7 ms·

AT&T verifies data throttling for top 5% of users

41 points by Flemlord 15y ago

alanfalcon 15y ago
On the surface it seems like a fair and balanced approach to the problem. I wish there was an actual number set, rather than the top 5% of each month's users which means that they're promising to always throttle speeds of 5% of their customers. Perhaps they're hoping this will cause a race among the customers who use the most data to reduce their data usage every month? I also find great humor in the throw-away line concerning the necessity of the acquisition of T-Mobile at the end.
- hugh3 15y ago
  I also find great humor in the throw-away line concerning the necessity of the acquisition of T-Mobile at the end. Apparently AT&T has hired Cato the Elder to do their PR. This is bad news for Carthage.
  - gtank 15y ago
    We shall lay low their towers and sell their engineers to the Shanzhai.
- phereford 15y ago
  Preface: What I am about to say is a complete and utter assumption. One would assume that ATT did some analysis on bandwidth usage patterns amongst heavy users. They probably came to the conclusion that the top 5% of bandwidth hogs account for X% of their entire bandwidth throughput. ATT's approach doesnt really solve their problem very much though. If someone has extremely sporadic bandwidth usage but uses gigs at a time, limiting these users won't do much for solving whatever problem they are trying to solve. Maybe their data modeling/forecasting is so accurate that they are able to segment those 5% into various segments and limit that way.
- jerrya 15y ago
  That's not amusing at all. And in fact, what is more likely: competition on GSM will bring better service and more data cheaper to users, or a monopolistic single service on GSM will bring better service and more data cheaper to users. If I was at the FTC or in Congress, or at Sprint, I would definitely be waving this AT&T policy around, and use it to stop the merger. What AT&T needs is more competition, not less.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
modeless 15y ago
A couple of changes would make this into an actually reasonable policy that I wouldn't mind other ISPs adopting: 1. Define a usage threshold instead of always throttling 1/20th of your customers, and 2. Allow customers to pay a reasonable fee to boost their speeds back up after they hit the throttling.
- roblund 15y ago
  Isn't #2 pretty close to their tiered data plans?
NathanKP 15y ago
This doesn't really make sense to me because it seems that over time it will reduce the threshold for the entire network. Here is what I'm thinking: suppose that for the first month the top 5% uses 50gb of data per month. Well once the throttling kicks in they will not be able to reach the 50gb per month that they usually hit, and instead they only hit 40gb. Next month the top 5% of usage rates is 40gb per month, and so the threshold kicks in sooner. If this repeated over the course of months then the threshold would get lower and lower, until it began to infringe on normal usage. I'm willing to assume that AT&T is doing this intelligently, and that the top 5% is a static measurement, but the way it is described makes it sound like a sliding scale that will lower the threshold more and more over time. And that doesn't even touch the issue of always throttling connections for 5% of their customers...
- dkokelley 15y ago
  They're not capping the top 5% each month. They're throttling it. That means that the top 5% could always be a certain range. So if the top 5% is over 50GB/month, then once you hit 50GB you'll be slowed down, but not stopped. You can keep going, and this is why the top 5% can stay the same from month to month. It's possible that they can hit 50GB next month just as before, unless their behavior changes. You're right that this plan could bring the top 5% down to 40GB over time, but that's only if the users behavior on aggregate changes. Once you're in the 95th percentile of users, I'm not sure how much extra usage is needed to get to the 99th, or even how much changing your behavior will significantly lower the averages.
  - NathanKP 15y ago
    When your bandwidth is limited it becomes difficult to get many more gigabytes as that is the whole point of a throttle. So when that throttle is applied to the power users then they physically can't download as many gigabytes as they used to. So my theory is that over time the difference between the 99th percentile and the 95th is going to decrease as the power users who used to raise the bar higher are throttled down to a more normal gigabyte per month usage.
- chc 15y ago
nextparadigms 15y ago
My problem with this is that they've advertised "UNLIMITED" data and convinced a lot of people to join their network because of it, and now they are saying that's not actually true. I know they have footnotes in the contract, but isn't it some kind of false advertising? It's not "unlimited", it's more like "a lot", and they get to decide what a lot means. If you're not going to really give people unlimited data, and you're going to get upset about it when people actually try using it as if it was unlimited, then how about you stop advertising it as such?
- Joakal 15y ago
  It's illegal to offer unlimited in Australia if it's not by definition, unlimited. http://www.theage.com.au/business/accc-seeks-unlimited-optus-ban-20100615-ydev.html http://www.theage.com.au/business/accc-seeks-unlimited-optus... http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2011/01/dodo-busted-by-accc-for-unlimited-broadband-promotions/ http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2011/01/dodo-busted-by-accc-for... Optus is the second most popular ISP in Australia. Telstra is most popular and even they got slapped for having 'Unlimited' in the past (Now called Liberty plans).
- dangrossman 15y ago
  Same with a lot of residential ISPs too. They all advertise internet in terms of download and upload speeds, yet if you used the connection at that speed you'd hit the fine-print data cap in under a day.
- awj 15y ago
  To play devil's advocate: does cutting back on the transfer rate constitute a data limit? Users that hit that 5% threshold aren't blocked from sending and receiving data, they just don't get the same transfer speeds. Granted, it sucks to see this happen, but if transfer rates aren't also specified in the plan/advertising it's hard to argue that this represents going back on an "unlimited data" promise.
  - dedicated 15y ago
