Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 169 posts

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

#41

Post by georgerobinson »

derefr wrote: post #29
revscat wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 neigh…

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.

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

#44

Post by KJasper »

ProAm wrote: post #27
leesalminen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#45

Post by mangeletti »

hueving wrote: post #6
istvan__ wrote: post #4

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.

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.

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

#46

Post by jgoewert »

japhyr wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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

#47

Post by elihu »

istvan__ wrote: post #4

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. :)

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

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

#49

Post by TheLoneWolfling »

CRASCH wrote: post #28

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…

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.

Post reply on HN