I have switched to Sprint in Oct. from AT&T. I've had little to no issue with them here in the Mid-Atlantic region.
I have the unlimited data plan for my mobile device, and am quite happy with it. I also purchased from Sprint a netbook with an embedded WiMax (4G cellular) internet connection, and unfortunately, there's no unlimited data plan available for it. I have to settle for a 12GB/mo. plan for about the same price as my Blackberry's plan. It's now the first month I've had my netbook, and after bringing all my offsite files in locally, I'm stuck using public WiFi for the rest of the month since I already used up my 12GB, + $250 for an additional 4GB.
The only problem I've had with Sprint so far is that the netbook's WiFi didn't work out of the box, and I couldn't use it to do my big offsite backup's download. I eventually got the corrupted apps reinstalled & afterward contacted Sprint support to try to get a credit on my overage charge, but they would only credit a third of it citing that I should have waited until it was resolved before finishing my big download project.
Happily, AT&T has been prevented from taking over T-Mobile, so we still have at least four providers for wireless data in most major markets - let's hope it stays that way.
You think the wireless ISP biz is a free market? Try to start one. Try to get cities and tower owners to give you permission to put your gear up. Who will you get fibre interlinks from for those towers? Who will issue permits to dig trenches to lay fibre all over the cities? Wireless ISPs ("wireless telcos" but I consider them ISPs because ALL their calls, SMS, MMS, and data is now digital) know the game and make no mistake, it is this way on purpose. They have done everything they can to ensure an anti-competitive market.
EDIT: I'm sure someone will mention that you could just resell service as many regional WISPs do. Again though, WISPs know the score here, and they price reseller service so that it basically matches what they're offering direct to consumers. At my old company, we'd resell SBC-ATT-Yahoo-Cingulair-Bell-BellSouth-Ameritech-Edge Wireless-Cellular One-Centennial-Wayport DSL (yes, those are all just known as "ATT" today) and the cheapest we could offer 1.5mbit DSL service was $25/month.
So, this is clearly a breach of the spirit of the contract. A claim with the small claims court and/or FCC seems to be in order.
Unfortunately, the tech community hates usage-based billing about as much as they hate throttling. Baffles me as to why.
I think we need to make it illegal to advertise "unlimited" without it actually being unlimited. I would have thought that existing truth-in-advertising laws would cover this, but apparently they don't.
Make it illegal to promise what you never intend to deliver and this whole problem goes away. If unlimited is practical to offer, then it will be offered. If unlimited is not practical, then ISPs will no longer be allowed to pretend that it is, and will be encouraged to make the limitations of their offers obvious up-front instead of using shady nonsense like this.
For example: I pay 13.50€ per month for 1.5GB of data (for my iPad). After those 1.5GB my speed is throttled, I do not ever have to pay more, though. I like that. I want it to be like that.
The only thing I don’t like is that I can’t yet buy additional bandwidth at full speed from my carrier. (One carrier recently started doing that. 5€ for every additional GB. But it’s not automatic, you have to manually initiate that. I would prefer that massively to overage fees.)
- First, any time a company tries usage-based data billing, they charge absolutely criminal rates. If you paid attention to usage-based cell service over the years, you'd know what I speak of.
- Second, in an "unlimited" model, some users use more, some use less. In general the tech community will be the ones using more- so they benefit at the marginal expense of other users. They pay comparatively less by volume for their usage.
- Third, in my opinion there's at least a tiny bit of entitlement going around in the online community as a whole. Nobody wants to pay for anything. You know, because "information wants to be free!" and all.
The second two I agree with, but they're sad reasons.
Of course in theory this is going to reduce the average usage of AT&T users, since someone is always on the top 5% (by definition 1 in 20 customers will be affected). It also seems a little unfair to have a rule that you can't know in advance.
New games come in at 10 GB or more when you are downloading them from places like Steam, add in two people downloading new games and you can easily see 100's of GB's going to just gaming. If I rebuild my Windows desktop and have Steam re-download all of the games I tend to keep locally I myself use about 150 GB of transfer. On top of that comes watching TV Shows (on Hulu/NetFlix) and movies (iTunes/NetFlix/Hulu) and various other downloads. The latest Mac OS X update weighed in at a hefty 1.38 GB, split across 4 devices.
Granted, I am a technology person, I am a programmer, I spend more time behind a computer than doing almost anything else (including sleep). My usage pattern is going to be vastly different compared to grandma and grandpa that check their email. The thing is though that I want higher quality content delivered to me instantly, Hulu's 480 is nice and all, but I would love to have it in 720p or 1080p for my large TV. All of this uses up bandwidth/transfer.
As for mobile data, I don't tend to do a lot of streaming of music and the like, so far I haven't had any issues with going over the allotted 2 GB from AT&T, that and when I do want to stream I am near Wifi.
Sadly, I don't think "unlimited" internet is a sustainable model, because generally speaking every bit you send costs the provider money, and the rise of things like Youtube mean that people actually use more bandwidth. However, 250 GB plus a reasonable per-GB charge after that should be reasonable for a very larger percentage of users.
