AT&T fined $100M after slowing down its ‘unlimited’ data | Hacker News Reader

AT&T fined $100M after slowing down its ‘unlimited’ data

washingtonpost.com

367 pointsnvr219155 comments

To put this into perspective:

$100MM is 0.0759878% of AT&T's 2014 gross revenue, so less than 1/10th of 1%.

That's like earning a $100,000/yr salary, and then paying a $75.99 fine. It's basically less than your average speeding ticket.

Reminds me of an old joke about Consolidated Edison:

"A million bucks? They'll fine me well--a minute's income shot to hell."

> $100MM is 0.0759878% of AT&T's 2014 gross revenue

Which is completely irrelevant. To the extent a revenue comparison is relevant, the relevant revenue isn't AT&T's 2014 gross revenue, its the revenue over the period of the activities covered by the fine attributable either to the unlimited data plans, or to other data plans to which people switch from unlimited plans once the slowdown was in place.

That is to suggest that past activities have no bearing on future earnings?

If I cheat by committing a crime this year that saves me money, then continue earning more money each year from here out, all while squashing competitors, is the advantage I gained by cheating this year no longer relevant in 5 years?

True, why does the time frame of one year matter? How long do they have to pay the fine?

It's more than just a fine -- it's a precedent that tells AT&T et al this practice will not be tolerated.

5 years from now if AT&T resorts to this practice, you can bet the FCC et al will have no problems levying a much more severe consequence.

It seems reasonable to make it based upon the value they charged vs the value they provided on a per customer/month basis. If you did a calculation I bet it would come out a lot higher than $100 million. They have 72 million wireless customers. But I don't have the numbers infront of me (e.g. number who enrolled to unlimited data, for how long, how often it happened, how long this was happening, etc) to do the calculations myself.

Then multiply this difference in value provided by some number greater than 1.

I hate AT&T as much as the next cat, but you know that isn't a fair comparison.

Probably more important to compare to profits over the year -- this is ~%1 of their 2014 reported profits of (again roughly) 10 billion. (Also, this is only one segment of the business, so that's a bit of a comparison issue)

How about putting in perspective of cost to fix versus cost to pay fine? Say 100 mm vs 260 mm to fix it?

Sure, though for perspective you should also mention that it's 1.6% of their profit (6.244 B$ last year). If this fine had been levied last year, it would have made their wireless numbers 12% worse (5.2% decline v.s. 4.7%).

Fines are not about killing the company, they are about penalizing certain decisions made by the company to affect change in policies.

Who said anything about killing the company? If we break a contract, we pay for that mistake, unless we get away without anyone noticing (or have thousands of lawyers). We don't get to just lie to people and steal their money and then whine when somebody wants their money back (or fines are levied in response).

There were far more than 50 million wireless subscribers on AT&T during this period, myself being one of them. The damages to me were far greater than $2 during the period after this change occurred, not to mention the $350 I paid to get out of my renewed contract after realizing how useless my data plan was, in order to get my work done when I was on the move. Even if there were only 10 million customers on the unlimited plan and each customer was impacted in a manner that could be monetarily valued at $50 over a period of many years, that would amount to $500MM in damages.

The killing part comes next when this FCC decision holds up in a superior court, providing the common law grounds for a class-action lawsuit. That will be many hundreds of millions of dollars, and that's the real reason AT&T will appeal this.

> ...providing the common law grounds for a class-action lawsuit.

This will be fun.

Most (all?) ATT customers have undoubtedly agreed to an updated terms of service contract that contains the "In order to use our Services, you agree to waive your right to trial by jury and class action suit, and agree to use only binding arbitration to settle your disputes with us." language[0] that every company was adding to their contracts after AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion.

[0] AKA: A binding arbitration clause.

Out of curiosity, is that enforceable in every state? I'm asking because I read about "GRAFTON PARTNERS LP v. SUPERIOR COURT LLP"[1] in California, that appears to make pre-dispute trial waivers unenforceable.

[1] http://caselaw.findlaw.com/ca-court-of-appeal/1258748.html

That's why it has an arbitration clause. The Federal Arbitration Act trumps state law and allows such waivers.

Well fk that.

The penalty should be proportionate to the amount they got from the "unlimited plan" users since they started throttling.

  But consumers are unlikely to receive any money from the fine, 
  which will go instead to the U.S. Treasury, said the agency official.

Additionally, govt is getting money but what happens to the customers who actually paid for it?

That's the equivalent of some police officers catching a thief and keeping the money for themselves.

