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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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 29 2014, @07:06PM
The real outcome is modification of AT&T's behavior in the future - based on past performance, I'm not impressed yet, but that's the hope - that all vendors will get the message that this kind of nonsense is unacceptable.
My personal answer to AT&T has been "NO" for the past 20 years - they sucked then and haven't gotten any better compared to the competition. As a whole, telecom service has improved dramatically over that period, but as a service organization, with AT&T you service the provider.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/