AT&T Adds Limits To Your Unlimited Plan

People are going to complain to complain. Some of the same people complaining about 5gb on LTE are the same ones who was fine with T-Mobile doing similar a year ago.
 
The new rules are hilarious. If you have an LTE device on the unlimited plan ($30/month), you now get 5GB before throttling. But they encourage you to switch to the tiered plans, of which the 5GB plan costs $50/month. I guess the 7 to 8-figure earning morons think people really are that stupid.

The fact that they offer 5GB/mo plans and then throttle an unlimited plan member with a 3G phone at 3GB puts it right in the open that they are violating the spirit of the contract and do not have a technical reason to do so.
 
Valshistixol said:
I'm always reminded of this.

q0jW1.jpg
Click to expand...

Haha.

You know, comcast get's a lot of hate, but I consistently get better speeds than I pay for. My Verizon 3g speeds on the other hand are pitiful. Last night I was trying to look up some info on my phone and I couldn't get things to load. So I gave the speedtest app a try. I got a blazing .04mbps down. It's just pitiful.
 
JapaneseGorilla said:
Haha.

You know, comcast get's a lot of hate, but I consistently get better speeds than I pay for. My Verizon 3g speeds on the other hand are pitiful. Last night I was trying to look up some info on my phone and I couldn't get things to load. So I gave the speedtest app a try. I got a blazing .04mbps down. It's just pitiful.
Click to expand...

Verizon 3G will only get 1.5 Mbps on a good day. That being said, I rarely get less than 20 Mbps on LTE and have hit 35+ Mbps with full service. Obviously a world of difference.
 
JapaneseGorilla said:
Haha.

You know, comcast get's a lot of hate, but I consistently get better speeds than I pay for. My Verizon 3g speeds on the other hand are pitiful. Last night I was trying to look up some info on my phone and I couldn't get things to load. So I gave the speedtest app a try. I got a blazing .04mbps down. It's just pitiful.
Click to expand...

Sounds like sprint's 3g for me. Hell I had to force my phone to roam on Verizon's towers to get usable internet.

I always found it ironic when sprint advertises unlimited data with no throttling, when the speeds are so slow I can never reach more than 150mb a month.
 
"Unlimited Access?"

Are you guys fucking dull. That justification is an absurd line of reasoning. It goes against the spirit of the advertising and the type of service provided.
 
I am glad, that here in EU my unlimited data package is unlimeted - just in past 12 hours I downloaded over 1.5GB of data via my phone.
 
If it's only the top 5% of unlimited users, you know what happens... As more users use more data you fall into the 6% range, so your speed should speed back up!

AT&T Fooking sucks ass. So far glad I'm on Big Red.
 
DejaWiz said:
Yeah, Verizon is starting to suck more and more as time goes on and Sprint has remained true to their word, IMO.
Click to expand...

I got a chance to play with my buddys Nexus the other day and the 4G LTE is pretty damn fast. This was middle of the day too.
 
i gonna upgrade to a 4g LTE phone and only be able to use LTE for like 4 days before i go over the limit. does bandwidth really cost money? does it use more electricity or something? i am gonna have a 1080p screen on my phone but not be able to stream 1080p. heh maybe they should invent a compression for cellular data so we can get more for our money.
 
they have us by the balls unless you going to build your own wireless network. we are at there mercy and it bites.

a unified network might help but i don't know just why do we need 20 different networks? do we have 20 different brands of wires for are telephone? i think we have for cable though. at least when i had comcast come out they told me i was wired for there competitors and not for them and they spent 2 days pulling wire to my house. seems dumb to me. so now i have 3 holes in the walls for each of the 3 cable carriers in my area...glad it is a rental but it just seems waist-full.

i know they don't want it. but would it not benefit everyone
if you want to do business in a market you have to pay part of the fee to upgrade and maintain that equipment. just some thoughts
 
Nerdydave said:
they have us by the balls unless you going to build your own wireless network. we are at there mercy and it bites.
Click to expand...
If you try that, they'll just pay off the FCC to say your network will kill babies and kick puppies, just like they did with Lightsquared.
Nerdydave said:
a unified network might help but i don't know just why do we need 20 different networks? do we have 20 different brands of wires for are telephone? i think we have for cable though. at least when i had comcast come out they told me i was wired for there competitors and not for them and they spent 2 days pulling wire to my house. seems dumb to me. so now i have 3 holes in the walls for each of the 3 cable carriers in my area...glad it is a rental but it just seems waist-full.

i know they don't want it. but would it not benefit everyone
if you want to do business in a market you have to pay part of the fee to upgrade and maintain that equipment. just some thoughts
Click to expand...
In countries where the telecommunications are cheap and fast, the government either owns the lines or forces telecoms to share them with competitors at reasonable rates.

