

AT&T Caps Unlimited Data Plans - grellas
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203986604577255532947217336.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories

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IgorPartola
When someone offers you an unlimited plan, or says that you must sign a
contract, watch out. The former means that there is a limit, and it is low and
they don't want to tell you what it is. The latter means that their service is
so crappy, the only way they can keep you is by legally obligating you to keep
paying them.

We've seen this with "unlimited" web hosting: practically it means that you
can only store a certain amount of data and only have so much bandwidth, and
when you start "abusing" the service, you get booted. Calling it "unlimited"
gives the provider a license to change the rules whenever it sees fit.

I welcome data caps and limits. If AT&T tells me I can only use 2GB of data
and at what speed I can make an informed decision on whether to go with their
offering or not. I would like to see the limits be more near a 20-30 GB mark
as that is my usage, but that is better than "unlimited, but if you do
something we don't like we limit you". Please, if you run any kind of service,
put a limit on it an make sure you can meet the demand, unless the resource is
not constrained on your part in any practical sense. For example, I say
"unlimited email notifications" on Ping Brigade, but there is no real
constraint in place. However, I put a hard limit on how many services/servers
you can monitor because I know the limits of my system and I have planned for
capacity (and have a plan to expand the capacity if all of a sudden the
service gets popular).

Contrast that with AT&T, who sold first and build the service later. I guess
though that it works out for them: they have billions while I can only buy
noodles with my earnings.

~~~
TheCapn
I think you're off base on this and are looking at the issue from a single
side.

The "Unlimited Data Plans" are cooked up through marketing departments that
take a broad look at the numbers their network can ideally handle and conclude
that when matching up customer usage models to these numbers they can offer a
service that exceeds the average user's need. If they evaluate the market and
determine that the average user is a 2GB/month type user and their network is
supposed to be able to handle upwards of 7GB/month per user at their projected
service rates they make the offer that "unlimited" is what is offered.

From the consumer's P.O.V. an "Unlimited" data plan looks much better than a
"7GB/month" data plan. Smoke and mirrors.

What happens is the power users or edge cases to these hypothetical usage
models break down that service offering. A lot goes into a mobile network and
heavy users CAN cause issues to the equipment out in the field. What happens
is the tech side of the provider begin to scramble to make things happen,
project budgets skyrocket and everything suddenly looks terrible on paper.

The next step is then to realize that "unlimited" is a pipe dream and is
really only available to those people who check the weather and read their
emails on a daily basis.

/rant

tl;dr - its not a malicious decision by the provider to make these offerings.
They work with models and offerings from a business perspective that aren't
ideal from a technological perspective and the disjoint creates problems on
the bottom line. To the end user however it looks like a planned event.

~~~
ajross
_"marketing departments that take a broad look at the numbers their network
can ideally handle and conclude that [...]"

"the power users or edge cases to these hypothetical usage models break down
that service offering"_

I don't see how you can write the former and then get the culpability so wrong
in the latter. It's not the "power users" or "edge cases" that broke the
model, it's that the _model was wrong_. AT&T thought they could offer
"unlimited" service at a certain price, and they were wrong. And rather than
honor it and lose money, or change their pricing and lose customers, they are
cheating with a throttle.

I'm sorry, but that _is_ malicious. They're playing with the dictionary
definition of "unlimited" instead of offering their customers the service they
promised.

~~~
TheCapn
My apologies for my poor explanation. You're entirely correct with what you've
said. The model they employ certainly is broken if it doesn't account for the
possibility that not everyone falls into their ideal customer. When I said
that "it is not malicious" I really should have stated that it is not with
malicious _intent_. A marketing manager doesn't create offerings that they
feel will piss off the customer base because a child could tell you that
unhappy customers == churn and by extension churn == less marketing jobs as
the company shrinks.

I merely wanted to provide a perspective as to what sort of train of thought
is followed regardless of how logical it may be.