"Aren't you glad we are here to protect you?"

Well thanks to Civil Forfeiture [0] you don't have to be a thief. (Good luck doing that to Corporates.)

Customers/Citizens are at the receiving end from all sides.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...

I have no idea if that statement is serious or ironic.

I think they are being sarcastic...

Always seeing mega-corp gets fined millions and the people they wronged get nothing. Where do these fines go?

We should stop lawyers from re-defining words like unlimited. We should make sure that if somebody says unlimited in advertisment or product description it really means unlimited. I know, I am an idealist. :)

So what does unlimited mean then in your definition? Even before they throttle, you will be limited by the throughput of the cell tower.

This is not about the speed, more like about the volume of data. They limit you after you reached a limit that should have never reach because it was advertised limitless.

Interesting question.

"Unlimited: Wherein the amount of bandwidth, measured by megabits/s up/down, will not be artificially affected. While system outages or other technical limitations can at times affect throughput, at no point will AT&T or its subsidiaries place constraints upon throughput based upon the amount of data transferred over the course of one or more billing periods."

Would an ISP still be able to call their service "unlimited", by this definition, if some of their distribution nodes (cable optical nodes, wireless cell towers, whatever) are oversubscribed+saturated to the point of degraded service for the customers on that node?

If they could, then would they still be able to call the service "unlimited" if they enforced moment-by-moment QoS at the distribution node (so your neighbour's download will slow down to allow you to Skype, as if you were both connected through the same router in a building)?

And if that is allowed, then what is the difference if they're doing the QoSing by long-time-window statistical aggregation rather than packet-by-packet prioritization?

Decreasing the bandwidth available to a given link that has reached some monthly "quota" on a given oversubscribed node†, has exactly the same incentives as decreasing the bandwidth available to a given link for as long as someone else is trying to saturate the pipe with higher-priority traffic.

Either method disincentivizes everyone on the link from "wasting" their bandwidth unnecessarily (in a "you don't want your neighbour to do X, so you stop doing X and hope that they have empathy" way), such that the link becomes less saturated on a long-term basis. But only one is ever highlighted by the news as explicitly breaking the promise of "unlimited." Why is this?

---

† (...where that quota is the area-under-the-curve of the router's upstream bandwidth, divided by the number of users attached to the distribution point—in other words, the user's ration of the distribution node's available transit. If the quota is an arbitrary fixed number that isn't anywhere near this number, then that's just price-gouging.)

I would think so. Let's use "unlimited" in the context of public transport. You have paid for a Travelcard on the London Underground Zones 1 to 6, including peak hours. If there is congestion on the line, or it's a busy rush hour morning is your Travelcard no longer "unlimited"? I mean you're not paying an SLA in which you're guaranteed a seat and that trains will be delayed no longer then X minutes. I'm not defending AT&T in the slightest, but I think "unlimited usage", "100% availability" and "100% link rate" are not the same.

I would almost say that an oversubscribed+QoSed line is the modern definition of "residential service", while guaranteed bandwidth (equivalent in effect, but not necessarily in implementation, to the "dedicated circuits" of DSL terminology) is the modern definition of "business service."

So many people here obsessed with making some kind of technical disambiguation. I don't think the lawyers care for that at all.

Both intentionally throttling and not remotely providing the necessary infrastructure necessary to support use will get you into hot waters.

My question was more:

If an ISP usually has enough pipe for everyone on each of their distribution nodes (that is, has no oversubscription—or, more practically, only oversubscription for aggregations of customers with statistically-predictable usage such that the node should reasonably never be saturated, with some extra engineering tolerance for the rare occasions usage goes above statistical norms)—

but the ISP sometimes falls short when the introduction of a new service like VoIP or Netflix or Steam into the market, or lots of new denser construction in an area, makes demand outstrip their supply,

then should they get in trouble for enforcing QoSing (through whatever means) on their distribution nodes, temporarily, while they work on upgrading those nodes?

Because, if so, then ISPs should probably never use the word "unlimited" at all because they would still get in trouble for reasons (almost) completely out of their control.

(I say "almost" because they could just refuse to sell service in oversubscribed areas. But customers would like that even less, if the ISP has a local monopoly. Alternately, ISPs could change to "dynamic billing" where everyone in an oversubscribed area gets billed for non-unlimited service for as long as they're oversubscribed, and then goes back to being billed for unlimited service once the oversubscription is over. This would be cool, but seems like one of those nearly-impossible-with-the-hardware-we've-got sort of things, especially for wireless ISPs where you don't stay on the same distribution node so you're constantly moving between oversubscribed and undersubscribed nodes.)

but AT&T isn't in trouble for enforcing QoS, they're in trouble for throttling connections down to dial-up speed after a usage cap.