In my personal opinion, the government should own the lines just like they own the roads. And the ISPs would pay the taxes that would maintain those lines out of the money collected from their customers, just like oil companies pay taxes that maintain the roads.
 
I really can't grasp the concept of just how in the hell they are allowed to call it "unlimited" when in fact that's a 100% outright lie. It's clearly NOT unlimited if there's some type of limit. I know that previous sentence makes me sound like captain obvious - but that's my point; what the fuck is unlimited about a limited service? How is this not illegal?
 
If I recall, there was a man that sued AT&T (with-in this month) in court for throttling his unlimited access, and WON!! it was in small claims court here in CA. He won $850, so I dont think this throttling will last.
 
This kind of crap is the exact reason why I am seriously considering jumping ship, even after being a loyal att customer for around 14 years.
 
The problem I see is that when AT&T first came out with the unlimited plan, it actually meant unlimited data and now they're changing their definition.

Can anyone think of an all-you-can-eat buffet that kicks you out after a third plate of food (or limits you to a dinky little teacup plate) because you're eating more than most other people? This isn't even a great analogy since the expenses of bandwidth are laughable compared to the costs of ingredients.
 
w4ffles said:
The problem I see is that when AT&T first came out with the unlimited plan, it actually meant unlimited data and now they're changing their definition.

Can anyone think of an all-you-can-eat buffet that kicks you out after a third plate of food (or limits you to a dinky little teacup plate) because you're eating more than most other people? This isn't even a great analogy since the expenses of bandwidth are laughable compared to the costs of ingredients.
Click to expand...

It costs about $1/GB, which means that the average person could use 30GB per month before ATT lost all of its profit... for that one customer. I think the average customer uses what, something like 2GB, so yeah, they're not exactly scraping for pennies.
 
I went to my local ATT store and asked them about getting out of my plan. They say that because you're still able to use your unlimited plan albeit throttled some, it's still not in any violation of their contract with customers. I explained to him that I've been on the tail end of ZERO data and because you guys are playing with throttles, it's possible, you've already stopped me from using my data plan a couple of times. He again goes on to say that we don't shut off data, we reduce it to EDGE "like" speeds. I kinda feel like have an Iphone 3G with "3G" being important, it was totally implied that you were getting 3G speeds all the time.

Everyone in my family has Iphones. My wife and I, both 4S users and my kids, a 4 and a 3G all use data and I pay for my kids plans due to there's no unlimited plan for them but for my wife and I there are--and we stream a lot--a lot of music, videos and download apps. Most importantly, I use my phone as a GPS in my work truck. We also play MP games too. When home, of course it's wifi but I'll be damned if I'm going to look for open wifi when I'm out and to use GPS on anything else isn't workable.

So I said, the friends I have all received the infamous message and he says, all of his have not. Your on a plan right? Yes. So of course you're not getting such messages. The fact you're trying such shit logic already irritates me. He said that it takes mucho data before they throttle....yeah? how much?....20gigs he states. No effing way am I using that much so I start looking on my phone to check data but it doesn't or at least I couldn't figure it out so he checked on his screen. He showed me my plan and it showed over 40g use last month. I was 5 days in the cycle and I already used 250mg. He was like "see"?

I said to him I was going to max that 20g until you guys either offer me an "out" or I'll burn data as usual because honestly, we agreed in our first contract to this and I pay damn near 3 bones a month for all my phones. Then you market the 4s phones to be faster at downloading? WTFIGO?

Got home, checked my usage and it looks nothing like the bastard depicted. The most I've ever used was 6G over the past year and I average less then 4gigs month to month.

This is an act of desperation of behalf of ATT and they know they cant do much without losing customers who at the end of the day, still pay alot for their services. I couldn't think straight when he showed me the numbers but I've always had trouble looking at mb to gb conversions so I suspect he either showed me a popular offending user or didn't explain mine correctly.
 
capturearq.png

capture1sq.png


I pay so much money I forget and overpay them all the time.
As you can see, I've never used 40gig of data.
 
collegeboy69us said:
i fail to see how it's legal for them to use the english word unlimited to describe a truly limited plan.

Does that mean I catn open up a restaurant selling the greasiest nastiest (hence most delicious) burgers and call them "Ultra healthy eco burgers"? If I take the AT&T approach and just totally bork the meaning of "healthy"

The only thing unlimited about AT&T's fucked up business is the amount of money they plan on making off you the consumer whore.
Click to expand...
No, but you can open up an "all you can eat" buffet...and then charge customers by weight once they've eaten the limit you've set.
 
