If you can remember that in 2014 the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued AT&T. It claims that the operator had cheated the customers who had signed an unlimited data plan. The FTC stated that limiting the speed of data from unlimited customers that exceeded a monthly data limit. AT&T betrayed these subscribers. Initially, AT&T was able to reject the claim by claiming that the FTC had no jurisdiction over a common carrier. Therefore, the FCC fined AT&T with $100 million which was never finalized. So, no payment was ever made) for the undisclosed strangulation. And last year a federal appeals court in San Francisco restored the FTC’s action against the wireless operator.
In May 2018, AT&T announced its intention to resolve the allegations with the FTC. And on Friday Reuters reported that the agreement had been reached. Both sides agreed on the agreement on August 2. But waited until the end of last week to make the announcement. A 90-day suspension was established in the agreement to allow the FTC to review and vote for it. The dollar amount of the agreement was not disclosed.
AT&T wants its customers not to use more than 3GB of data on 3G devices
These days, carriers include their monthly data limits with ads and on their websites. While the actual limit varies between different wireless service providers. Everyone notices that data speeds may be limited under certain conditions once they are violated the respective data limits. In 2014, AT&T was mainly selling tiered data plans for subscribers. But it still had a small number of exempt customers with unlimited plans. AT&T wanted these customers not to use more than 3GB of data on 3G devices. And 5GB of data on 4G LTE devices during a billing cycle. Customers who exceeded these limits saw their data rates reduced by up to 90%. But by the time these customers were originally registered for unlimited data, the operator did not mention these restrictions.
The current AT&T data limit for your unlimited data plans is 22 GB. The fine print on the operator’s website says “Data Restrictions: After 22GB of data usage on a line in a billing cycle, for the remainder of the cycle AT&T may temporarily slow data speeds on that line during times of network congestion.”
