AT&T to throttle wireless data speeds of heaviest users

Consumer Reports News: August 01, 2011 10:28 AM

Find Ratings

Tablets

Bad news if you're a heavy data user with an old AT&T "unlimited" wireless data plan: The carrier announced on Friday that if you chew through too much bandwidth, you'll face a slowdown of service on your smart phone or tablet.

According to the announcement on AT&T's website, there's been an "exploding demand for mobile data," and the top 5 percent of its data subscribers are actually data hogs who use "12 times more data than the average of all other smartphone data customers."

So beginning on October 1, AT&T will start to throttle wireless data speeds for those subscribers—typically, smart-phone and tablet users who stream a lot of video and music over the network.

AT&T says it will provide notices and a grace period before unlimited data subscribers run into the speed reductions, which will remain in place until the subscriber's next billing cycle.

Our recent analysis shows—and confirms AT&T's claim—that data hogs make up a very small percentage of smart-phone users, and that most subscribers wouldn't be affected. (See: Smart-phone data nibblers outnumber data hogs.)

AT&T says the move is just one of the many measures it's taking to address network congestion. But at the end of its announcement, the company adds:

Nothing short of completing the T-Mobile merger will provide additional spectrum capacity to address these near term challenges.

Senator Herb Kohl, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, has said such arguments in favor of the AT&T and T-Mobile merger "are without merit." And in his recent letter to the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice, he urged both agencies to reject the deal.

An Update for Our Smartphone Customers With Unlimited Data Plans [AT&T press release]
AT&T cutting data speeds for 'unlimited' hogs [USA Today]
AT&T to throttle heaviest wireless users, latest shift from unlimited data [Washington Post]

—Paul Eng