    True that the transfer rates aren't specifically spelled out, but if I'm advertised the nation's largest 3G network, or something to that tune, then my expectation is unlimited data on that network.
drcube 15y ago
Stop pretending that you're not a dumb pipe and bill by usage. The sooner information is treated like the basic utility it is, like fuel, water or electricity, the better off we'll all be. It's painful to watch every last data provider dance around the subject like this. You're not fooling anybody. All right, you're fooling a lot of people, but not me, and not anybody else for very long.
- dpark 15y ago
  People don't want to pay by usage, though. They want unlimited bandwidth and transfer for $30/month, and they aren't going to be happy with settling for $15/GB.
  - mikeash 15y ago
    Customers always want better products for free. The problem is that ISPs are responding to the desire for unlimited bandwidth by providing "unlimited" with tons of caveats. Everybody would be better off if they would just cut to the chase and charge by usage. Advertising "unlimited" should qualify as false advertising if it's not truly unlimited, which would push everybody towards more sane behavior.
    - NathanKP 15y ago
      Everybody would be better off except for the ISP's who would now be exposing the ridiculously high dollar per gigabyte rate they are charging.
    - dpark 15y ago
      I agree that they should not (and should not be able to) call a limited plan "unlimited". However, I don't think that going to a true pay-for-usage plan is realistic. Most people don't use much bandwidth. Those people are effectively subsidizing the high-usage clients. Let's assume that the average data usage is 1GB (the actual amount doesn't matter). Right now, everyone pays $30 whether they use 1kB or 1TB. Imagine if instead we go to a pay per MB plan. A MB currently costs $0.03 (on average, and assuming 1000MB to the GB). We know that the top 5% are using 12x as much data as the average user, so the top users are around 12GB, while the average user is around 420MB. So if we keep the usage price the same, the average non-top-5% user will be paying only $12.60. The top users are paying $360.00. Of course, the top users aren't going to continue this kind of payment. They'll leave for another provider or else drastically cut their usage. So now AT&T is serving less data (yay), but they're also bringing in about 42% as much revenue. And bear in mind that this same calculation could be done for the next 5% and the next. The person using 1MB today paying for the 999MB they don't use so that someone else can use it. After the new plan, their fee goes down to $0.03, and someone else's goes up by $29.97. A lot of people would simply stop using any significant bandwidth and force AT&T to raise the price per MB drastically. I think tiered plans make more sense, where instead of a true pay-for-usage, you basically have pay-for-max-usage. I think this might be where we end up. And the reality is that what we'll probably see will be $30 for "average" or slightly-above-average usage (1GB in my example), and other tiers for "exceptional" usage. Maybe $45 for 2GB and $60 for 4GB. AT&T isn't going to take a big pay cut on average users, because exceptional users by and large will not make up the difference. They'll just stop being exceptional users.
ajaimk 15y ago
As this is in effect a change of the Terms of Service, I wonder if they will let you get out of your 2 year contract if you were on the unlimited plan WITHOUT a early termination fee. I know that any change to the ToS that involves pricing/coverage is eligible for a termination of contract with no fees, but would this be covered too? Thoughts?
- Rhapso 15y ago
  You might have to use a lawyer to get it done, but probably yes. But that is true for most of the stuff involving termination fees. The same is true for if you bring in your own cellphone to a plan. They make a lot of money betting you will decided it is not worth fighting for a clause in the contract in your favor and will write you off versus paying a cooperate lawyer their minimum fee.
- viscanti 15y ago
  It seems like they're trying to get rid of the unlimited plans altogether, so I'd bet they'd let you out of your contract if you were one of the people who would be throttled. The people who use that much data aren't nearly as profitable, and they'd probably love to see most of that group switch networks or accept data limits.
rawsyntax 15y ago
they do not tell us how many GB is too many
- sahaj 15y ago
  Why is this comment not at the top. They need to define what "unlimited" really means.
orky56 15y ago
Let's hope that everyone or at least a majority start using up more and more bandwidth so that the threshold for the top 5% is a very high amount ~30gb. At that point, we can bring the future of high usage to the present so that AT&T and these other telco's can create policies that are future-proof rather than vague, temporary measures. We should make it clear that these high-bandwidth activities are here and the telco's are the bottleneck blocking these new services from going mainstream.
lpolovets 15y ago
One new measure is a step that may reduce the data throughput speed experienced by a very small minority of smartphone customers who are on unlimited plans – those whose extraordinary level of data usage puts them in the top 5 percent of our heaviest data users in a billing period. If 1 out of 20 people qualifies, then it's by no means "extraordinary". "Extraordinary" should be something like 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000. If 3 people on your block fit the bill, then that's just called "ordinary".
mdda 15y ago
The problem for a potential competitor to AT&T that could offer a 'REALLY unlimited' contract is that the people who would switch would be all the really high bandwidth consumers. All the 'juicy' decently paying, (in reality) low bandwidth people don't feel oppressed by AT&T. So the competitor would just be setting themselves up for providing a better service, for the worst ($/Mb) customers.
daimyoyo 15y ago
I had every intention of getting an iPhone 5 when it launched and renewing my contract with AT&T at the same time. Now I'm going to run the contract out and then go elsewhere.
xkaylorx 15y ago
IF you want to look at it this way, if they average users speed was 3mb/s , then over the course of 1 month they could download 7593.75GB, which isnt truely unlimited. And if they decide to leave AT&T, who would they go to? T-mobile throttles, Verizon does not offer unlimited, and Sprint has some deffinatley has some issues with users being able to connect at all.

