FTC sues ATT over internet useage

Just wow. Thanks for sharing this.

 

Good that they are finally being sued over it. I was shocked it didnt happen years ago.

When ATT had exclusive iPhone rights, they initially offered unlimited data plans. When the droves came over and signed up in order to have the iphone ATT's network started getting congested. They wouldnt admit that they over sold their bandwidth.

Often many towers were only fed by T1's.
T1 = 1.5 mbit. Or roughly 180 kb/s maxed out.
Get 1000 iphone customers in the area and you had a network jam with often no net access at all. So they began throttling speed in order to save network bandwidth.

They all do it. Verizon and Sprint too. Though I read somewhere that Verizon stopped throttling after towers were upgraded with fiber backbone and 4GLTE became available. But they were all throttling when it was just 3g/4g.

Its very common practice. Most residential networks are throttling you and you dont even know it. Its a fact that Time Warner, Comcrap, Cox,.. everyone. They use whats called statistical multiplexing. Basically a series of routers at a NOC (Netowork operations center) tries to evenly distribute bandwidth through each node (Your neighborhood). And we all know how that works out during peek usage hours.

I was so happy when Fios came into my neighborhood. I couldnt sign up fast enough.

Hurst

 

All the while your $156.00 bill is in the mail and they have no problem billing you for late fees and overage fees. Caveat emptor

 

Ive been an AT&T subscriber since 1994. Can't say I'm upset over this.

 

I've been a subscriber since before the iPhone came out and ever since then. I subscribed to their DSL service and watched their prices go up every year without notice (though I'm sure there's some small sentence buried deep in some long legal notice somewhere) while their speed or the box they originally gave me back in 2006 never changed.

This comes as no surprise and I will happily cash whatever check they send. Heck, it's all from the petty cash envelope, anyway.

 

I live in a sparsely populated, very rural area that will never see FIOS. I recently upgraded from my AT&T DSL to Comcast Internet and have been happy with the significant speed increase from 6 Mbps to 37 Mbps. Even my home network gets a pretty steady 32 Mbps. It also costs less...for a year.

 

In your type of situation in a sparse area you should have good internet. Its still a shared node,.. but you wont have the same problems like I had in a place that saw an influx of 250k people a year from 2003 to 2007 permanently move to my area.

Back in 99 when I first bought my place the only broadband internet option was Caise SDSL or ADSL from Bell Atlantic. And the speeds werent that great. 768k/768k SDSL or 768/256k ADSL.

When Time Warner finally launched their Road Runner internet service in my neighborhood in 2001, they started us with 1 mbit down and 25kb/s up. We were happy with it as it was better then what we had and worlds better then dial up.

Brighthouse bought out TimeWarner in my area. They increased speeds while upping the price points for each tier. Seemed each time we upgraded, we would often get outages or severe lag during peak usage hours. I resorted to hacking the modem and modifying the communication it has with Brighthouse. I had a full 10mbit both ways. But had to be careful how I used it or risk getting caught. They came out with a new modem that I never mastered how to hack completely. They upped the bandwidth to 40mbit down and 5mbit up. With it came more lag and more periods of no service. 2 yrs later Fios rolled in. I had heard it was the cats meow. Signed up and have been very happy ever since.

Given time,.. I think more areas will have fiber to the home. Fios isnt the only one doing Fiber. But like Fios,.. its in select areas only. I mean look at what we had 10,.. even 15 yrs ago. I remember in Md all I could get was 33.6 dial up. No broadband at all. My brother lived in an area with ADSL,.. I was so jealous.

I think anything over 10mbit is excellent internet speed. Unless your moving large files or have multiple people on your home network, most people really dont need more than 10mbit.

Hurst

 

I still have a Pavlovian response when I hear those old modem connection noises...