Currently, Verizon doesn't throttle their unlimited 4G customers. I've used gigs upon gigs of data since last March when they launched their first LTE phone, the HTC Thunderbolt, and no issues at all.

But I feel its only a matter of a few months before they follow in ATT's footsteps. I'd better enjoy mine while it lasts.

I wonder if Sprint will also moved to tiered data once they launch their LTE network too.
 
My phone's 3G connection was completely unusable last month once I hit 2.1GB and was throttled. Web pages took over a minute to load and often completely timed out. It was worse than edge. My contract is up soon so I will be looking to switch.
 
Yeah this was the last straw for me. Going over to Verizon this weekend.
 
AthlonXP said:
Yeah this was the last straw for me. Going over to Verizon this weekend.
Click to expand...

My phone's 3G connection was completely unusable last month once I hit 2.1GB and was throttled. Web pages took over a minute to load and often completely timed out. It was worse than edge. My contract is up soon so I will be looking to switch.
Click to expand...

https://ting.com/

check 'em out. Seems like a pretty good deal IMO
 
arcturus said:
Oh great, just what us Sprint users need ... more congestion from new data hogs.
Click to expand...

well, to be fair... this seems like a service better suited for people that don't use a ton of data. I checked my data usage and since Oct '11, I've only used 7GB worth of data but paying for unlimited. With usage like that, Ting sounds like a great replacement. It should, essentially, cut my bill in half.

If you're using data like it's going out of style, Ting probably wont be much cheaper than anyone else (and in fact, might even be more expensive since they only offer plans up to 3GB)
 
Pkirk618 said:
I went to my local ATT store and asked them about getting out of my plan. They say that because you're still able to use your unlimited plan albeit throttled some, it's still not in any violation of their contract with customers. I explained to him that I've been on the tail end of ZERO data and because you guys are playing with throttles, it's possible, you've already stopped me from using my data plan a couple of times. He again goes on to say that we don't shut off data, we reduce it to EDGE "like" speeds. I kinda feel like have an Iphone 3G with "3G" being important, it was totally implied that you were getting 3G speeds all the time.

Everyone in my family has Iphones. My wife and I, both 4S users and my kids, a 4 and a 3G all use data and I pay for my kids plans due to there's no unlimited plan for them but for my wife and I there are--and we stream a lot--a lot of music, videos and download apps. Most importantly, I use my phone as a GPS in my work truck. We also play MP games too. When home, of course it's wifi but I'll be damned if I'm going to look for open wifi when I'm out and to use GPS on anything else isn't workable.

So I said, the friends I have all received the infamous message and he says, all of his have not. Your on a plan right? Yes. So of course you're not getting such messages. The fact you're trying such shit logic already irritates me. He said that it takes mucho data before they throttle....yeah? how much?....20gigs he states. No effing way am I using that much so I start looking on my phone to check data but it doesn't or at least I couldn't figure it out so he checked on his screen. He showed me my plan and it showed over 40g use last month. I was 5 days in the cycle and I already used 250mg. He was like "see"?

I said to him I was going to max that 20g until you guys either offer me an "out" or I'll burn data as usual because honestly, we agreed in our first contract to this and I pay damn near 3 bones a month for all my phones. Then you market the 4s phones to be faster at downloading? WTFIGO?

Got home, checked my usage and it looks nothing like the bastard depicted. The most I've ever used was 6G over the past year and I average less then 4gigs month to month.

This is an act of desperation of behalf of ATT and they know they cant do much without losing customers who at the end of the day, still pay alot for their services. I couldn't think straight when he showed me the numbers but I've always had trouble looking at mb to gb conversions so I suspect he either showed me a popular offending user or didn't explain mine correctly.
Click to expand...

He couldve easily showed you yearly usage, but I highly, incredibly, definitely doubt you used 40g in a month, especially if they stop you at 20gb, or slow you severely. Their edge speeds are garbage for everything. I don't bother using my data unless I have HSPA service.

If it wasn't for the prepaid loophole, I wouldn't be an AT&T customer honestly.
 
But to fair, I've always received great service whenever I walk into an AT&T store or talk to someone on the phone.
 
dr.stevil said:
well, to be fair... this seems like a service better suited for people that don't use a ton of data. I checked my data usage and since Oct '11, I've only used 7GB worth of data but paying for unlimited. With usage like that, Ting sounds like a great replacement. It should, essentially, cut my bill in half.

If you're using data like it's going out of style, Ting probably wont be much cheaper than anyone else (and in fact, might even be more expensive since they only offer plans up to 3GB)
Click to expand...