Even when read in the most beneficial light, no way can the word "unlimited" be interpreted to mean such a thing.

But the FCC Specifically said that companies have the right to employ reasonable network management. 56Kbit/s on the same network others are getting 30Mbit/s is not reasonable by anyone's stretch of the imagination.

If the technology cannot provide unlimited for customers who have paid for it, then unlimited service should not be sold. Simple as that. Anything else is inexcusable. If the technology stack can only handle all customers at 250 kBps, then that is the maximum service they should be selling.

"We can handle 20% of users at 5 Mbps, and the other 80% at 250 kBps. So we'll sell the 5 Mbps. But we won't restrict sales to 20% of customers, we'll sell to as many as want it and then throttle to handle overloads on the system." There is no way to make this situation acceptable. Don't sell what you can't provide. Pretty fucking simple.

> Would an ISP still be able to call their service "unlimited", by this definition, if some of their distribution nodes (cable optical nodes, wireless cell towers, whatever) are oversubscribed+saturated to the point of degraded service for the customers on that node?

That definition specifies "artificial" limits, which would - I'd think - exclude technological limitations like oversubscription/saturation.

Oversubscription is intentional (and in many scenarios can enable lower prices).

I doubt rules about advertising are going to change the market, the problem is that tens of millions of people are happy to pay for connectivity without really sweating the details of it.

Rules about advertising could just end up like it did in Portugal. ISPs were advertising unlimited data (on fiber/cable), but the small print stated that there was a limit, which was dependent on congestion/etc.

Essentially, in any given month, you could get throttled/yelled at for going over an arbitrary data cap, which could (and did) vary every month. Given, it was usually above 1 TB, but it was still there.

ISPs got a book thrown at them by the FCC equivalent, saying that if they advertise their product as unlimited, it must be truly unlimited. Literally the next day that decision came out, all ISPs changed their adverts from unlimited to "at will" data caps, which essentially conveys the same marketing message, but isn't a regulated term.

Welcome to the new world, same as the old world, except where we've replaced a word.

Yea, but that's a better world to live in, because people know what "unlimited" means and will glide right over it, thinking they get the speaker's intended message. I want people to see a new unfamiliar term like "at will" and think for 5 seconds about what the heck that actually means. AT&T would have avoided all the fines and public backlash if they had just made up some new term rather than underhandedly and intentionally misleading people.

"Would an ISP still be able to call their service "unlimited", by this definition, if some of their distribution nodes (cable optical nodes, wireless cell towers, whatever) are oversubscribed+saturated to the point of degraded service for the customers on that node?"

I actually complained to the FCC about this very issue. Where my office is, I can see the service degradation progress over the course of the day, peaking around 2PM when everyone's in the office. Should ATT really be allowed to advertise that they provide LTE service here, when every weekday the service provided is much, much slower, if usable at all?

What does it mean to sell wireless service 'where my office is'? Presumably you could drive somewhere inside their geographic service area and continue to get service. After all, its wireless.

Every service will be limited by local congestion. I'm not sure where this could be going? I get unlimited water from my local water company; but of course the pipes and the number of faucets at my house are practical limits.

If there's too much congestion to provide LTE speeds in a certain area, they shouldn't be able to advertise LTE speeds in that area. Or they should build more capacity to manage the congestion.

Maybe an office building is a little narrow for an 'area'?

I'm talking about the entire neighborhood. (Manhattan's Financial District)

For the purposes of this action, it means you can use it as much as you want. AT&T was selling it as unlimited 3G/4G, they were not told the conditions that would result in throttling, and they were not told that they would effectively have an unusable data plan after throttling. My memory may be fuzzy, but this story[1] provides a few more details.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/technology/FTC-says-ATT-de...

FYI, "unlimited data" != "unlimited throughput". No one's asking for unlimited throughput. What people who signed up thought they were getting was pretty straightforward - unlimited data at the throughput promised. Period.

> unlimited data at the throughput promised

I'm with you, but I've noticed that ISPs generally state speeds using "up to". Eg, AT&T's lowest U-verse tier gives you "Speeds up to 6Mbps".

Which is exactly the worst guarantee possible. "Don't worry, we certainly won't give you more than 6Mbps!"

Of course, if you pay them more, they'll guarantee not to give you more than 18Mbps.

