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?
AT&T fined $100M after slowing down its ‘unlimited’ data
21–30 of 169 posts
Re: AT&T fined $100M after slowing down its ‘unlimited’ data
#22The 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.
Re: AT&T fined $100M after slowing down its ‘unlimited’ data
#23GENERAL 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.
Re: AT&T fined $100M after slowing down its ‘unlimited’ data
#24[deleted]
Re: AT&T fined $100M after slowing down its ‘unlimited’ data
#25The 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.
[deleted]
Re: AT&T fined $100M after slowing down its ‘unlimited’ data
#26We 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. :)
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.
Re: AT&T fined $100M after slowing down its ‘unlimited’ data
#27The 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.
Re: AT&T fined $100M after slowing down its ‘unlimited’ data
#28I 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.
Re: AT&T fined $100M after slowing down its ‘unlimited’ data
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what does unlimited mean then in your definition? Even before they throttle, you will be limited by the throughput of the cell tower.
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.)
Re: AT&T fined $100M after slowing down its ‘unlimited’ data
#30T-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.