They made way more money by misleading customers and will continue to do so with penalties that small.

"Available when Stream Saver is turned off. Learn more at att.com/streamsaver. After 15 GB hotspot speed limited to maximum of 128Kbps. Customers may temporarily experience slower speeds during busy times. On AT&T Unlimited & More Premium, if you exceed 22 GB of data on a line in one billing cycle, your speed may be slowed until the end of that billing cycle when the network is congested. All AT&T Unlimited Starter and AT&T Unlimited Extra customers have a limit of 1.5 Mbps (SD quality) when video streaming, and may experience temporarily reduced speeds when the network is congested."

The FTC didn't even make them stop using the term "Unlimited".

Waiting for a single 3MB photo to show up (or send) would take 4 minutes.

Right now my download speed is 10.62Mbps and upload speed is 13.38Mpbs. That is some heavy throttling indeed.

It reminds me of a time I saw an Olive Garden food truck offering unlimited soup, salad and breadsticks.

Do the people in line understand conservation of mass? What must be happening inside that truck to support “unlimited” food.

I think in this case, the offer is well understood. "Unlimited" means as much as you can consume during one seating, without limit. If you can eat 5 orders of pasta by yourself, they should serve you 5 orders, they shouldn't serve 3, then make you wait 30 minutes between orders after that. If you only get 2 orders of pasta before they run out, then you should expect a refund since that's not "unlimited". No one thinks that the single food truck can feed the entire world, but I do expect it to feed me as much as I can eat.

When a cellular company advertises "unlimited data", that's similarly understood to mean as much data as you can consume in one billing period, without limit or throttling. It doesn't mean that I should be able to run my server farm over it and transfer petabytes of data every month, but if I'm a heavy Netflix user and want to transfer 100GB or more of data, I should be able to, if you can't support that use, then don't sell an "unlimited" plan.

The added humor in the food truck case is that you can visually see both the extent of the physical supply and the queue of consumers rendering that physical supply incapable of supporting the “unlimited” offer all in one single field of view, leaving you to surmise the only possibility has to do with outrageous food engineering to reduce resource usage and leading to questionable end product (thus undermining the “unlimited” offer’s intended effect to draw customers).

Consumers should stop accepting that as the status quo.

My ISP (Sonic.net) offers "unlimited internet", and they deliver, they have no bandwidth or download caps at all.

https://www.sonic.com/transparency#ii-b

Throttling: Sonic does not engage in any practice that degrades or impairs access to lawful internet traffic based on content, application, service, user, or use of a non-harmful device.

And then a sizable fine over that, let’s say an additional 100%

These companies need to feel pain for unethical practices. Not a slap on the wrist.

Next where does that money for the fine go? It shouldn’t just disappear into the ether.

Using the money from the fine perhaps a third party committee should be formed that regularly audits this known exploitive behavior. Maybe 50M could get that off of the ground and moving.

That could be 36 months of auditing from a third party.

All of this of course isn’t how things work. It’s just what I think is ideal.

I am failing to see how these numbers add up. What is the explicit formula you are using?

The 24 months explains it. I figured a pay period was a month because I think of it as how often I have to pay.

Make it hurt.

> “None of these allegations were ever proved in court. We were fully prepared to defend ourselves, but decided settling was in the best interests of consumers,” said Jim Greer, a spokesman for AT&T.

* (2014) Verizon settles an overbilling case for $64MM, of which only $36MM went to payouts. [0]

* (2015) Verizon settles a robocalling class action for only $4MM. [1]

* (2009) Sprint settles an ETF class action for only $17.5MM [2]

* (2015) Sprint pays only $131MM to settle a lawsuit about their bungled $36 BILLION merger with Nextel [3]

This has far less to do with "this administration" and far more to do with how business is run in America. I'm not saying it's right, not at all, but I do want to point out that buying into this partisan nonsense distracts us (voters) from actually changing the system meaningfully (where "meaningful" is creating an environment where this doesn't happen).

[0] https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/closed-settl...

[1] And more... https://moneyinc.com/10-verizon-lawsuits-you-should-know-abo...

[2] https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/sprint-settling-clas...

[3] https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/sprint-pays-131m-to-...

Go to an AT&T store and purchase a plan with a phone using installments. Then, wait a day, and try to return it at a different AT&T store.

You will go through the absolutely worst customer experience imaginable; so bad, in fact, it'll make you laugh out loud. Their printers won't work, they'll be too slow, the systems will go down, the batteries will die in their payment devices. At least that's what I experienced on every one of the three times they asked me to come back to the store to return the phone(because each time their systems simply were unable to do it).

So it's no surprise to me that they got caught lying to their customers.

I would actually be happy with true unlimited 144kbps. It’s usable. I can run RDP over that with reasonable refresh rate.

It is also not possible as a customer to voluntarily turn off high speed when you don’t need it.

From experience, once my connection gets limited to 2G, my speed is closer to 9600bps, which is absolutely unusable for interactive Internet use.

