The Cell Phone Junkie

The New York Times ran a piece this week citing the same report we discussed last week about AT&T throttling data users at usage as low as 2GB. The Times spoke with Mark Siegel, a spokesperson for AT&T, who said that as of last summer, the top 5% of AT&T customers were indeed typically using 2GB each month. Siegel though said that even if you exceed this amount, it doesn’t absolutely mean you’ll be throttled.  According to the piece:

AT&T will only reduce speeds for the top 5 percent of users in areas where network capacity or spectrum is insufficient, he said. In other words, throttling is done on a case-by-case basis, not based on a hard number, according to AT&T’s claims.

“There’s a very good chance you wouldn’t be slowed,” Mr. Siegel said. He added that in the last month, less than 1 percent of AT&T smartphone customers were affected by the policy.

But less than 1% could mean up to 1%. And per the latest quarterly earnings, 1% of smartphone customers would be 1% of 56.8% of 69.3 million postpaid subscribers – or up to 393,624. While the number of people reporting the throttling on the internet is fewer than nearly 400,000, there are more reports over the last month than we’ve seen up until this point.

Source: New York Times