~~~
ajross
OK, agreed. It's not a bait and switch. AT&T honestly believed their pricing
was sound. I believe that too.

~~~
Terretta
I don't, not for a minute. Look at how the AT&T iPad plans changed a month
after launch. That was not a usage based decision, and it takes longer for a
company their size to create the materials than the time between launch and
the change.

They've known what they were doing, and considered these actions a viable
contingency.

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ben1040
This outcome is actually better than what AT&T previously has been doing.

At least now unlimited users on the grandfathered $30 plan can consume the
same amount of data as the 3GB/$30 metered plan, and only get throttled after
3GB.

Up until now the throttling trigger was at 2GB. When people called AT&T and
told them that customers on the current 3GB/$30 plan got more data than those
on the "unlimited" plan (yet paid the same price), they were told that they
were more than welcome to switch to the metered plan that doesn't get
throttled.

~~~
martingordon
I wish they made this an actual option though. When you hit your cap, do you
want AT&T to charge you for the overage or drop your speed? Right now it's a
one-way decision, and only for those who still have an "unlimited" plan.

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th0ma5
I can't believe no one is talking about how this is all arbitrary and all made
up, and a part of an ongoing fleecing of the public resources, the airwaves,
like they fleeced us on the right-away we gave them, the telephone lines,
which resulted in the whole dark fiber hooked up to nothing.

~~~
blario
Why don't you explain it yourself?

~~~
th0ma5
Well, in a nutshell, back in the 80s, there was a fee tacked on to all phone
bills for "upgrades" that had listed among other things that everything would
be moving to fiber optic. Instead they sort of double dipped. You can read
articles like <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre> perhaps as a starting
point, but essentially they charged their customers a special government
mandated fee, that allowed them to build it out but not actually have to hook
it up anywhere, and then when everyone forgot about this fee and what this
really was, then treated as this new asset they could sell off, all while
never actually figuring out the last mile problem, which was the heart of the
original law to begin with. So now with wireless it is the same thing, where
terms get thrown around like "bandwidth" and "capacity" and while they want
to, on one hand, say that these are limitations from the FCC or just plain
physics, they are actually words to describe the fact that it is their towers,
or the connections to the towers, that they purposefully keep limited in order
to facilitate very high profit margins. So they tell their customers "have all
of this unlimited everything" but they've only built out (of their own
equipment mind you) the ability to service 10% maybe of what they sell, so
that when people actually start using it, they can then blame the customer,
all the while showing ever increasing profits to their shareholders. I would
be very very suspect of anything any of the damned companies have to say about
their own capacity, and be very careful not to assume that it is the airwaves
that are full, but it is really their equipment that they've oversold.

------
pixelfiend
I just got off the phone with AT&T customer support. While the representative
was sympathetic, she stressed that "AT&T is not required to provide
notification of service changes." I informed her that this change constituted
a major change in service, and that I viewed it as grounds to waive the ETF
and get out of my current contract. This, apparently, is not a view shared by
AT&T. I'm debating wether or not to call again and be nasty to see if I can
get out of my contract, but I doubt it will do any good.

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Dylan16807
A big problem, though, is the severe and opaque nature of the throttle. From
what I've heard ATT throttling can cripple the connection even for email. On
the other hand I was barely annoyed when my carrier put in a throttle after a
couple gigabytes because the speed is still a quarter megabit.

~~~
iamandrus
I ran a speed test on my (throttled) AT&T 3G connection on my iPhone 4. 5
bars, perfect signal here. 0.03 Mbps down and 0.02 up. It's absolute bullshit.

~~~
joshAg
why stick with them now that the 4 major cell phone companies have the iphone
and 1 (Sprint, i think) even offers unlimited unthrottled data plans?

~~~
janardanyri
And that's the trick: AT&T implemented throttling just after all the dedicated
iPhone users upgraded to an iPhone 4S and locked themselves in for another two
years.

Disgusting, eh?

~~~
Terretta
You didn't have to lock in. If you paid full price for the iPhone 4s, then
when you first plugged it to iTunes, you got a "congratulations, your phone
has been unlocked" message, and the phone stopped being carrier locked. This
worked since iPhone 4s release day, before the 'official' unlocked phone
shipped.