41 points by Flemlord 15y ago

On the surface it seems like a fair and balanced approach to the problem. I wish there was an actual number set, rather than the top 5% of each month's users which means that they're promising to always throttle speeds of 5% of their customers. Perhaps they're hoping this will cause a race among the customers who use the most data to reduce their data usage every month? I also find great humor in the throw-away line concerning the necessity of the acquisition of T-Mobile at the end.

hugh3 15y ago
I also find great humor in the throw-away line concerning the necessity of the acquisition of T-Mobile at the end. Apparently AT&T has hired Cato the Elder to do their PR. This is bad news for Carthage.
- gtank 15y ago
  We shall lay low their towers and sell their engineers to the Shanzhai.
phereford 15y ago
Preface: What I am about to say is a complete and utter assumption. One would assume that ATT did some analysis on bandwidth usage patterns amongst heavy users. They probably came to the conclusion that the top 5% of bandwidth hogs account for X% of their entire bandwidth throughput. ATT's approach doesnt really solve their problem very much though. If someone has extremely sporadic bandwidth usage but uses gigs at a time, limiting these users won't do much for solving whatever problem they are trying to solve. Maybe their data modeling/forecasting is so accurate that they are able to segment those 5% into various segments and limit that way.
jerrya 15y ago
That's not amusing at all. And in fact, what is more likely: competition on GSM will bring better service and more data cheaper to users, or a monopolistic single service on GSM will bring better service and more data cheaper to users. If I was at the FTC or in Congress, or at Sprint, I would definitely be waving this AT&T policy around, and use it to stop the merger. What AT&T needs is more competition, not less.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

modeless 15y ago

A couple of changes would make this into an actually reasonable policy that I wouldn't mind other ISPs adopting: 1. Define a usage threshold instead of always throttling 1/20th of your customers, and 2. Allow customers to pay a reasonable fee to boost their speeds back up after they hit the throttling.

roblund 15y ago
Isn't #2 pretty close to their tiered data plans?

