While the headline might be a little harsh the simple truth is that AT&T, and generally all telcos for that matter, have no problem doing whatever they can to charge their customers more and offering them less – in otherwards screwing them.
In this case a new study from a data analysis company Validas says that AT&T is intentionally and quietly throttling customers with unlimited plans in an underhanded effort to get them to move to a tiered plan.
While there has been some criticism lately due to AT&T deciding that all those nasty data hungry people needed to be throttled back the company has stated that they are only targeting the top 5 percent of what they call data hogs.
However what the report from Validas suggests is that these so-called data hogs aren’t mowing down on data as hard as AT&T is making them out to be. After taking a look at the data from over 55,000 cell phone bills for 2011 Validas found that on average those terrible and greedy unlimited data hogs only hit 3.97GB per month; which according to PCWorld wouldn’t hardly affect AT&T network in the slightest.
“When we look at the Top 5% of data users, there is virtually no difference in data consumption between those on unlimited and those on tiered plans—and yet the unlimited consumers are the ones at risk of getting their service turned off,” Validas wrote in a blog post. “So it’s curious that anyone would think the throttling here represents a serious effort at alleviating network bandwidth issues.”
Of course AT&T isn’t the only telco to be throttling accounts but in their opinion when it comes to AT&T they have an ulterior motive for doing it.
via TechnoBuffalo