I would define it as without limits imposed by the company. Limits imposed by nature are fine. I'm not going to complain about unlimited talk time when there are only so many seconds in the month.

I'm even ok with prioritization for congestion control since you're hitting a natural limit of available bandwidth. This is apparently what AT&T is doing now according to Ars Technica.

When it comes to networking providers wired/wireless/mobile it means speed is invariant with regards to volume.

Network neutrality means speed is invariant with regards to source.

I have mixed feelings about traffic shaping between users and protocols – that is limiting a minority of whales taking an unfair share.

Certainly "unlimited plan" doesn't mean "limited to a greater extent than the limited plan".

If AT&T had set the bandwidth rate to match that of their normal 5GB plan, there would be no problems. In fact, I think that would be seen as expected behavior. What they instead did was punish their long-time customers who were grandfathered into a mistake that AT&T made. I signed up for unlimited data in 2008, after the second iPhone was out, so it's not like the term "Internet" was suddenly redefined and AT&T was in a new paradigm of mobile Internet access. What really happened is that they got greedy and oversubscribed their network, and they decided to punish us for that.

Throughput, latency, and so on are natural limitations of consuming bandwidth (internet and RF) which is shared across subscribers. What the FCC took exception to (and rightly so) is that AT&T imposed artificial limitations on subscribers based on their consumption. You can't say that your service has no limits but then go on and impose limits.

My daily driver has an unlimited top speed. Rather optimistically according to my xbox and Forza it can top our around 100-110. (Edited to add, Forza seems to imply I can get my car up to 115 or so, then stability control loses it, but theres no hard coded limit).

In the army I drove a pos HMMWV and it has a limiter topping it out at 55 mph from memory. Although if you remove the governor supposedly it rockets along at 75+. My pos would have leaked out all the oil or something before it ever got to 75, but in theory a reliable one can go that fast. The civilian model replaces the 100 HP indestructible engine with a 600 HP consumer engine so those move quite fast.

If the throttling slows it down but not to the extent of asymptotically approaching a limit within the month, then I think the word "unlimited" really applies.

The limit might be, say, 5x less than what you would get with normal tower reception. But it's still "unlimited" in the same sense as being limited by cellphone throughput.

So I guess the lawyers can argue that truly being "unlimited" is clearly impossible anyway.

How do you define "asymptotically approaching ... within the month"?

A formula, perhaps

I read that as if to mean that it would be possible for the ISP to set a limit, say a 10 GB monthly cap, and once a lower threshold (say 5 GB) is reached, decrease bandwidth as usage continues to climb. As usage grows and bandwidth decreases, you could eventually reach a point where it is so slow (say at 1,000 bits per second) that it becomes more or less unusable for the consumer and therefore unfeasible to realistically exceed the 10 GB limit.

Sort of like halving the distance between you and a destination repeatedly ultimately leads you to a position infinitesimally separated from your destination, but never past it.

No, because you're paying for unlimited 4G or HSDPA access, not unlimited access at any speed. AT&T is wrong, they know they're wrong, and they should pay the money. It clearly misleads consumers and that's the issue here.

Lawyers? I think the problem here is with words being redefined by marketers.

Every single letter of AT&T marketing materials is obsessively filtered by a crack legal team. The lawyers are very much involved here.

My home ISP gives me a certain number of megabit up and another down. My contract essentially says 60up/20down unlimited, which means that I can download as much as I want, subject to the limitation not to download more than 60 megabit a second.

We could use that as a template for 3g sales as well - granted we may have to specify the speed as 3g or 4g rather than a certain number of megabits - but ISPs hate that they are selling a commodity (which they shouldn't. Butter, toothpaste and oil are commodities but Procter and Gamble, Unilever and Saudi Arabia are all rich).

I would say "60up/20down unlimited" means your ISP guarantees this bandwidth as part of the contract, rather than upper bound the bandwidth by this number. In the off peak hours you may be allowed to download at a rate higher than this number, but even in the peak hours you should be able to fully utilize your guaranteed bandwidth.

Even a "guaranteed bandwidth" becomes impossible if you're transferring from a server that can't provide those speeds, or over some portion of the Internet that can't due to link congestion/etc., and your ISP can't do anything about that. In that sense, all bandwidths are "up to".

The significantly more expensive "business level" plans usually do have some sort of guarantee via SLA, but once again that only applies to the part of the network between you and the ISP.

You can check that with torrent. If it is not a single server and a single connection you should be able to saturate your network connection.

Well redefining words is pretty common these days, and quite popular too if it's for the politically correct reasons.

