that has been paying for unlimited substantial refunds for the last several years, where usage has been low. They are trying to force everyone away from unlimited data now that it is obvious that wireless data demand is going to increase at least an order of magnitude in the next decade.

While I certainly can't fault an organization for attempting to maximize revenue, I think there comes a point when they seem to be focusing solely on short term numbers to the extent that it may actually harm them in the longterm should customers decide they've had enough and start taking their business elsewhere.

Of course, customer switching is less likely for service providers where there are real barriers in place that effectively prevent users from actively doing so (e.g., coverage issues, other networks with similar policies, etc)

It's the whole "yeah, we're taking advantage of you, but it's not like you have any other real options here, so sit back and like it." thing that just makes me sad.

The problem is that they can get away with it. That is the cell phone market has very little competition.

There really needs to be a movement to address the collusion in the telecommunication industry. I priced out a business cell plan (with > 5 lines), and there was not even a single penny price difference between ATT and Verizon, and both refused to negotiate at all. No matter what options changed, the prices matched to the cent. Strong regulation needs to be introduced, the major players need to be broken up again, or their infrastructure needs to be nationalized. Working, efficient, non-crippled and inexpensive communications infrastructure is too economically important to leave it in the hands of these bozos.

It is unconscionable that wireless communication, which is fast becoming a necessity, amounts to a $100/month/person tax on the citizens of this country, payable to the corrupt interests of two or three companies. The government has laws to prevent this, they should be enforced.

It's unconscionable that _you_ pay 100$/person for cell service.

I pay for my and my SO's cell service. The combined bill is 55$/mo. That includes unlimited calls, unlimited txts, and for the time being 20k/s data bandwidth. Note that I did not pay extra for the data.

And yes, I'm within the US, using a division of T-Mo.

Tiered plans have overage charges, unlimited plans don't.

I used precisely 5 gigs last month and received no notifications. I guess that means I'm in a higher capacity area?

So all the unlimited users need to use over 4gb to raise that "top 5%" number significantly.

Yep, I can confirm about this.

Find people like you. Class action lawsuit.

I also have a grandfathered at&t unlimited plan and would be willing to join a class action lawsuit.

That would be very difficult to do:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/2011-04-27-...

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