Beset with dropped calls, delayed messaging, and many other customer complaints, the much-besmirched AT&T appears to have finally found a solution to the congestion issues that have plagued its network: They’re going to throttle the amount of bandwith that users recieve.
AT&T appears to believe that all of their users, or at least the ones with smart phones, are naughty little data hogs. To combat this and improve service for the users that don’t use so much data, AT&T will be implementing usage-based pricing for data. Their goal is to get consumers to “reduce or modify their usage.”
“We need to educate the customer … We’ve got to get them to understand what represents a megabyte of data,” said head of consumer services Ralph de la Vega. “We’re improving all our systems to let consumers get real-time information on their data usage.”
De la Vega went on to say that AT&T had the fastest 3G network in the U.S., and it was greedy smart phone users in Los Angeles and New York that were ruining the fun for everyone. Apparently 3% of smart phone users use 40% of AT&T’s bandwith, with much of it going to audio and video streaming.
Information has not been released on when or how usage-based data pricing would go into effect, but it is said to be “inevitable.”
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