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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

A big problem, though, is the severe and opaque nature of the throttle. From what I've heard ATT throttling can cripple the connection even for email. On the other hand I was barely annoyed when my carrier put in a throttle after a couple gigabytes because the speed is still a quarter megabit.

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I ran a speed test on my (throttled) AT&T 3G connection on my iPhone 4. 5 bars, perfect signal here. 0.03 Mbps down and 0.02 up. It's absolute bullshit.

Are you still on 3G? T-Mobile's throttling solution is just to force your connection to EDGE once you hit the cap.

Yep, still on 3G.

I've experienced this on T-Mobile, and the connection is still usable, though slower. The AT&T throttle sounds unusable.

That's not entirely true for T-Mobile, actually. You still connect to 3G towers even after throttling, but you are slowed down to "2G" speeds. In practice, the 2G speeds are much slower than EDGE, but slightly faster than GPRS.

why stick with them now that the 4 major cell phone companies have the iphone and 1 (Sprint, i think) even offers unlimited unthrottled data plans?

I don't have a choice. It'd be too expensive to switch.

And that's the trick: AT&T implemented throttling just after all the dedicated iPhone users upgraded to an iPhone 4S and locked themselves in for another two years.

Disgusting, eh?

You didn't have to lock in. If you paid full price for the iPhone 4s, then when you first plugged it to iTunes, you got a "congratulations, your phone has been unlocked" message, and the phone stopped being carrier locked. This worked since iPhone 4s release day, before the 'official' unlocked phone shipped.

If you'd been on sprint lately you'd know it's because the whole 3g network performs like it's throttled.

that seems like a fair enough complaint, but what about verizon or tmobile?

vzw at least is quite fast, but I believe they both throttle heavy users.

No 3G on T-Mobile.

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