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Comment by Drakim | Hacker News Reader

> began throttling data speeds in 2011 for its unlimited data plan customers after they used as little as 2 gigabytes of data in a billing period

This is what really gets me. I expected this sort of situation to come about when some jackass used up 1 petabyte of bandwidth on his unlimited plan, but 2 gigabytes?

To me, that's like offering unlimited coffee refills, but stopping customers after the second cup, with some excuse that there has to be some limits to "unlimited".

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Wouldn't it be more like after 2 cups they only get served in half-cup increments? I agree with the sentiment. Unlimited with throttles isn't truly "unlimited", but "unlimited*". That said, the FTC complaint seems to take issue with that AT&T did not "adequately disclose to its customers" this information. And there, I take some issue with this. AT&T did actually explain that. Maybe some consumers didn't understand that because of the lack of an asterisk. I guess this will be interesting to see just how important an asterisk can be.

> Wouldn't it be more like after 2 cups they only get served in half-cup increments?

More like buying "unlimited coffee for a year" and then being limited to one cup per week after the first two.

Maybe the FTC should just crack down on all footnoted disclaimers.

"Access some websites with your AT&T phone while in AT&T service areas." doesn't have the same punch as "Unlimited Internet Everywhere", but at least it is more or less true.

given the degree of throttling, it would be more accurate to analogize that after two cups, they got refills by the teaspoon

I don't believe they did, especially because for grandfathered users, there is no documentation on unlimited plans and there hasn't been for years.

Yeah, you're right that the grandfathered consumers are a special case. It would be like having truly unlimited coffee refills then all of a sudden being told you're getting half-cup intervals.

Aren't they the only case here? AT&T hasn't offered unlimited data plans for quite a while. They basically only had them for the original iPhone introduction, and got rid of them seemingly as soon as they could.

What if I'm the only person who uses data on that cell tower and there is no contention on the line at all?

Throttling when someone is causing problems for other people can be fair, but that's not what's going on. They chose an arbitrary point and applied a capricious punishment.

At the same time they were pushing people to new plans that gave them less for a much higher cost, but AT&Ts costs to provide the service have been dropping.

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