I have two phones. One has Visible from Verizon with allegedly unlimited but relatively slow data at 2-10mbit with unlimited tethering. The second is my T-mobile phone with an allegedly unlimited but in reality limited to 50GB much faster data with a 7GB hotspot.

I use my Tmobile data when I have to and the rest of the time that phone is tethered to my Visible phone. Visible is $40/mo, T-mobile is $80 and I may downgrade it to a limited plan with zero-rated video.

FWIW, the film Law Abiding Citizen examines a similar topic: plea bargains in criminal cases against individuals. For me, it was a great thought-experiment about how one's anger about plea-bargaining could play out. But just a warning, it has some pretty horrific scenes that you might regret watching.

Like, I know the sovereign citizen stuff is all nonsense, but this is kind of their point. They're trying to get away with the same things corporations get away with on the regular.

But that shield is not all-encompassing. The corporate veil can be pierced, and one of the things that can bring that result is lawbreaking on the part of a corporation.

This is a complex topic. A reasonable explanation can be found here: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2014/03/27/the-three-justifi...

Stay classy Jim.

The international ones are the most concerned about a company’s domestic relationship with its government because the power imbalance is hard to comprehend and trust

AT&T doesn’t store the contents of your data usage; The NSA might, though...

But seriously, an unlimited data plan should be exactly that: unlimited. No throttling. If you’re gonna include throttling over a certain limit: say that; Don’t hide it in the fine print that no one but lawyers read. That’s deceptive advertising, and is illegal. The FTC should go after them for that.

I seem to recall that something similar as this case happened in Sweden (10+ years ago?), where a operator was forced to not claim "unlimited data" unless it truly is unlimited and without throttling, but I can't find any references to this right now...

Does it really matter if they change their branding to be unmetered rather than unlimited?

No, not honestly.

There is a natural "hard cap", though. If you're paying for a certain speed, then the natural limit would be however much data you can pump at that speed over a set period of time.

I think it would be fair to call that "unlimited", in the sense that the service provider would not be imposing an artificial lower limit from what physics allows.

If a service provider isn't allowing that, then it's hard to see how they can characterize a service as "unlimited" without it being an outright lie.

Most people aren’t upset about network management throttling, but about the deceptive advertising that says you get unlimited, but in fine print: “limited to EDGE speeds (128Kb/s) after 2 GB”

The problem is that mobile operators are incredibly underprovisioned. If your plan offers 1 GB of LTE data, at 35 Mbps, you can burn through a monthly allocation in 3.8 minutes. That's an average utilization of 0.0087%, or an underprovisioning by a factor of 11,500.

They sell it as if you're buying 35 Mbps access to the network all month long, when really, you can't use that for more than a few hours even on 'unlimited' plans.

I don't expect 1:1 access so that everyone can use their full bandwidth full time; I don't want to pay hundreds of dollars a month for that. But I'd pay a tenth of that for 1:10 underprovisioned access, and I'm sure that plenty would pay a few cents for the current 1:10,000 underprovisioned service...

Not good enough?

In my view, the entire problem is that they want so badly to say "unlimited" while at the same time not allowing actual unlimited use.

The problem could be easily resolved at no cost -- all the companies have to do is stop using the word "unlimited".

Unlimited means no limits to speed, and no limits to quantity. If there is any type of artificial limit, then the thing ceases to be "unlimited". That is just straight up common sense, based on dictionary definitions.

But somewhere along the way (or perhaps as an unfortunate consequence of not seeing far enough ahead to always throttle unlimited plans) the definition in consumer minds also seemed to include no speed limits either.

If the same buffet made you wait 2 hours between plates, then it's no longer realistically an all-you-can-eat buffet.

If the restaurant is crowded, you’re going to have to both wait longer to get through the line and the kitchen won’t be able to cook enough to satisfy all of the customers.

There is also a known limit of how much data can be transmitted over a certain frequency and only certain frequencies are amenable to data.

For instance, T-mobile was infamous for not working well in buildings because the spectrum they were using couldn’t travel through buildings.

Yes, everyone understood that unlimited meant "not limited". And then telecoms started trying to change that definition to mean "limited".

If AT&T didn't throttle, I suppose "unlimited" would still be a lie because there is still a limit to how fast your phone will download it. If you remove that it's still a lie because there's a limit to medium bandwidth, and so on.

All of these things are artificial! Should AT&T upgrade all users to phones with the latest modems because otherwise they are "artificially limiting" their experience? The impact on AT&T would be the same as stopping traffic shaping: spending more per user.

I disagree. In my view, "unlimited" means that the service provider will not introduce artificial limits. Of course there are natural limits (the speed of the devices involved, network congestion and signal quality, etc.). None of those are the service provider imposing an artificial limit, though.

Or wait a minute...

Who is "they"? If it's the users, simple. Either on your harddisk or RAM (temporary).

It is deceitful, regardless.