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:
The running spat between AT&T Mobility and its subscribers over what is and is not considered “unlimited” made up some significant ground this week as lawsuits have been won and taunts thrown.
Between an online petition and a recently successful court case, there seems to be some momentum against AT&T Mobility’s limiting “unlimited” data plans. The carrier in turn seemed to cave a bit this week when it agreed to set a definite limit of 3 gigabytes of data transmission per billing cycle before throttling the network speeds of customers with unlimited data plans.
For me this is all funny for the obvious reason that unlimited and 3 GB cap do not seem to be the same thing. I am no math wiz, but I am guessing to most that is also the case.
However in AT&T Mobility’s defense, the carrier does not seem to at any point be “limiting” the amount of data a person can download, only the speed at which that download is happening. This places all of this word play into an interesting game of definition. AT&T Mobility is still allowing unlimited downloading to customers with unlimited plans, but just altering the speed at which this connectivity is happening.
(This sort of takes me back to the original iPhone days when the device could only access the carriers EDGE network, or at least access it when it was not clogged.)
Is there anywhere in AT&T Mobility’s terms and conditions that promises certain network speeds when a customer signs up for service? Sure there are numbers thrown around in advertisements that note how fast a carrier’s network is, but when a customer signs up for service are those the promised speeds a customers should expect to have at all moments of the day, or is that an assumption a customer makes influenced by what they see in the advertisements?
I would say that on a number of occasions my own mobile data connection fails to live up the promised or expected speeds of “4G” or 3G connectivity I suspect I have. And when I say on occasion, I mean this happens every time I use mobile data through my device. Some pages or content just don’t upload or download as fast as I would suspect they should, but I rarely think that my carrier is “throttling” my speeds. I just figure that seeing how we are dealing with the instability of wireless technologies, I am just being impacted by cosmic forces greater than myself.
Reading the complaints from some of those customers it would appear that they are unable to conduct most of their life without having a constant, high-speed wireless data connection, which is something that the wireless industry has for years tried to promote. However, in reality we know that carrier’s really can’t support this sort of action and really just want people to pay a fixed rate per month for “unlimited” data services and really not use that service very much.
(Sort of interesting as well that while wireless carriers have aggressively taken to social media outlets for more direct interaction with its customers from a marketing standpoint, those customers are using the same outlets to aggressively take out any form of frustration they have with their carriers, in near real time. Awesome.)
That is not to say that these people don’t have a legitimate beef. I would agree that carriers have done a wonderful job in producing confusing messaging through their advertisements, though I also find this to be the case with most advertisements.
Carriers have walked this fine line in advertisement before, and have also had their hand slapped by the hilariously named National Advertising Division of the Better Business Bureau. (Go ahead and take a few minutes to compose yourself. I’ll wait.)
Some AT&T Mobility competitors have been a little bit more upfront on the network throttling issues, though even those addendums are typically buried behind marketing speak, spokeswomen in pink dresses and silly monkeys.
With some 17 million AT&T Mobility customers reportedly on unlimited data plans, and data usage not expected to slow any time soon, I will guess that this issue will continue to boil. The end result of this could be that AT&T Mobility pro-actively removes these customers from its network or from their unlimited data plans, which will be a public relations nightmare, or somehow manages to live with these customers having unlimited data access.
The latter would appear to be the better solution and one that could be facilitated by the introduction of the carrier’s LTE network, which as everyone says is more efficient at handling data traffic. I will guess that most of the unlimited data customers on AT&T Mobility’s network are iPhone users and once Apple rolls out an LTE-compatible version of that device, AT&T Mobility could do itself a favor and help these unlimited customers move to that network as quickly as possible. The carrier has said it would allow LTE usage of up to 5 GB per billing cycle before throttling, so that might be just enough headroom to allow both sides to get along.
But, for those of us observing this war or words, let’s hope not.
OK, enough of that.
Thanks for checking out this week’s Worst of the Week column. And now for some extras:
–I guess at some point I should comment on what happened this week at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, but so far can’t seem to remember much. Unlike past events, there did not seem to be really any huge news from the show, and instead there was just a number of smaller “topics” that seemed to permeate most conversations.
Sure, Nokia made some noise with its 41-megapixel camera phone running the Symbian operating system. What there was not a more archaic OS available?
I guess one topic that was central to most of my network-centric conversations was that since people don’t seem to be using any less wireless data, carriers will need to enhance their networks with smaller cell technology to handle the demand. Now, I am still processing all of the information, but from what I can remember at some point we will all be carrying around network cells on our person, with some of us having to work overtime carrying multiple cells.
Sounds like a wonderful future.
–Not that I approve, but I don’t disapprove either.
I welcome your comments. Please send me an email at dmeyer@rcrwireless.com.
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