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

61–70 of 169 posts

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

#61

Post by ohw »

tomjen3 wrote: post #51
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. :)

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…

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.

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

#62

Post by ams6110 »

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. :)

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

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

#63

Post by slayed0 »

hueving wrote: post #5
Zekio wrote: post #2

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'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.

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

#64

Post by virtuallynathan »

beambot wrote: post #12

[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...

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

#65

Post by tomp »

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. :)

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.

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

#66

Post by angersock »

mangeletti wrote: post #55

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."

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

#67

Post by dragonwriter »

mangeletti wrote: post #55

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.

> $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.

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

#69

Post by Domenic_S »

mangeletti wrote: post #55

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.

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

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

#70

Post by altcognito »

mangeletti wrote: post #55

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.

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)
Post reply on HN