AT&T: Using more than 2GB/month on your phone = abusing service

[OILFIELDTRASH]

Just curious what kind of job you have where you can watch Netflix all day at work....

A f@ck off Job. lol
I watch oilfield related equipment. If it breaks I fix it. Monitor pressure etc.. Supervisor calls twice a day. Probably an hour of work total in a day. Lots of netflix, trolling anandtech forums, talking on the phone, surfing the net.

 

[Gothgar]

I used to use a lot of data, now I am down in the single digit G's

 

[sdifox]

part of the problem is iphone's bandwidth inefficiency.

 

[alent1234]

bandwidth or throughput?

bandwidth

every tower even if it's in the middle of no where needs a connection to the network so even if the data is inside AT&T's network it has to get to a tower in the middle of no where. and add the fact that towers can only serve something like 50 people at once

if someone is streaming netflix the tower is broadcasting it to everyone's phone and their device has to "ignore" it so in effect you lower everyone's bandwidth like the old layer 1 hubs

at least that's the way i understand how it works

 

[airdata]

A f@ck off Job. lol
I watch oilfield related equipment. If it breaks I fix it. Monitor pressure etc.. Supervisor calls twice a day. Probably an hour of work total in a day. Lots of netflix, trolling anandtech forums, talking on the phone, surfing the net.

I commend you, sir.

 

[Anubis]

wtf can anyone possibly be doing on a phone that takes up 2-6 GB or more a month?

I don't get it.

Stream music over 3g/4g for 6 hours a day 5 days a week, Slacker, Pandora, whatever, you will be between 3.5 and 5 GB a month from only the music streaming,

that does not include downloading aps, using GPS nav, web browsing or anything else that happens to use data

not sure why you dont get it its pretty fing easy to figure out


hell simply syncing my Gmusic ap to my account used almost 400 megs of data. and that was just the initial setup. NO DOWNLOADING/CACHEing of songs

and before some moron says "use wifi" some of us cant as its not available anywhere but our own house

 

[darkewaffle]

For so many people streaming everything, you'd think there'd be less bitching when phones come out without much onboard storage lol.

 

[Anubis]

For so many people streaming everything, you'd think there'd be less bitching when phones come out without much onboard storage lol.

to stop me from streaming a phone would have to have a 250 GB drive in it to hold all my music

 

[AznAnarchy99]

For so many people streaming everything, you'd think there'd be less bitching when phones come out without much onboard storage lol.

I'd be streaming less if I didn't didn't fill up my 32 inboard already. I have a 32 sdcard collecting dust cause the nexus decided not to include a slot

 

[Ichinisan]

A f@ck off Job. lol
I watch oilfield related equipment. If it breaks I fix it. Monitor pressure etc.. Supervisor calls twice a day. Probably an hour of work total in a day. Lots of netflix, trolling anandtech forums, talking on the phone, surfing the net.

Where can I sign up?

 

[bearxor]

part of the problem is iphone's bandwidth inefficiency.

Link? My own searches have brought up articles talking about how band efficient the iPhone is.

 

[sdifox]

Link? My own searches have brought up articles talking about how band efficient the iPhone is.

I am probably remembering the at&t phantom data use issue.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2...vercharging-smartphone-users-for-data-use.ars

http://www.nojitter.com/post/229700155

 

[CZroe]

None of that changes the fact that, when you signed up for service in 2008, there was no choice but the unlimited $30/mo plan. Again, the reason you signed up for it wasn't because you intended to use it, it was because you didn't have a choice. You wanted a iPhone on AT&T, you were getting the $30/mo unlimited data plan.

Just because you had ideas about what you were going to do with it doesn't matter.

Not true at all. I could have easily gone with another phone or carrier. My choice was PURELY based on my intended use.

 

[Fritzo]

Translation: We don't have the money to expand our network, so we have to make you think that 2GB is excessive use.

 

[rasczak]

those of you who go over your 2gb limit, do you not have wireless access at home or work?

 

[Phoenix86]

those of you who go over your 2gb limit, do you not have wireless access at home or work?

I don't think people are looking for solutions, they are wanting to know why 2gb is excessive or how the hell it's the top 5%.

If AT&T wants to push this, they are going to have to show some proof. What's to prevent them from calling the top 30% the top 5%?