No worry, Sprint's network is so screwed up it would be difficult to bust the cap even if done intentionally. Any increase in subscribers, high bandwidth users or not, will simply in the aggregate make the Sprint experience even more intolerable.
 
nerdydesi said:
Currently, Verizon doesn't throttle their unlimited 4G customers. I've used gigs upon gigs of data since last March when they launched their first LTE phone, the HTC Thunderbolt, and no issues at all.

But I feel its only a matter of a few months before they follow in ATT's footsteps. I'd better enjoy mine while it lasts.

I wonder if Sprint will also moved to tiered data once they launch their LTE network too.
Click to expand...
Let's see how long that lasts. We won't know until most of their devices on the network are 4G. Then again, if I can regulary run at over 4.5/4.5Mb and at times get 14/14Mb then maybe they do have a better network in place that can withstand the mobile bandwidth onslaught. There isn't a whole lot of (legal) things you can do on a mobile phone to saturate that kind of bandwidth unless you're one of those people that like to bit torrent or download from Usenet over a tethered 4G connection. It might not be so bad in the 4G world (at least on Verizon).
 
The funny part is that if AT&T had just canceled all "unlimited" plans after the expiration of their 2 year contract, people would have no legitimate case here. They could just stop offering it and it wouldn't be a problem.

The fact that they grandfathered those of us who had the "unlimited" plan in now that they no longer offer a "unlimited" plan to new subscribers, and now want to throttle it is causing them a lot of headache.

Personally, I am considering switching to Verizon. I've had a phone with Comcast->AT&T since '99. At first I was concerned about losing my "unlimited" plan I was grandfathered into, but seeing that it is limited to 3GB I really don't care anymore. I currently use well below a gig per month on average, so if I got the 2GB plan on Verizon I'd be in good shape. and actually save a little bit of money...

I can understand that limited spectrum could become a problem, and that they would have to limit people who abuse the system by tethering and using their cellphone instead of a broadband connection, but limiting legitimate users is really shitty.
 
Verizon runs a special double data every now and then...4GB for the 2GB price.
 
tesfaye said:
Let's see how long that lasts. We won't know until most of their devices on the network are 4G. Then again, if I can regulary run at over 4.5/4.5Mb and at times get 14/14Mb then maybe they do have a better network in place that can withstand the mobile bandwidth onslaught. There isn't a whole lot of (legal) things you can do on a mobile phone to saturate that kind of bandwidth unless you're one of those people that like to bit torrent or download from Usenet over a tethered 4G connection. It might not be so bad in the 4G world (at least on Verizon).
Click to expand...

The funny part is I don't think it's wireless spectrum that is T&T's problem. I often have pretty good reception on my phone (judging by the bars) but still get poor data transfer rates.

This suggests that I would get good speed to the tower, but that their wired infrastructure behind the towers is what's fucked up, and that is just sad.
 
Emission said:
But to fair, I've always received great service whenever I walk into an AT&T store or talk to someone on the phone.
Click to expand...

I've received good service when I look like I am going to buy something (presumably they are on commission) but I have received poor service from both Verizon and AT&T when I have had issues, particularly billing issues. I will give AT&T the slight edge here though.

The funny part is that as soon as I added my company's account info to my line I was switched over to AT&T's "business service" which was leaps and bounds better than their normal customer service for everyone else.
 
Well I'm paying $130 a month for 2 iPhones on AT&T with the unlimited plan, they throttled my Wife of all people because she was streaming Pandira everyday at work! We checked her usage and she was only at 1.8 gigs, the loser asshole scumbags at the store told us she was at 6.4 gig which was proven to be a lie. We want out of our contract but they say they will do nothing. So her phone is a paperweight until the next billing cycle. So we have no options but to leave these greedy phuks when our contract is up. I'm canceling my house /tv/Internet from them as well. I know I'm only 1 person but hopefully enuff people do it they will notice.
 
Marcdaddy said:
Well I'm paying $130 a month for 2 iPhones on AT&T with the unlimited plan, they throttled my Wife of all people because she was streaming Pandira everyday at work! We checked her usage and she was only at 1.8 gigs, the loser asshole scumbags at the store told us she was at 6.4 gig which was proven to be a lie. We want out of our contract but they say they will do nothing. So her phone is a paperweight until the next billing cycle. So we have no options but to leave these greedy phuks when our contract is up. I'm canceling my house /tv/Internet from them as well. I know I'm only 1 person but hopefully enuff people do it they will notice.
Click to expand...

I really wish I could do the same. I have internet service with them and its the only option where I live but I need the internet. *shrug*

They are dicks for doing that to you guys, and to any one. I just don't have any choice but to stick with them.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top