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mikeash
Advertising "unlimited" and then not providing it should be illegal under
truth in advertising law. It's well past time for ISPs to get rid of this
whole "unlimited" concept and start charging reasonable rates for usage.

~~~
sukuriant
Why can't we just have unlimited for wire-based services?

Also, I'll take a flat rate over "reasonable rates for usage" any day, when it
comes to my internet. I'm sorry, but my usage varies wildly, and I want a
consistent bill I can trust.

I would be in support of a "$0.25 a GB of 35/35 until you hit 250GB, then flat
rate of $X for the rest of the month, at a limited 15/10" or something like
that

~~~
mikeash
Wire-based services suffer from contention as well, just at a much higher
usage than wireless services.

A provider's costs to serve you are largely fixed. A sane bill will have a
large fixed cost plus a variable cost for usage. For example, rather than the
fixed ~$45/month I pay to Comcast, I'd expect to pay something like $30/month
for the connection itself, then another $15 (or perhaps more, since I'm
probably a heavier user than the average) for bandwidth.

We manage to get by without fixed bills for gasoline, food, electricity,
water, etc., what makes internet special where you absolutely need it to be
consistent?

~~~
bryanlarsen
For wired lines, he provider does not pay for usage, it pays for a certain
sized pipe. So if you use a terabyte of data in a month but all of it comes at
off-peak times, but your neighbour uses 10 gigabytes a month but always does
it during the peak evening period, your neighbour costs the provider more than
you do.

~~~
mikeash
If the provider did not pay for usage, then why would they care how much you
use in a given month? And yet, wired internet providers are demonstrably upset
if you use "too much", with some even having official policies of kicking you
off their network if you do it consistently.

Ultimately capacity is the limiting factor, but the way capacity is managed is
to charge people to use it. Your ISP is charged by the byte for its
connections to other ISPs.

You're absolutely correct that usage patterns greatly impact the cost of
usage, but simply charging by the byte is a good approximation. A more
sophisticated arrangement might have different prices at different times of
day (this is already common for electricity) but so far it doesn't appear that
this is necessary.

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paul9290
I'm with Sprint and they offer unlimited data for iPhone users and probably
across their network for smartphone users.

My usage is higher then average but even using Spotify and Pandora in the car
everyday (30 to 40 mile drives) I rarely go over 2 gigabytes.

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kamechan
if i recall correctly, it used to be the case that if a cell phone provider
made major changes to an individual's contract (at least in california), one
had a small window to terminate the contract without the termination fee (or
with a reduced termination fee).

am i mis-remembering this or does anyone know if this is still the case?

~~~
blario
That sounds correct. I used this before in Washington, DC when I was a Verizon
subscriber. I cannot remember what Verizon changed at the time... It might
have been the price on text messages. I did the same with Sprint when I
changed to an iPhone in 2009 also.

I'm very interested to know if this applies here. I've been LOOKING for a free
way to switch from AT&T to Straight Talk!

------
danso
Off-topic: How do people typically go over 3GB in a month? The only time I
came close was when Spotify forced a re-download of all my previously-cached
music and I had my wifi turned off. My IT person (in a company <50) said I'm
the only person to have ever gone near 2GB.

I'm sure you can easily go over the limit by streaming Netflix...but I
generally watch Netflix at home.

~~~
zacgarrett
On my Android phone I use the doggcatcher app to download podcasts. I go well
over 3gb each month, but as a Sprint customer I currently do not need to worry
about the limits.

I could certainly set the app to only download on wifi and avoid the issue
entirely. However, it is quite nice to have it check hourly for new podcasts
and download them at that point no matter where I am.

~~~
spoiledtechie
AT&T has pushed on us hard. We pay almost $200 for 2 people. We will be moving
over to T-Mobile when the contract is up. It will save us almost $100 a month
and still keep the unlimited plan. Ive had enough of AT&T for a while, im just
waiting for this damn contract to be done with.

