AT&T is as mad as hell and it’s not going to take it anymore! The Hill reports that AT&T this week hit back at the Federal Communications Commission’s plan to fine the carrier $100 million for deceiving consumers when it throttled their “unlimited” data plans.
RELATED: T-Mobile will slow down your ‘unlimited’ LTE data in some circumstances – here are the details
“The Commission’s findings that consumers and competition were harmed are devoid of factual support and wholly implausible,” AT&T wrote in a filing with the FCC. “Its ‘moderate’ forfeiture penalty of $100 million is plucked out of thin air, and the injunctive sanctions it proposes are beyond the Commission’s authority.”
AT&T may deny that its network management practices harmed consumers but that still hasn’t stopped the carrier from changing its approach to handing unlimited data customers in a way that isn’t nearly as punitive.
AT&T last month changed its policy of throttling customers with “unlimited” data plans once they hit certain monthly consumption thresholds. Now AT&T says that “customers on a 3G or 4G smartphone or on a 4G LTE smartphone with an unlimited data plan who have exceeded 3 gigabytes (3G/4G) or 5 gigabytes (4G LTE) of data in a billing period may experience reduced speeds when using data services at times and in areas that are experiencing network congestion.”
This is different from before because AT&T used to claim the right to throttle “unlimited” LTE data once users exceeded certainly limits for the duration of billing cycles. Now it seems that once your connection moves off a congested site or once the site you’re on is no longer congested, you’ll be returned to your normal LTE data speeds.
