The FTC has filed suit against AT&T over the company's network management practices and policies. At issue is the way AT&T aggressively degraded network performance once its users had passed certain bandwidth thresholds, despite advertising its service as "Unlimited." As an AT&T customer with an unlimited data plan, I can personally confirm that AT&T still throttles its users -- whenever my cellular bandwidth use nears the 5GB limit I receive an automatic warning from AT&T telling me that I'm approaching the point where I'll be automatically throttled.
Interestingly, the FTC complaint(Opens in a new window) actually gives the current levels of throttling devices are subjected to -- 256Kbps for 3G/HSPA+ and 512Kbps for 4G LTE devices. That works out to about 64 kilobytes per second for 4G devices -- enough bandwidth to surf the internet, and probably enough for streaming audio, but you won't do much video streaming on 64KB/sec. Typical unthrottled speed, the FTC notes, is in the 5-12Mbps range, and users on older devices actually suffer more -- at 32KB/s, you're not going to be doing much of anything, except checking your emails.
The FTC's documentation makes it clear that consumers have been anything but pleased with the implementation of these plants, with up to 93% of users dissatisfied with 128Kbps throttling and over 190,000 logged complaints to the FTC since AT&T began choking "Unlimited" data. AT&T's own focus groups showed similar findings, but recommended that the company simply communicate less clearly what customers were actually buying.
For years, AT&T and other providers have argued that throttling was simply a way of guaranteeing that the network was usable by everyone. There are certain times and cases where this might even be true. Any time you have thousands of people crammed into one area using data-hungry devices, there's an argument to be made for reducing everyone's bandwidth to ensure adequate service to everyone.
Unfortunately, as the FTC explains, that's not what AT&T actually did. From the filing:"The speed reductions and service restrictions in effect under Defendant's throttling program are not determined by real-time network congestion at a particular cell tower. Throttled customers are subject to this reduced speed even if they use their smartphone at a time when Defendant's network has ample capacity to carry the customer's data, or the use occurs in an area where the network is not congested ... since October 2011, Defendant has throttled its customers more than 25 million times, affecting more than 3.5 million unique customers."
The FTC goes on to state that AT&T has considered both requiring its customers to switch to tiered data plans and simply disclosing its throttling program with full disclosure at point of sale. AT&T has rejected both ideas.
The FTC's Apex building
Hoisted on its own petard
Given that AT&T throttles none of its tiered customers, no matter how much data they use per cycle, the FTC takes an extremely dim view of the argument that Unlimited customers deserve to be uniquely throttled when said throttling doesn't actually serve any useful purpose. It further notes that the terms and conditions under which mobile usage is throttled are never fully disclosed, that consumers are never made aware of the nature or degree of throttling, and that the customer agreements which AT&T requires do not specifically state any of the data rates that throttled customers will receive.
Read: The FCC’s net neutrality proposal: What does it mean for you, and the internet?Despite these failure to disclose, AT&T does not allow customers who are unhappy with their service to escape paying early termination fees (ETFs), including ETFs for multiple devices under family plans.
The actual heart of the complaint, however, is simple -- AT&T advertised a service as unlimited. It has failed to provide an unlimited service. It has also failed to adequately inform consumers of the nature of the service they are purchasing, failed to justify its need for data throttling, and failed to satisfy the FTC that the throttling serves any useful purpose other than to push high-bandwidth users towards more profitable tiered plans.A return to the good old days? Probably not
As glad as I am to see the FTC going after AT&T for these practices, I don't hold out much hope that it'll make a significant difference in the long term. Most customers that had unlimited data plans have already transitioned away from them, and the FTC notes in its court case that nothing compels AT&T to continue offering "unlimited" (in reality, 5GB) data plans in the first place. In fact, given that customers are throttled to 5GB, one could argue that the joke is on those who continue to buy into the system -- unless you have multiple people on a family plan that bump up against that 5GB limit and would therefore still pay more for data.
Even if AT&T's response was simply to stop offering these plans, however, the FTC's decision to investigate the practice is welcome, even if it should've come years ago. American carriers have gotten away with false advertising and exorbitant wireless pricing for too long.
Now, if the FTC would agree to take on Verizon for its various bad behaviors related to copper wire, we might actually get somewhere.
Now read: FCC begins research into 24GHz for gigabit ultra-dense 5G mobile networksTagged In
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