AT&T Planning to Crackdown On Bandwidth Hogs

AT&T Mobility CES Ralph de la Vega told investors at a UBS conference in New York that the company plans to implement measures to reduce the strain on its network. He said, "We need to educate the customer to reduce or modify their usage. We've got to get them to understand what represents a megabyte of data. We're improving all our systems to let consumers get real-time information on their data usage." Mr. de la Vega did not say exactly how it plans to enforce any sort of new policy, but the Associated Press said that a usage-based policy is inevitable. Right now, AT&T's smartphone users have no limit on how much data they can consume per month.



so they want you to pay your bill but not use there service. must be one of there 100,00...
(continues)

tethering, always uses internet, growing number of apps, and so on. and exactly how many years ive been tethering on phones? about 5!

cant wait for wimax to show up

Will most likely get a MB limit on a device that only works 50% of the time.. hahaha 😈

You just can't make this stuff up. LMFAO

Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless already do this. You have a soft cap of around 5GB on phones (this is a hard cap on data cards). If you're consistently downloading over that your account gets flagged for excessive use.

From my Sprint contract:

Sprint: "reserves the right to limit throughput speeds or amount of data transferred and to deny, terminate, modify, or suspend service"

Here's the deal, I understand what AT&T is going through with the traffic of the iPhone. I honestly get it. But they aren't going to win over consumers this way. In fact, I feel like a lot of the steps they take to pull back on network problems make people hate them even more than dropped calls and uneven 3G coverage.

Already, we can't download more than a 10MB file unless we are on Wifi, we can have any video streaming apps unless on Wifi, and we can't tether. All these things make AT&T call attention to it's own faults...something they should have never started to do unless they had full intention of alleviating some of those problems. AT&T proclaims their network is strong, but in turn, does these things to protect it.

Taking actio...
(continues)

Why ralph? why?! you're supposed to be the one creating confidence in the company you help run, not making people wonder why in 7 f*cks you still have this job title!?!

this is infuriating.

For once I commend At&t's admission of network woes. Are they not able to handle data traffic even with the 800 mhz implementation?

...that I have always been of the mind that unlimited is exactly that. Now here I have this unlimited data plan and you want to limit me and make me the bad guy? No thanks! Get LTE up and running as soon as possible!

It was a question posed at a conference about industry wide choice on limited usage; he simply stated we are looking into it but nothing is concrete set in stone we are going to enforce it, policy. Besides, any existing user would have to be grandfathered in because of the contract.