 

[Anubis]

those of you who go over your 2gb limit, do you not have wireless access at home or work?

i have wireless access at work, however all the music streaming sites are blacklisted, so you cant connect to them

 

[airdata]

those of you who go over your 2gb limit, do you not have wireless access at home or work?

That's not the issue.

The issue is the ones of us with the UNLIMITED DATA plan. therefore we shouldn't be worrying about being connected to wifi before using our phone... we're paying $30 a month for a service.

If I was going to worry about hooking up to wifi I'd get an ipod touch and screw paying $30 a month for data.

That's really what it boils down to. They're wanting you to use wifi all the time and still pay them for data services that they're not wanting to provide.

 

[Gunslinger08]

Something's gotta give here. Cell phone companies can't keep pushing "the fastest [insert number]G" service while maintaining the same limits and prices. Especially not with the way that computing is moving to mostly mobile devices that are used a lot outside of the home (where most people have wifi).

This is all from my (limited) understanding, so I could be wrong. I'm going to assume that the companies aren't making a huge profit off of data usage. It looks like AT&T's margin is around 3-4%, from the numbers I could find. That's not a huge profit, so they don't have a ton of money to spend on infrastructure. ~$4 billion a year doesn't build you as many towers as you'd think, and towers are the limiting factor. I don't believe that they really care about how much "data" you use - wired bandwidth from a tower shouldn't be that expensive. They care about how long you're taking up the very limited number of channels on a tower. So basically they're saying 200MB is x minutes of data channels at typical speed. We're assuming that they can't afford to build many more towers to support increased (data minute) demand, so they need to either:
- Increase MB/GB limits as typical speed increases
- Decrease price as typical speed increases

I don't see prices going down, especially with such a small margin already. So I think that ultimately faster technologies should result in increased limits. However, it's going to take a while for:
1. The available channels to match the typical usage, given current growth rate.
2. Market pressure to force limits up.

What this means in the short term is that caps are here to stay and that prices may actually go up (for the same or slightly larger limits) while they finance tower growth. In the long run, limits will go up when the infrastructure can handle it and other competitors force it.

 

[CZroe]

That's not the issue.

The issue is the ones of us with the UNLIMITED DATA plan. therefore we shouldn't be worrying about being connected to wifi before using our phone... we're paying $30 a month for a service.

If I was going to worry about hooking up to wifi I'd get an ipod touch and screw paying $30 a month for data.

That's really what it boils down to. They're wanting you to use wifi all the time and still pay them for data services that they're not wanting to provide.

I'm with you on that but, unfortunately, the others are too as off a week ago. I think AT&T only gave them that extra GB so that we can't say that we pay more for the privilege.

 

[CZroe]

I don't think people are looking for solutions, they are wanting to know why 2gb is excessive or how the hell it's the top 5%.

If AT&T wants to push this, they are going to have to show some proof. What's to prevent them from calling the top 30% the top 5%?

Not only that, but they are shaping the top 5% by penalizing them and 5% isn't even that "exclusive." Like I said: As an unlimited user and a techie, I *expect* to be in the top 5% of *all* smartphone users. I shouldn't even be compared. I bought and paid for unlimited. Smartphone use is now mainstream. It wasn't always the case. You can only compare me to un-manipulated unlimited users. I'm not going to become a second-class customer just because the mainstream caught up to the early adopters / power users and bought themselves a shiny new smart phone.

 

[GrumpyMan]

Can't wait for October, after my current contract is up with ATT, to get a dumb phone. I'm done with data phone plans and smart phones.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I love love love my smartphone, but I'm almost always on a wifi network, so I use probably a couple hundred MBs of data a month.

 

[zerocool84]

This is why I'm on Sprint. I don't have to worry about overages but it seems like they might be capping as well. It's not like AT&T and Verizon don't have the money to expand, they've had record profits every year, they just want to charge us more and more for what we use. When Verizon hikes prices, so does AT&T and vise versa. I think congress should really look into those two and see if they are colluding with each other to keep prices high for what we get.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Can't wait for October, after my current contract is up with ATT, to get a dumb phone. I'm done with data phone plans and smart phones.

I have a T-mobile LG Optimus-T on a pay-as-you-go plan that costs me about $12/month. They offer an unlimited data/text plan (+100 minutes) for $30/month. If you are going to pay at least $30/month for a dumb phone, I would recommend considering that instead.