Bait and Switch

If you have an AT&T smartphone you are probably aware that the company has been "throttling" data usage for its "heaviest users" on the unlimited accounts. It has now publicly announced that this means if you use more than 3 Gb of data per month, it will automatically slow your phone down to snail speed. Coincidentally, this also happens to be the same limit as AT&T's new tiered plan for smartphone data. I think DatabaseDoctor has it just about right in his interpretation of AT&T-speak:

"Translation of AT&T-speak: We love the fact that we got you all to buy iPhones and sign up for unlimited data plans, thus alleviating some of our insanity in giving Apple so much to subsidize the phones. Now that you are actually USING those phones for data consumption, we realize that we were idiots to allow for an unlimited plan. We can't kick you off of unlimited plans without more lawsuits, so we'll just arbitrarily slow you down to a crawl when we feel we can get away with it. BTW, now that we lost some legal suit to someone who feels like unlimited should be unlimited (the nerve, the gaul, the fool!), we'll just cap you off at the same limit our largest plan institutes and promise you a dribble of bandwidth from that point on. Nanananah! DatabaseDoctor"

I suspect that AT&T goes to the same school for crappy customer service as the airlines and the big banks. I also think that it is a massive breach of contract that will result in a class action lawsuit for billions that will make some law firm reach. Some customers have also started to file their own actions in small claims court and have won. Good for them! It's a heckuva way to run a railroad - or in this case a phone company.