WASHINGTON — The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday charged AT&T with deceiving smartphone customers who signed up for an “unlimited” data plan only to find that AT&T drastically reduced the speed at which their phones could use the Internet once they had used a certain amount of data each month.
Since 2011, data speeds have been reduced for more than 3.5 million AT&T customers on more than 25 million occasions, the F.T.C. said.
AT&T notified customers in mid-2011 that they might face “reduced data speeds” if they were in the top 5 percent of users. But the commission said that notification was inadequate because it did not specify that customers’ speeds would be reduced by up to 95 percent — essentially making their smartphones inoperable for the purpose of accessing the Internet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/t...eceived-consumers-on-unlimited-data-plan.html
My ordeal was even worse where AT&T forced me onto a limited data plan, this was before they started their throttling policy. I switched to sprint which has real unlimited data
i paid full price for my S4 on Verizon to keep unlimited data a year or so ago, which was probably not the best idea. however, they spent so much time trying to get me to sign up for a tiered plan that it set off my bull**** alarm, and i also didn't feel like checking my data usage 15 times a month.
the fact that we pay this much for data at this point in the technology is fairly ridiculous. i'm not fatalistic about it, though. there is enough new competition recently that i am optimistic that there might still be a price drop at some point.
Eventually, perhaps. The problem is that the big telcos got a head start via billions upon billions of dollars in taxpayer funds.
i paid full price for my S4 on Verizon to keep unlimited data a year or so ago, which was probably not the best idea. however, they spent so much time trying to get me to sign up for a tiered plan that it set off my bull**** alarm, and i also didn't feel like checking my data usage 15 times a month.
With me and at least 10 others I know of, they were even more sneaky.
Myself and these 10 others had been grandfathered in with an older unlimited data plan. And when we deployed overseas, we all placed our phones on a military hold until we returned. Yet each and every once of us when we returned found out that about half way through the deployment Verizon and unfrozen our accounts, and they had been cancelled due to non-payment. All we could do is reactive our phones with a new contract, which of course none of them at that time had unlimited data.
We all choose to walk away and go with other carriers. I had used Verizon for years, and I will never go back to them ever again.
i paid full price for my S4 on Verizon to keep unlimited data a year or so ago, which was probably not the best idea.
however, they spent so much time trying to get me to sign up for a tiered plan that it set off my bull**** alarm, and i also didn't feel like checking my data usage 15 times a month.
the fact that we pay this much for data at this point in the technology is fairly ridiculous. i'm not fatalistic about it, though. there is enough new competition recently that i am optimistic that there might still be a price drop at some point.
Which really means you're paying like $1,200+ for that phone after subsidy recovery fees that are built into it. Ouch. Still though, at least you get real unlimited unlike AT&T or Sprint's "Unlimited" but so slow it's not usable.
Have you seen European data pricing? Try not to vomit in disgust as how badly we're getting screwed.
and not just for phone data. what we pay for cable internet is almost obscene.
BBC News - Why is broadband more expensive in the US?
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