"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.