Posted on 07/29/2011 6:07:18 PM PDT by Swordmaker
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Every month it won't affect 95% of the customers, by definition.
AT&T or as we call it in our house “the phone company of the anti-christ” bla and boo to them.
My contract is done - I’m actively looking for another smart phone, probably with another company. I don’t move that much data, but the quantity of dropped calls IN MY OWN HOUSE are rather troublesome.
I went with AT&T because of the IPhone and the fact that they are the only company that has a signal in our work building.
Oh, and AT&T, let me guess, you're not going to count in this top 5% the massive video streaming network that goes to stores across the country? The true cause of the bandwidth crunch?
Go look in your local Circle K, 7-11, etc and look for the wireless hub with the AT&T cellular network card attached to it that's streaming video to that stupid display in the store that no one looks at. They're everywhere. Even in the checkout lines at the market. There's where all your bandwidth went, AT&T, as your sales force went out and gave away over half the bandwidth for less than the price of the current top tier throttled programs.
But we know that you'll be limiting only consumer accounts, and not these bandwidth hogs in the commercial sector. And please, please, please, be considerate and pull these bandwidth pigs off of other networks that are required under federal law to permit data roaming, even if the customer is in a location where there never has been any AT&T cellular service.
I finally got off my contract with ATT and went to Sprint with the EVO and couldn’t be happier!!
This seems quite reasonable, and therefore people will complain a lot about it.
My guess is they won’t be doing an actual analysis like that, they just figured out where the 95% number is, and that’s where they will start throttling.
Interestingly, this means that early in the billing cycle, they can still bog down the network, and then near the end of the billing cycle, suddenly the network will get better for everybody as they start throttling those who were using the most data.
Unless they spread the billing dates across the entire calendar, this could lead to interesting data throughput cycles. Obviously, it would be best if they spread out the throttling.
What they probably should do is throttle the top 5% of instantaneous use when the network gets above 90% utilization. Most of the time they wouldn’t have to slow things down, only when usage was peaking, and then they’d throttle whoever was really using it at that moment.
Well I have AT&T and I have no complaints. First class stuff. All the carriers will be doing this to survive. First internet and now mobile. Verizon and now AT&T. You have a small percent of bandwidth hogs that drive up the cost for everyone else and should indeed pay more.
Instead of beating up on these carriers I suggest everyone beat up on the FCC. They are pushing for free universal internet. This will have greater impact on all of us than this bandwidth hog price
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2379296,00.asp
Ah yes... the unlimited limit plan. Makes perfect sense
I thought Verizon now owns t mobile.
Don’t these top 5% have contracts guaranteeing them unlimited data?
We have been making the change from Sprint to AT&T, after having been pretty happy with Sprint. But we got EVOs on the promise of speed and 4g, which has been on the horizon for what seems like an eternity. My 4G EVO(3G network in our city) has slower internet than my Palm Pre(EVDO) did, which really burns me. I paid quite a lot to upgrade. I really like my EVO as a phone- big screen, a decent number of apps, but side by side tests with an iphone 3g on AT&T against my EVO on sprint are no comparison. AT&T is more expensive plans, but what good are the savings when I can’t get a web page to load or search for a local store? Plus we’ve had issues with calls not going through (between the EVOs and now between the iphones and my EVO).
Yes. 2 year plans, most likely
The provider can change what they provide, without penalty... but the customer has no ability to walk away from the deal, original or changed, without paying a steep penalty
Yea, that seems about right. /sarc
They still get unlimited data, it’s their speed that is being throttled back. Unlimited data does not mean unlimited speed.
This sounds like an excellent way to lose one’s customers to one’s competitors in a bad economy.
So true and they lie, lie and lie.
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