Thread: AT&T Wages Quiet War on Grandfathered Unlimited Users

Originally Posted by JAG72

For those that have received the message did you start getting throttled? If you did what were your speeds like?

Honestly, I don't know.

Like I've mentioned before, I've used TONS of data and have never received anything resembling a warning or anything. I thought I may have been throttled earlier in the month but it turned out my phone didn't work well with the Rogers radio file (installed to allow for switching over to EDGE network to save battery life.) I have made some efforts to reduce my data usage, the main one being that I am no longer streaming SiriusXM for nearly 8 hours a day, 5 days a week on my phone. But this is my past data usage:

1GB, 5GB, 3.4GB, 4.9GB, 5.3GB, 8.6GB, ~6GB (I'm guesstimating because AT&T won't tell me for some reason.)

So I've either fallen off the radar for some reason, or if they are really basing it off the top 5% of the area, I can only imagine what sort of data usage is around me.. Oh and they still haven't detected that I have been using WiFi Tethering, but to be fair I only use that in an absolute emergency.

Originally Posted by yourbeliefs

Like I've mentioned before, I've used TONS of data and have never received anything resembling a warning or anything. I thought I may have been throttled earlier in the month but it turned out my phone didn't work well with the Rogers radio file (installed to allow for switching over to EDGE network to save battery life.) I have made some efforts to reduce my data usage, the main one being that I am no longer streaming SiriusXM for nearly 8 hours a day, 5 days a week on my phone. But this is my past data usage:

1GB, 5GB, 3.4GB, 4.9GB, 5.3GB, 8.6GB, ~6GB (I'm guesstimating because AT&T won't tell me for some reason.)

So I've either fallen off the radar for some reason, or if they are really basing it off the top 5% of the area, I can only imagine what sort of data usage is around me.. Oh and they still haven't detected that I have been using WiFi Tethering, but to be fair I only use that in an absolute emergency.

They will find you eventually. I believe they are targeting certain markets right now. They removed my "Unlimited" plan and put me on a DataPro plan. They caught me tethering and so I really couldn't argue with the move, since I was, technically, violating their TOS.

I received the "Top 5%" message last month the same day I hit 2GB. In the past, I have used almost 10GB and was never warned. I was also told they probably wouldn't mess with me since I'm on a large corporate account, but that proved to not be the case.

I have an LTE phone, so I can burn through some data pretty quickly.

Something tells me that once LTE comes into my market that things will become more stringent. Reading all these reports of throttling, one of the common themes appears to be customers in larger markets, while mine is rather small (relatively speaking.)

As far as the punishing for tethering goes, don't they give you some sort of warning first, or do they just say "Okay, now you've lost your unlimited plan" and switch you? That sounds a little screwed up that they can just switch your plan without your permission. I mean I can understand if they sent me a warning and I continued to do it, but just for one time?

i got the text msg at 2.6 gb. i know it is prob not a better service but i am strongly considering virgin mobile 45.00 plan with their android motorola triumph. a lot of people here have virgin data and it works well over the sprint network.

Originally Posted by StevenD

They caught me tethering and so I really couldn't argue with the move, since I was, technically, violating their TOS.

I've only experimented with tethering just to see if i could. But now that I am LTE I'm thinking I might use it on weekends in L.A. because it's faster than the Hotel Wifi(which sometimes doesn't work at all). The question is how can someone be caught tethering?

Over on DSL reports there seems to be indications that it depends where you are in the country as to where AT&T throttles you. Some areas do not seem to see any limit, other areas get hit at 2GB, 3GB, 5GB, 10GB, etc. So, it could be that they have been cranking down the cap in areas that are overloaded.

Originally Posted by steve4810

I've only experimented with tethering just to see if i could. But now that I am LTE I'm thinking I might use it on weekends in L.A. because it's faster than the Hotel Wifi(which sometimes doesn't work at all). The question is how can someone be caught tethering?

They say that the phone requests a second IP address for tethering and that is how they detect it.

Originally Posted by mike123abc

They say that the phone requests a second IP address for tethering and that is how they detect it.

They also can tell which browser you are using when querying a web page. Obviously, if you are on an iPhone, they expect yo to use Safari mobile. If they see you are using IE or Firefox, then you certainly arent using the phones browser.