Skip to footer

AT&T institutes caps on hungriest data users

AT&T says unlimited data subscribers will experience throttled service if they top 3GB of data in a single billing cycle. 

|
Reuters
AT&T announced this week that it would throttle the data speeds of unlimited-data customers – once a certain threshold had been hit.
  • By Matthew Shaer

Earlier this year, AT&T announced it would begin to throttle – or slow – the service of its hungriest data users, once they passed an unspecified limit. The problem: Since the limit was unspecified, users had no way of knowing when their service was about to get throttled. Unsurprisingly, AT&T was pelted with complaints.

This week, the company backpedaled, saying unlimited data subscribers would only experience slowed service if they hit 3GB of usage in a single cycle. "Our unlimited plan customers have told us they want more clarity around how the program works and what they can expect," AT&T said in a statement yesterday, according to Computerworld. "[And] for context, less than 5% of smartphone customers use more than 3GB per month."

As the Associated Press notes, citing a recent Nielsen report, the average smart-phone user chews through 435 megabytes of data each month. You'd have to use seven times that amount to come near the AT&T limit. Not that the whole data limit flap is going to go away anytime soon: Expect carriers such as AT&T to continue to find ways to manage the data speeds of American smart-phone users. 

"[O]n the bright side, we have a major company buckling under pressure from its customers. It’s not often you see a well-established, non-startup company actively respond to requests from its user base," writes Zach Whittaker of ZDNet. "Whether or not you think it’s fair, AT&T has at least – at last – been transparent about its opaque and hazy data caps. It’s far from an 'unlimited' service to what the public would expect, but it’s a lot of space to maneuver." 

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut. And don’t forget to sign up for the weekly BizTech newsletter.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to AT&T institutes caps on hungriest data users
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2012/0302/AT-T-institutes-caps-on-hungriest-data-users
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe