Free Press, Public Knowledge Blast AT&T Data Controls
AT&T warned that smartphone customers with unlimited data plans may experience reduced speeds once their usage in a billing cycle reaches the level that puts them among the top 5 percent of heaviest data users, the company said. According to the company, such users consume 12 times more data than the average AT&T customer. Free Press and Public Knowledge were sharply critical of the AT&T announcement Monday. The customers can still use unlimited data and their speeds will be restored with the start of the next billing cycle, it said. “Before you are affected, we will provide multiple notices, including a grace period."
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"Unlimited apparently means something very different in AT&T’s world than it does to the rest of us,” Free Press said. “In AT&T’s world, unlimited means you can surf the Web on your smartphone just as much as AT&T wants you to and not a bit more, unless you're willing to wait for the trickle that AT&T thinks is good enough for you. Imagine what they'd do without lower cost competitors like T-Mobile trying to keep them honest. This announcement should serve as a warning to T-Mobile customers about what they can look forward to if the proposed merger goes through."
"AT&T’s announcement that it will throttle the wireless service of so-called ‘heaviest users’ of its wireless service is simply the latest example of Internet rationing, an anti-consumer, bait-and-switch tactic being used by Internet service providers,” said Public Knowledge Legal Director Harold Feld. “No one knows the effect of data usage on networks, what triggers the throttling or even why, what the costs are to the network or even how it is determined that rationing schemes are to be imposed on consumers. It is all one big black box. What we do know, however, is that we reject AT&T’s assertion that only the takeover of T-Mobile will solve its spectrum issues. The $39 billion AT&T will spend for T-Mobile would go a long way to helping improve its network."
"What statements like this show is that Mr. Feld really wants telecom providers, even wireless providers, to be subject to public utility regulation where regulators dictate all their business practices,” Free State Foundation President Randolph May said Monday, in response to Public Knowledge. “It ought to be obvious that one way to manage networks in a way that does not unfairly penalize light versus heavy users is to establish either usage-based pricing or impose bandwidth caps. … It’s baffling that Mr. Feld would say that no one knows the effects of data usage on networks. We do know that greater usage means greater network congestion which means greater costs for network upgrades and expansion -- unless the consumer experience is just going to be severely degraded.”