AT&T is Now Throttling 'Unlimited' Data Plans After 2GBs of Data Use

Posted February 6, 2012 at 6:05pm by iClarified | Please help us and submit a translation by clicking here | 10141 views

AT&T is now throttling customers on unlimited data plans after they've surpassed 2GBs of data use, reveals John Cozen.

Cozen, an AT&T customer who had been grandfathered in to the 'unlimited' data plan with AT&T, was surprised to receive a high usage alert from the company after reaching only 2.1GB of data use. The alert informed him that he was in the top 5% of data users and would be subjected to near unusable speeds.

Thinking there was a mistake he contacted AT&T where he was informed that anything over 2GB is top 5%.

To give you a baseline - the average data use across the country by the top 5% of AT&T smartphone customers was 2GB per month, effective August 2011.

This is a pretty despicable move by AT&T to stay within their legal requirement to offer 'unlimited' data but at speeds so slow that you would be better off switching to a tiered data plan.

Read More [via CultofMac]

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Comments (49)

justabrake - February 16, 2012 at 10:21pm

The explanations were explained by editor from mashable website on foxnews

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Nick - February 16, 2012 at 9:55pm

I shwtcied to one of the new 3 cell phone companies and went from $96/month with rogers to $42 a month including tax, unlimited data, unlimited long distance north american wide etc etc. It was the best decision I've made yet!

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hmmm - February 7, 2012 at 9:56pm

So how is 2gb the top 5%? It sounds like 20% of the customers are being called the top 5%. If we ALL agree to use 4gb, essentially, we move the bar up, right? Let's all get together and use all of AT&T's bandwidth so they are forced to drop the stupid "top 5%" idea or to move the usage limit up

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Akira - February 7, 2012 at 8:13pm

Can anyone post what they said or who they had to talk to in order to get the termination fees removed? I'd like to move to sprint

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SXBB - February 7, 2012 at 5:31pm

just listening to Pandora for a few days will use up my ration of "unlimited" data. Rollover would be a lopsided compromise favoring ATT that I'd be willing to reluctantly accept. Otherwise I'll be looking for a Droid on another provider.

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