With so much of the reliance on cell phone wireless usage lately, it comes to no surprise that AT&T has decided to act on its new policy to throttle its heavy data users. AT&T made aware of this new policy dating back to July saying as of October 1st, unlimited data plan users that falls in the top 5% of data usage will see a decrease in their data speed. Emphasis on the unlimited data plans, others with a set number of data would simply pay more for overage.
It all makes sense from a business standpoint, they want you to go over, more money for them, but when it comes to be too much use for unlimited plan, they cry. Of course, AT&T is saying they must put some kind of limitation on the heavy use as it slows down the network and makes it unfair to other customers.
If you happen to be in the top 5%, you will get a text message from AT&T stating this along with the fact that your data speed will be reduced for the remainder of the billing cycle. There’s no mention how much the speed reduction will be, except that it will vary based on the data usage amount.
According to AT&T, the average user uses about 800MB/month, while the top 5% users are using 12x that amount. Doing some simple mathematical conversions, you’re looking at approximately 9.38GBs worth of data usage for those top tier users.
Now, the questions arises again, who would you rather have a contract with? Keep in mind, Sprint offers the only truly unlimited data plan as they have not implemented this throttling policy, however, the data speed is much slower compared to AT&T.