Absolutely, I still don't like it. :)

Politically correct is a pejorative term, you must use the word benevolent or words "socially progressive" /s.

Depends what they're advertising as "unlimited". If it's unlimited broadband/internet, then it should actually be unlimited. On the other hand, if it's just unlimited data, then that says nothing about the speed. However, truth be told, my operator (3 in the UK) is pretty explicit that after 5GB or so (each month) the speed is reduced, and there is no unlimited (free) data when you're abroad.

I don't see the difference. If you're limiting the bandwidth I can't access the data. I think it's reasonable to expect "unlimited" to mean without artificial restrictions or limitations to accessing the thing they are providing.

Unlimited should mean limited only by the physics of the device. The limit should be determined by the bandwidth and the number of seconds in a month.

Yes, but the question is, unlimited what. You don't go to an "unlimited food" restaurant expecting unlimited drinks as well.

You shouldn't expect unlimited food either. "All you can eat" doesn't mean "Please move in and live here for the rest of your life."

I had to take some training for a BigCo client, and they made a special point that you had to run marketing that used words like "free", "unlimited", and "lifetime" past a lawyer because you couldn't just fine print your way out of the common meanings.

I understand that it is much easier to sell something with unlimited (even if it is not) or free (even if it is not).

I guarantee you that it was marketing, not legal, that came up with those definitions. After all, its marketing that gets the credit while the company sells throttled service as "unlimited," but its legal that takes the blame when the FTC fines the company $100 million for that practice.

> its marketing that gets the credit while the company sells throttled service as "unlimited," but its legal that takes the blame when the FTC fines the company $100 million for that practice.

That's possible; AT&T legal might have advised against advertising the service as "unlimited" but been overruled. I'd be really surprised if AT&T didn't have a policy where every advertisement goes through legal review.

Alternatively, Homer might have nodded in the AT&T legal department, especially if Homer was in fact a junior attorney.

Self-cite: A few years ago I pulled together a collection of marketing words and phrases to avoid or rephrase, culled from a large corpus of advertising reviews I did for a large company. [1]

The AT&T situation illustrates the truth of a rule of thumb mentioned in that collection: All categorical statements are bad — including this one.

[1] http://www.oncontracts.com/marketing-legal-review-some-words...

As a marketeer that has worked big telco, I guarantee you legal signed off that definition. A marketing department will propose content and then EVERYTHING will go via legal for approval. Legal taking responsibility is entirely appropriate. Marketing are there to make ideas that sell, legal are there to make sure all ideas are within the rules.

In Australia there are extremely strict "false advertising" laws just like you propose.

A few years back Holden (GM) had an "Employee prices for all" sale - so supposedly regular people were getting the same deal that employees were getting.

It came out a while later that wasn't true, and so Holden (GM) were forced to give customers a refund of the difference to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

If you advertise it, and it's not true, you'll be forced to make it true.

Holden were indeed investigated by the ACCC for this, but they were not forced to refund the difference. The resolution was to "offer an opportunity to return the vehicle for a full refund of the purchase price including additional charges"[1], and applied to only 250-300 customers.

[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/holden-employee-pricin...

I kind of saw this coming after the whole Verizon fiasco when they tried to throttle their LTE network and the FCC and media made it a frenzy and they backed down. But then again, Verizon's main wireless spectrum they use for their base layer of their LTE network has the open access rules attached to them that pretty much forbids the throttling of any devices using the spectrum and forcing them to allow any device on their network that is capable of using it.

I'm glad I still have my Verizon unlimited data plan. I renewed my contract (unlimited line is out of contract in August 2016), by using the transfer upgrade loophole last year. But they are the only carrier that does not throttle their LTE network at all, and also allow you to officially pay for unlimited tethering, something no other carrier has ever offered. On top of that the open access rules attached to the C block of the 700mhz spectrum they use lets me pop my sim card into a dedicated lte router, tablet, hotspot, etc. Even devices that Verizon stores refuse to activate for you like a T-Mobile bought iPhone, or any device that is not sold as "for verizon". It's unlocked and works on the network you can pop your sim card into it and it will just work.

GENERAL PUBLIC can be swayed into not knowing that Internet Data is not a commodity. People treat Data like it needs to be grown and a limited resource that the ISP must harvest and think it is unfair that you use more for data usage.

I try to explain that Data is more like a pipe and at certain times they can't get all the data through at the same time. So if this was about throttling for their network they would just do it during "Peak" times and not 24 hours a day. I still feel this is a move to charge per amount of data and not speed access.

The fine, which AT&T says it will fight, is the largest ever levied by the agency.

Does anyone know how likely this fine is to stick? It sounds like a significant fine to me, but I wonder if these kind of fines are often appealed down.

It may seem significant to us mortals, however the fine is less than 1% of their revenue in 2014.

No one wants to lose 100M, no one.

No one wants to lose $1000, no one.

If you can make 200M and have a risk of paying 100M in the worst case you still make 100M more than you would without doing it. So it's basically calculated risk for these companies.

Sure, but you would still prefer to never pay the 100M.

ofcourse and they won't. Companies never pay the initial fine...

Not more than you would prefer to make the 200MM and risk losing 100MM of it.

again calculated risk, if theres even a chance that they walk away with all 200mm, and no chance that they end up with 0 or less, then it's worth pursuing.

I'm trying to say that they would have preferred to not get caught.

And therein lies the problem with most methods of government regulation. The worst that happens is usually a fine. Certain violations need to start carrying mandatory jail sentences.

Don't worry, there will be an "additional charge" tagged onto your bill for the rest of your life so that they can recoup this.

I wish I had my bills from when they added a surchage because they were pocketing the sales taxes in OH or Iowa or something like that and thus had to add a surcharge for 4 years on bills to pay for it. All I remember is that I was irked to pay a surcharge to pay for sales taxes in another state because some greedbag got caught and pushed the punishment onto the customers. It was like the B&O surcharge they taped on.

That's something both mobile and landline phone providers do. They add a separate line on the bill and word it so you think its a tax when it's just a charge they made up from whole cloth.

Hotels do the same thing.

It'll be a cold day in hell before this sticks. They'll use every slippery tactic in the book to justify it and to fight it, they'll bribe^Wlobby the appropriate parties to legally define "unlimited" as "limited", and even if they are stuck with it, they'll just not pay.

I mean, what, are they going to arrest executives? Give me a break. There's no recourse either way.

> They'll use every slippery tactic in the book to justify it and to fight it, they'll bribe^Wlobby the appropriate parties to legally define "unlimited" as "limited"

You don't think they tried this before they were fined?

Of course. The fine is just a step in the process towards them being exonerated, a mere formality.

$5 says you're wrong and AT&T does indeed pay a cash fine.

Throttling speeds after a certain amount of data is not equal to unlimited... serves them right for using the "Unlimited" wrongly :)

Well no amount is unlimited. Throttled or not, you will have a max throughput that will limit how much data you can download in a month. :)

That is true, but in a sense an Unlimited plan should allow you to download&upload 24/7 at what ever the max speed is for the full duration of the plan, without throttling.

Edited: gramma.

That's a terrible argument. Would you say the same if they only allowed 100kb of data transfer before switching to a throttled service (@ 1/100th the original speed)?

What you are doing is allowing them to draw a line in the sand and then standing by it and saying it is reasonable. This line should not exist and throttling should only occur when absolutely necessary (when the network is over-saturated). Even then, there should be reasonable expectations of them to not over-subscribe the network based on statistical projections of network use.

If this were a just world, in order to appeal the fine AT&T would have to first pay the fine, Net 30, and deal with the federal courts via an outsourced call-center in order to receive a credit on their account.

And the credit might or might not apply during the next three billing cycles. Is there anything else I can help you with today? No? Have a nice day!

There are countries where you cant simply LIE in a commercial/promotional material. I remember the case of Apple being fined and their ad campaign pulled when they tried to claim selling “the world's fastest, most powerful personal computer” (PowerPC times).

On the other hand in my country its ok for actors to lie about being doctors in commercials :/ ("Im a doctor and X is best for you")

I think this falls under a reasonable interpretation of the unlimited.

a reasonable person would understand that there are bandwidth limits both technological and environmental. A reasonable person would expect that the level of service they signed up for would continue or get better over time.

I see two issues.

One is that after a certain amount of data is used they limit bandwidth. If you limit something it is hard to call it unlimited.

The other issue is that early on throttling was not in place. They specifically added throttling to entice users to switch to more lucrative data plans.

I do not agree.

I would potentially reluctantly agree, iff the throttling was only during peak hours and when things were actually overloaded. And if they had been doing so from the start. ("I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." is incredibly shady.) But they weren't on either of those things. They throttled after a certain amount of data per month, and it was a flat throttle.

I disagree. That the word 'unlimited' exists in the language does not mean there must be a place and justification for it found in marketing material.