That's skewed to people who don't value a fast internet connection. Those that do have moved on from vanilla DSL to DOCSIS based cable, FIOS, U-verse, and other technologies. I'm not surprised that plain jane DSL is the home of retirees and people whose needs rarely go beyond a facebook/web machine.
Funny thing is that I'm with two providers the conventional "wisdom" here and at others sites like reddit consider to be garbage: comcast and tmobile. Comcast is honest with me and publishes its 250gb cap. I get 13/3mbps for that 250gb. Tmobile gives a 5gb cap on my S2 before throttling, thats 5gb on a fast HSPA+ connection. No games, no BS(well by corporate standards), and I can check my usage easily. I can't imagine having to deal with AT&T. Didn't they just unilateraly make everyone pay extra for text messages a couple months ago? Its horror stories all the way down. Meanwhile, I'm going pretty good with my supposedly "bad" providers reddit and consumerist likes to rant about.
This is also the reason that the sales drones at Best Buy just read the product packaging when you ask them a question about it. Unskilled labor is cheap, and these days, almost all level 1 support is unskilled (think across industries, not just IT; IT still has some great lvl1 support if you look hard enough.)
Given the cost of acquiring a customer they should be bending over backwards to keep existing customers.
> …You may also consider switching to a tiered data plan if speed is more important to you [...] Customers on tiered plans can pay for more data if they need it, and will not see reduced speeds. (from the blog post)
That's why. AT&T has shown that nearly every move they make is for the sole purpose of squeezing out all the money they can from their users.
In this case the problem is that they offered an unlimited plan and then did stick with their offer.
On a side note, I wonder how the cost of supplying customer service to address the complaints of the top 5% compares to the cost of just letting people consume as much data as they like. I would guess even a few minutes of a CS rep's time is more valuable than letting someone download an extra gig of data per month.
Regardless of whether a given user moderated his data usage voluntarily, because he was throttled, or switched plans, the vast majority of the top 5% likely leaves the pool every month. This means that six months after the change was introduced roughly one quarter subscribers will be removed.
Why would AT&T do this? To avoid the negative publicity associated with eliminating a plan so many people valued while maximizing profitability. This was quite cleverly executed: Offer cheaper limited plans to save customers money, which has the effect of offering new customers a more competitive price while existing customers will happily pay the higher price as insurance against potential overage fees. Then, by removing the highest data users, they could maximize revenue from them while continuing to collect the higher fees from the lower data users. Then once unlimited becomes a less attractive offer than the $25 plan, eliminate it to avoid revenue leakage. The strategy might not be optimal but its superior to the simpler alternatives in the short run.
Of course, the reason is works is that the majority of customers are sufficiently credulous to purchase an implicit insurance contract that AT&T never had to honor. Their actions are legally defensible since the customers did receive the uncertainty reduction in the present period but most of them likely knew they wouldn't go over and paid only for the option of maintaining that protection in a future period. That said, communication that is intentionally ambiguous so as to benefit from misunderstanding should constitute an unfair trade practice.
Disclaimer: I have no knowledge of the actual thought process behind these decisions.
I'm so glad I left ATT behind. Sure it's a little slower, and I can't get an iphone or the latest or greatest android phone. But it's one of the best values out there, and I didn't need to sign a freaking lock in contract.
And while the LG Optimus Slider has a smallish screen, it still runs android 2.3. And with a slide-out keyboard, SSH sessions are a lot easier. It's "good enough."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/2011-04-27-...
Of note; Lets say you were in Australia you could take this case straight to the ACCC or the Communications Ombudsman and from experience I would be fairly confident of you getting what you want.
With an unlimited data plan at worse than dial-up speeds, the data service is useless. I'm planning on switching to Verizon when my iPhone 4 AT&T contract is up, but I'm not holding my breath for any better customer service from Verizon. There really is no cell phone company in the US that I want to give my money to.
Given the incredible blowback they'd received from their poor iPhone support, I always felt compelled to tell the people I ended up talking to that they were doing great jobs, and that in spite of what was said in the press about them not having their act together, I found them to be on their game, and that I really appreciated the effort they were making.
Then something changed. Intelligence and responsiveness went off a cliff. On the occasions I did have to call I ended up so deeply infuriated that I'd find myself becoming angry BEFORE having to call again - even months later. It almost seemed that they'd adopted a posture of calculated incompetence, specifically designed discourage people from calling them.
Within a year (and after a series of truly appalling encounters) I'd gone from publicly defending them to hating them with an intensity bordering on incandescent. Were their service any less vital to my life in general, perhaps I'd feel more sanguine. But given the central importance of wireless connectivity, a "service" relationship costing north of $100 per month and delivering nothing by dropped calls and furious anger quickly made it to the top of of my dump-judiciously list.
And if I change it to the 2GB plan and then tether using an unofficial tethering app, they automatically change my plan back to the 4GB tethering plan.
I applaud the comments and the post. Perhaps enough outrage will spark a revolution.
