“That’s so twenty-seven seconds ago,” says the annoying football fan in that annoying AT&T commercial touting the “blazing fast speed” of their 4G LTE phones. The problem with all that bragging is that some users may be best served by limiting their surfing to bland, text-only web pages like this one.
AT&T customers whom the telecommunications giant considers “heavy” data users are having their web browsing speeds reduced by as much as 99 percent. Some customers are having their speeds reduced after using what they consider a reasonable amount of bandwidth, especially considering that these customers have the so-called “unlimited” plan.
I’m sure there’s enough legalese sprinkled somewhere in the contract for AT&T’s “unlimited” users that allows the company to cut their speeds under certain circumstances. Big companies like AT&T are always careful to leave plenty of loopholes for themselves.
The problem seems to be that AT&T has oversold their service in some areas and have saturated their network with too many customers checking the latest sports scores or watching Lady Gaga videos on YouTube.
I just love it when some company rolls out a new service that their so anxious to brag about only to have it fall flat on its face for some of its users. Their TV commercials promoting their 4G LTE service are running constantly here in my area. I just hope they’re not running them in areas where their network is straining to keep pace with the users.
There’s no doubt that competition among cell phone carriers is pretty fierce, but for AT&T to be running these stupid commercials with the presumed intent of convincing the public that theirs is the fastest wireless network while they are throttling some users of their “unlimited” plan is just ridiculous.
Other companies like Verizon are reportedly using a smarter version of throttling by cutting data speeds only temporarily while users are in a congested area and cutting speeds back as little as possible.
While AT&T seems to keep customers in the dark about how much data usage is too much, other companies like T-Mobile make their policy pretty clear by stating that users can be throttled once they surpass the 5 gigabyte-per-month mark. I guess it puts AT&T in a rather tough spot if they announce a cap on their “unlimited” plans. Not that I would be surprised if they did!
Perhaps AT&T should simply stop offering “unlimited” plans in areas that are not built out sufficiently to handle the demand. This certainly is not the first time a company has spent millions of dollars advertising a product or service that wasn’t quite ready for prime time and I’m sure it won’t be the last.
I guess neither of these guys from the commercial have had their phones throttled and I’m willing to bet some of their customers who have would love a chance to go on TV and talk about how wonderful their AT&T phones are working for them.
For the record, I’m not an AT&T customer and I don’t even have a smart phone. I’ve got a plain-old cell phone that I use only when I leave the house. I guess I just have a tendency to get a bit annoyed when I see bold claims being made by companies who don’t seem able to hold up their end of the deal while they continue to bombard the public with annoying commercials that show up on my TV way too often.
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