Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
AT&T Mobility rattled some cages late last week when it announced it would begin reducing data speeds for some customers currently on unlimited data plans. The threshold before getting “reduced” is when data usage puts a consumer among the top 5% of data users.
However there is some vaguery (it’s a word now) as to where the threshold is for being in that elite 5%, with AT&T Mobility only noting that “you have to use an extraordinary of data in a single billing period.” I know AT&T Mobility needs to leave some wiggle room here, but my guess is that for consumers that are say bouncing between say 5% and 6% of top data users, some concrete-ness would be appreciated.
This is indeed a confounding issue where no one is going to come out the winner. Carriers are struggling to balance network capacity and quality with their need to offer the word “unlimited” in their marketing efforts. And consumers seem to be freaking out because they see reducing data speeds as a limit to their “unlimited-ness.”
Read the rest of this column at RCR Unplugged.
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