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from the as-much-as-YOU-want-but-as-slow-as-WE-want dept.
Federal officials on Tuesday sued AT&T, the nation’s second-largest cellular carrier, for allegedly deceiving millions of customers by selling them supposedly “unlimited” data plans that the company later “throttled” by slowing Internet speeds when customers surfed the Web too much.
The Federal Trade Commission said the practice, used by AT&T since 2011, resulted in slower speeds for customers on at least 25 million occasions – in some cases cutting user Internet speeds by 90 percent, to the point where they resembled dial-up services of old. The 3.5 million affected customers experienced these slowdowns an average of 12 days each month, said the FTC, which received thousands of complaints about the practice.
See also Ars Technica's coverage: US sues AT&T, alleges severe throttling of unlimited data customers which notes that customers were throttled by as much as 90% once they reached 3GB or 5GB of data.
The FTC has made available both a press release and the AT&T lawsuit (pdf).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 29 2014, @05:02PM
Yeah, don't rub it in. I currently pay over USD100 for the privilege of getting my data capped at 5GB/mo. But then, I have download speeds which are typically measured at tens of kbps. So it's not like I could ever actually take advantage of promises of unlimited data anyway. Land of the free, indeed.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday October 29 2014, @07:30PM
Wouldn't making the ISPs common carriers solve the "up to" problem? Instead of "up to X gigs" translating to "We'll tell you a big number, lying right to your face, and then laugh when you can't do anything to force us to provide you with the actual service we're selling you."
Come to think of it, I wonder if part of the reason they all want to throttle or block bittorrent is because that's one of the easiest ways to max out your bandwidth since you're connecting to a bunch of different peers at once.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"