AT&T may start throttling data speeds in October

By on Jul 28, 2011 at 2:45 PM
mobile July 28, 2011

AT&T will begin to throttle data speeds during the first week of October, 9to5 Mac reported on Thursday. The carrier could move to throttle the data speeds of its biggest data users in an effort to ensure network stability for its first LTE devices, which are expected to launch later this year. It remains unclear how low AT&T will knock the throughput down to, but 9to5 Mac says Virgin currently forces data hogs down to 256Kbps until the next billing cycle after they use more than 2.5GB. T-Mobile also throttles its data speeds after users go over their monthly 5GB “unlimited” cap. The move should actually be beneficial for most AT&T customers looking for stable performance and will only affect those who use much more data than the average customer according to the report.

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  • Keith

    When revenues are not reinvested in Network this is what it comes to for TMobile & especially AT&T. I can see why Tiered Data is needed as those that want more should pay more, especially when they (heavy data users)only make up about 5% of the overall data customer base and network integrity needs to maintained for the majority of users. But, Throttling consumer & business user consumption is downright deplorable!!  It’s an excuse to delay network improvements and it stifles business prosperity and innovation. TSk TSk to the AT&TMobile combination

    • TooMuchNoise

       To add LTE, you have to take away bandwidth/frequency spectrum/capacity from the the HSPA network. That means that you will have less of that for your existing HSPA customers. But your few LTE customers will have a lot and probably more than they can use until more customers switch to LTE capable phones. This is the primary reason why AT&T wants T-Mobile. They can combine their frequency spectrum to better add LTE.

      • Anonymous

        Not necessarily.  LTE is supposed to be deployed in the 700MHz band and AT&T has plenty of bandwidth there.  There shouldn’t be a need to take bandwidth away at this time considering the single band for LTE to be used.

  • Anonymous

    And this is surprising why? Verizon does it and t mobile does it. 

  • CMC

    How much greedier do these assholes have to be?  Its like they just really do not want people to use their network at all.  People pay lots of money to use these services which are less than 100% reliable.  Introduce tiered speeds such as a 1mb service, 2mb service, etc.  Make it like a cable or dsl service.  Entry level could be 512K.  THAT makes great sense.  This total consumption (for data they did not produce) just makes no sense at all.  

  • http://twitter.com/neajon Jon Templeton

    I would much rather have unlimited usage that is throttled after a set limit, than to have to pay overage fees.  Sadly, nothing in this report mentions unlimited usage, so would I be paying overage fees for throttled bandwidth?

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