NathanKP 15y ago

This doesn't really make sense to me because it seems that over time it will reduce the threshold for the entire network. Here is what I'm thinking: suppose that for the first month the top 5% uses 50gb of data per month. Well once the throttling kicks in they will not be able to reach the 50gb per month that they usually hit, and instead they only hit 40gb. Next month the top 5% of usage rates is 40gb per month, and so the threshold kicks in sooner. If this repeated over the course of months then the threshold would get lower and lower, until it began to infringe on normal usage. I'm willing to assume that AT&T is doing this intelligently, and that the top 5% is a static measurement, but the way it is described makes it sound like a sliding scale that will lower the threshold more and more over time. And that doesn't even touch the issue of always throttling connections for 5% of their customers...

dkokelley 15y ago
They're not capping the top 5% each month. They're throttling it. That means that the top 5% could always be a certain range. So if the top 5% is over 50GB/month, then once you hit 50GB you'll be slowed down, but not stopped. You can keep going, and this is why the top 5% can stay the same from month to month. It's possible that they can hit 50GB next month just as before, unless their behavior changes. You're right that this plan could bring the top 5% down to 40GB over time, but that's only if the users behavior on aggregate changes. Once you're in the 95th percentile of users, I'm not sure how much extra usage is needed to get to the 99th, or even how much changing your behavior will significantly lower the averages.
- NathanKP 15y ago
  When your bandwidth is limited it becomes difficult to get many more gigabytes as that is the whole point of a throttle. So when that throttle is applied to the power users then they physically can't download as many gigabytes as they used to. So my theory is that over time the difference between the 99th percentile and the 95th is going to decrease as the power users who used to raise the bar higher are throttled down to a more normal gigabyte per month usage.
chc 15y ago

nextparadigms 15y ago

My problem with this is that they've advertised "UNLIMITED" data and convinced a lot of people to join their network because of it, and now they are saying that's not actually true. I know they have footnotes in the contract, but isn't it some kind of false advertising? It's not "unlimited", it's more like "a lot", and they get to decide what a lot means. If you're not going to really give people unlimited data, and you're going to get upset about it when people actually try using it as if it was unlimited, then how about you stop advertising it as such?

Joakal 15y ago
It's illegal to offer unlimited in Australia if it's not by definition, unlimited. http://www.theage.com.au/business/accc-seeks-unlimited-optus-ban-20100615-ydev.html http://www.theage.com.au/business/accc-seeks-unlimited-optus... http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2011/01/dodo-busted-by-accc-for-unlimited-broadband-promotions/ http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2011/01/dodo-busted-by-accc-for... Optus is the second most popular ISP in Australia. Telstra is most popular and even they got slapped for having 'Unlimited' in the past (Now called Liberty plans).
dangrossman 15y ago
Same with a lot of residential ISPs too. They all advertise internet in terms of download and upload speeds, yet if you used the connection at that speed you'd hit the fine-print data cap in under a day.
awj 15y ago
To play devil's advocate: does cutting back on the transfer rate constitute a data limit? Users that hit that 5% threshold aren't blocked from sending and receiving data, they just don't get the same transfer speeds. Granted, it sucks to see this happen, but if transfer rates aren't also specified in the plan/advertising it's hard to argue that this represents going back on an "unlimited data" promise.
- dedicated 15y ago
  True that the transfer rates aren't specifically spelled out, but if I'm advertised the nation's largest 3G network, or something to that tune, then my expectation is unlimited data on that network.

drcube 15y ago

Stop pretending that you're not a dumb pipe and bill by usage. The sooner information is treated like the basic utility it is, like fuel, water or electricity, the better off we'll all be. It's painful to watch every last data provider dance around the subject like this. You're not fooling anybody. All right, you're fooling a lot of people, but not me, and not anybody else for very long.