The only reasonable interpretation of a word is its meaning; since there are no shortage of words to describe non-unlimited data plans, the mobile networks should use those instead.

And yet PAM non-stick spray is marketed as 'fat free' when its 100% fat. And so on. Marketing has its own Brave New World rules.

AT&T is still doing this as of yesterday. I just got a text that I've used 75% of my "unlimited" plan

Add it to the FCC's evidence pile.

Yep, got this last week. Full text: ATT Free Msg: Your data has reached 75% of the 5GB network management threshold. If you exceed 5GB this month, you may experience reduced data speeds at times and in areas that are experiencing network congestion. Wi-Fi helps you avoid reduced speeds. For more info visit...

I think AT&T should be fined (or be the target of class action lawsuit) for constantly lying to customers/future customers... the most common example being lying about u-verse being fiber-optic going to their customer's homes (while it only goes to a central box in the neighborhood).

> the most common example being lying about u-verse being fiber-optic going to their customer's homes (while it only goes to a central box in the neighborhood).

And that doesn't even matter since no U-Verse internet speed even comes close to what a true fiber connection could carry (1Gbps+). In my area, the fastest U-Verse internet offered is 18Mbps down, so fiber or not, it's irrelevant.

I think that it is relevant even if the maximum offered speed by AT&T doesn't reach the full bandwidth that fiber optic could provide (one example is ping might be a lot lower on fiber optic, or customers think that they have the latest technology, or that costs should be lower with fiber optic, etc..., but the main one is lies, why lie if it doesn't matter)

The issue with this kind of fine is that the profit is greater than the fine so they will continue to do shady things like this.

Also people in charge for approving this should be held accountable.

The premise is for the FCC's fine to also act as a warning shot.

If AT&T doesn't change behavior, the next fine will be more. The FCC has claimed the high ground against AT&T and Verizon, as witnessed by the net neutrality victory.

[Sorta OT...] Ugh, now we just need goad Comcast into improving their peering.

It's pretty sad when the TV viewing experience is better via torrents than Netflix. Comcast is doing some serious throttling.... For me, the Netflix stream is all pixelated, yet we can pull the entire hour-long HD content via torrent in ~5 minutes. Something is amiss.

Comcast doesn't do any throttling, and have tons of interconnection, including direct connectivity with Netflix. http://corporate.comcast.com/news-information/news-feed/comc...

http://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-to...

Maybe it's Netflix that needs better peering? I'm not on Comcast (trying from Central America) and Netflix regularly sucks (but is better than YouTube) whereas torrenting works fine.

Swisscom in Switzerland sells unlimited data plans that are capped at different speeds depending on how much you pay per month. Just like a DSL or cable plan.

I find this a lot more fair than selling unlimited that isn't. Or killing grandfathered accounts by capping them.

T-Mobile UK (now largely assimilated by the EE mothership) comprehensively denied the existence of an 18-hours-a-day 4mbps throttle placed on its unlimited plans [1] for several years before getting in trouble with the regulators. As far as I'm aware they weren't even punished, which is a shame given how blatantly deceptive their practices were.

This strikes me as a reasonable fine. Well done FCC.

[1] http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobil...

> But consumers are unlikely to receive any money from the fine, which will go instead to the U.S. Treasury, said the agency official.

Well why the hell not?? If we were the wronged party, should we not benefit from the settlement directly?

Because its a fine, not a lawsuit. Even for a lawsuit, that would be like 50 cents per person, and most people would never claim it, especially former customers.

It shouldn't go into the general treasury, that's for sure. It should be earmarked for relevant infrastructure projects and not just pissed away.

We need to stop calling this practice "slowing down" or "throttling". If you are slowed down, you'll be limited to 56kbit or less, by artifically induced packet loss. At this point, most websites and other internet services will just completely stop working as the massive packet loss suffocates any payload.

It's like advertising unlimited miles on a rental car, then slowing it down to 5mph after 200 miles. Sure, the car still moves, but you can't practically use it for anything.

Any idea what the legal landscape for these kinds of issues is like in Canada?

Wind Mobile also advertises unlimited plans yet throttles starting at a mere 3GB...

https://www.windmobile.ca/plans-and-devices/plans

Granted, their true rates are still better than their big telecom counterparts, but I still find this distasteful as a marketing tactic.

Umm, did they STOP throttling in addition to this settlement? It feels like they did. I was getting throttled like crazy in March and April (I have no internet at my house other than AT&T LTE for stupid reasons, so I have to tether all the time), but in May and June, I seem to mostly never get throttled anymore... or if I do it's much more modest. Anyone else notice a change?

