The FTC is suing AT&T for throttling its unlimited data customers
Federal officials on Tuesday sued AT&T, the nation’s second-largest cellular carrier, for allegedly deceiving millions of customers by selling them “unlimited” data plans that the company later aggressively controlled by slowing Internet speeds when customers surfed the Web too much.
The Federal Trade Commission said the practice, called “throttling” and 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.
It gets better. AT&T's response:
The FTC's allegations are "baseless" and an intrusion into the normal network management practiced by all telecommunications providers. The company also noted that it had alerted customers about the throttling, by sending e-mails or texts notifying customers that they had crossed pre-set limits and would experience slower data speeds for the rest of the billing period.
In other words, "everyone is doing it." And I'm not sure how alerting customers about the throttling justifies anything, when it wasn't supposed to happen in the first place.