dpark 15y ago
People don't want to pay by usage, though. They want unlimited bandwidth and transfer for $30/month, and they aren't going to be happy with settling for $15/GB.
- mikeash 15y ago
  Customers always want better products for free. The problem is that ISPs are responding to the desire for unlimited bandwidth by providing "unlimited" with tons of caveats. Everybody would be better off if they would just cut to the chase and charge by usage. Advertising "unlimited" should qualify as false advertising if it's not truly unlimited, which would push everybody towards more sane behavior.
  - NathanKP 15y ago
    Everybody would be better off except for the ISP's who would now be exposing the ridiculously high dollar per gigabyte rate they are charging.
  - dpark 15y ago
    I agree that they should not (and should not be able to) call a limited plan "unlimited". However, I don't think that going to a true pay-for-usage plan is realistic. Most people don't use much bandwidth. Those people are effectively subsidizing the high-usage clients. Let's assume that the average data usage is 1GB (the actual amount doesn't matter). Right now, everyone pays $30 whether they use 1kB or 1TB. Imagine if instead we go to a pay per MB plan. A MB currently costs $0.03 (on average, and assuming 1000MB to the GB). We know that the top 5% are using 12x as much data as the average user, so the top users are around 12GB, while the average user is around 420MB. So if we keep the usage price the same, the average non-top-5% user will be paying only $12.60. The top users are paying $360.00. Of course, the top users aren't going to continue this kind of payment. They'll leave for another provider or else drastically cut their usage. So now AT&T is serving less data (yay), but they're also bringing in about 42% as much revenue. And bear in mind that this same calculation could be done for the next 5% and the next. The person using 1MB today paying for the 999MB they don't use so that someone else can use it. After the new plan, their fee goes down to $0.03, and someone else's goes up by $29.97. A lot of people would simply stop using any significant bandwidth and force AT&T to raise the price per MB drastically. I think tiered plans make more sense, where instead of a true pay-for-usage, you basically have pay-for-max-usage. I think this might be where we end up. And the reality is that what we'll probably see will be $30 for "average" or slightly-above-average usage (1GB in my example), and other tiers for "exceptional" usage. Maybe $45 for 2GB and $60 for 4GB. AT&T isn't going to take a big pay cut on average users, because exceptional users by and large will not make up the difference. They'll just stop being exceptional users.

ajaimk 15y ago

As this is in effect a change of the Terms of Service, I wonder if they will let you get out of your 2 year contract if you were on the unlimited plan WITHOUT a early termination fee. I know that any change to the ToS that involves pricing/coverage is eligible for a termination of contract with no fees, but would this be covered too? Thoughts?

Rhapso 15y ago
You might have to use a lawyer to get it done, but probably yes. But that is true for most of the stuff involving termination fees. The same is true for if you bring in your own cellphone to a plan. They make a lot of money betting you will decided it is not worth fighting for a clause in the contract in your favor and will write you off versus paying a cooperate lawyer their minimum fee.
viscanti 15y ago
It seems like they're trying to get rid of the unlimited plans altogether, so I'd bet they'd let you out of your contract if you were one of the people who would be throttled. The people who use that much data aren't nearly as profitable, and they'd probably love to see most of that group switch networks or accept data limits.

rawsyntax 15y ago

they do not tell us how many GB is too many

sahaj 15y ago
Why is this comment not at the top. They need to define what "unlimited" really means.

orky56 15y ago

Let's hope that everyone or at least a majority start using up more and more bandwidth so that the threshold for the top 5% is a very high amount ~30gb. At that point, we can bring the future of high usage to the present so that AT&T and these other telco's can create policies that are future-proof rather than vague, temporary measures. We should make it clear that these high-bandwidth activities are here and the telco's are the bottleneck blocking these new services from going mainstream.

lpolovets 15y ago

One new measure is a step that may reduce the data throughput speed experienced by a very small minority of smartphone customers who are on unlimited plans – those whose extraordinary level of data usage puts them in the top 5 percent of our heaviest data users in a billing period. If 1 out of 20 people qualifies, then it's by no means "extraordinary". "Extraordinary" should be something like 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000. If 3 people on your block fit the bill, then that's just called "ordinary".

mdda 15y ago

The problem for a potential competitor to AT&T that could offer a 'REALLY unlimited' contract is that the people who would switch would be all the really high bandwidth consumers. All the 'juicy' decently paying, (in reality) low bandwidth people don't feel oppressed by AT&T. So the competitor would just be setting themselves up for providing a better service, for the worst ($/Mb) customers.

daimyoyo 15y ago

I had every intention of getting an iPhone 5 when it launched and renewing my contract with AT&T at the same time. Now I'm going to run the contract out and then go elsewhere.

xkaylorx 15y ago

IF you want to look at it this way, if they average users speed was 3mb/s , then over the course of 1 month they could download 7593.75GB, which isnt truely unlimited. And if they decide to leave AT&T, who would they go to? T-mobile throttles, Verizon does not offer unlimited, and Sprint has some deffinatley has some issues with users being able to connect at all.