Apparently they stopped throttling when the area you're connecting from is not experiencing congestion:

http://www.macrumors.com/2015/05/07/att-scales-back-unlimite...

T-Mobile throttles my "unlimited" family plan. The main number gets 3G and each additional gets 1G and then is throttled. Are they also on the radar or is it less of a problem for them because they give you the throttle data up-front (while still using the unlimited word). In reality, however, when you hit your limit it becomes almost unusable.

They tell you up front, so I don't think it's an issue. Technically it IS unlimited.

The problem is that it's quite literally not fit for use. It's some completely fucked software rate limiting or something that produces insane packet loss, pages don't load at all, IRC barely works, ssh breaks up and dies.

I don't mind being shaped to 5KB/s, but at least give me something resembling a consistent 5KB/s, not 12KB/s for two seconds and then 300 bytes/s (actual measurement) for the next half hour at 50% loss. It is quite literally unusable, even if unlimited. And I like Tmobile, but they don't even let me buy additional data.

Are you talking about data above the 21GB limit on their "unlimited" plan or the 2G data you get after going above your data limits on the lower plans?

I only pay for the 1GB plan but I haven't found it unusable when I go above that and I can buy a one-time increase if I like.

I'm on "Unlimited web" plan, but not 21GB.

Interesting, I haven't had that much trouble after getting throttled by t-mobile. I can definitely feel it, but it doesn't completely break like that.

Their marketing is pretty clear for the plans that have soft data limits but they hide their throttling for the "unlimited" plan in the fine print.

http://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans/individual.html

> "*Unlimited 4G LTE customers who use more than 21 GB of data in a bill cycle will have their data usage de-prioritized compared to other customers for that bill cycle at locations and times when competing network demands occur, resulting in relatively slower speeds. See t-mobile.com/OpenInternet for details."

"unlimited" means "not limited; unrestricted; unconfined". Speed limiting does not seem to fit that definition. It looks like they will avoid the rathe of the FCC because they were upfront about the limits though. It still feels like false advertising. I knew it would be slower after the limits but I had no idea how slow it would actually be.

On a side note, I wonder if one day, 5G, or 6G even, will allow us to have Complete Wireless Broadband. No more Last Mile Wired connection. No longer need G.Fast or VDSL2. Just Wireless connection that gives you 100Mbps ( Real world ) with unlimited data.

My unlimited plan gets throttled after 5GB usage. From what I understand, a 30GB family data plan won't get throttled until the 30GB are used up. If this is still true, how is it that throttling at 5GB is for "network management"?

Because at that point the distinction is an arbitrary hand-wave, and they can just drop the point at which they start throttling lower and lower to save money.

I received a text just the other week from ATT letting me know I reached 75% of the 5GB network management threshold, and that I may experience reduced data speeds. Anything I can do about this now?

By the way, go here if you'd like to request a Project Fi invite: https://fi.google.com/signup

I'll be shocked if after this AT&T continues to grandfather in their "Unlimited" plans.

Which is too bad, because mine is a really great deal even treated as a 5GB/device plan.

This is so sad.

The fine is pay to somebody else than the victim.

Is like when Intel get fine for screw AMD, and the money go to some EU institution: Why not pay it to the victim?

That is what this is stupid, and a no-justice.

Well, it gives the victims standing to sue, but even then the attorneys will take about 35% and you'll probably just get a $20 credit on your bill or somesuch.

And the FCC can use the money towards the universal service obligation by either subsidizing phone plans for the poor or encouraging the building of public access internet.

You might want to pick a different example. Intel paid AMD over a billion dollars as part of their settlement.

The money they paid to the EU as a fine was on TOP of the money they paid AMD, not in lieu of.

Ah, I don't know that detail.. good to know

Can we classify this as a revenue generating legal briefing on the net neutrality issue? Or is that wishful thinking?

What's the likelihood this will lead to some type of compensation for unlimited data users that were throttled?

I'd like the fine to be in the form of refunding affected customers for the period they were defrauded.

I'd like to see something like on the packages of food:

"No artificial limiters added"

What to the BURNED Customers Get? ZERO?

nobody said unlimited mean fast internet all the time... and they inform in terms, internet speed will decrease! People must start using brain and start thinking or you will end like europe (government will forbid you everything and tell you everything what u can or not... how much u can earn and what kind of light bulb you are allowed to buy in shop... ehh).

So awesome.

So that means our rates are going up again.

So sick and tired of these hidden middle-class taxes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com