parislemon

AT&T’s Unlimited Data*

*at the slowest, shittiest speeds they can possibly provide

If you live in a big city like New York or San Francisco, I can’t imagine why you’re still using AT&T. Seriously, just switch to Verizon, it’s wonderful. But millions are sticking with AT&T and as a present this Christmas, they’re getting flaming bags of shit sent their way.

I’ve had at least a dozen friends in the past couple of weeks says that they’ve received messages from the carrier saying their service will soon be throttled. Why? AT&T claims they’re using 12 times more data than the “average smartphone user”, and in an effort to maintain their network, they’ll start reducing the speed of their data.

It’s complete and utter bullshit.

These are people who pay for unlimited data (which AT&T has since discontinued, but they were all grandfathered in). AT&T doesn’t want to face the backlash if they kick them out of those contracts, so instead they’re taking more subtle, slimy maneuvers to make sure they can screw over long-standing customers.

Below is the message my friend Jacob got from them:

As he writes, “Ridiculous. Extortion. I’m a customer, it’s not my fault that I use their service. Insane for them to think I wouldn’t, and penalize me for it, even as one of their earliest iPhone users, grandfathered into the Unlimited plan.”

And it’s not like he’s alone. Again, I’ve seen this same complaint pop up several times over various social networks in the past few weeks. I have no doubt that many of the people I know (most of whom work in the tech space) use more data than the average user, but what does it mean when this many all face the same problem? Do they have the problem, or does AT&T? The carrier is playing a dangerous game here.

Worse, it seems the “top 5%” data users aren’t using that much data at all. As Amit Runchal points out in this post, he got that AT&T warning as well despite being right around the 2GB cap that AT&T offers on their current plans. In other words, it’s not like the top 5% are using 5x the data of AT&T’s current caps, they’re using about that much data, and AT&T is still going to throttle them.

I’d quit AT&T right now — if I hadn’t done that already months ago due to their piece of shit network. Merry Christmas loyal customers. Your present is 0 kbps speeds for the rest of the month. On us. Enjoy!