> however, to deliberately sabotage a customer's ability to use the service
> is another matter entirely.
I haven't read the court's full decision, but I would imagine that it's not
the throttling itself that caused the ruling, but throttling an "unlimited"
customer at a lower level than people on tiered plans are allowed to use
unrestricted. I imagine that if AT&T established their "top 5%" number and
then throttled *all* data users at the same data point, the court's decision
might have been different. I imagine it's the fact that the unlimited users
are singled out for throttling at a threshold that caused the ruling. If
"unlimited" users are throttled more tightly than tiered plan users, then
that constitutes a limitation since it's not being applied across the board.
At this point, as I see it, AT&T has four options:
1. Appeal the ruling and fight it out in court, which means either AT&T
wins and nothing changes, or the customer wins and AT&T is stuck with the
other choices below
2. Stop throttling unlimited plan users at lower thresholds than the
highest level tiered plan
3. Pick an arbitrary "top 5%" level and throttle everybody, regardless of
plan, when they reach that level
4. Cancel the unlimited plans altogether and force customers to go to a
tiered plan.
Since there's only one outcome in four that ends well for me, as an
unlimited user, chances are that when all the dust clears I'll end up
jumping ship to another carrier, likely Verizon, who also throttles, but
much more reasonably -- they only throttle those using a particular tower
when THAT tower becomes congested, and they stop throttling as soon as the
congestion eases, usually a matter of hours or even minutes, rather than for
the rest of the billing cycle as AT&T does.
Anne
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