Verizon customers still clinging on to their grandfathered unlimited data plans will shortly face a $20 price hike. The wireless carrier confirmed to CNET that it plans to raise the price of its old unlimited plan, meaning grandfathered customers will face a monthly data plan charge of $49. The price increase will take place once each individual contract expires…
Starting tomorrow, AT&T will be revamping its Mobile Share Value plans by adjusting data tiers and plan prices for new and current subscribers. At the low end, AT&T is consolidating a few data tiers into just two options with different price points. Meanwhile, AT&T’s double digit data tiers are also being reduced, and some subscribers can potentially end up with more data at no extra cost per month or get a better rate on even higher data tiers.
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It seems AT&T thinks throttling the data speeds of customers without telling them about it isn’t such a big deal. The Federal Trade Commission sued AT&T back in 2014 for “deceptive and unfair data throttling” after the company imposed caps on unlimited data contracts, beyond which it reduced their data speeds by almost 90%. The Federal Communications Commission joined the party last month, fining AT&T $100 million – and The Hill reports that the carrier now wants that fine reduced to just $16,000.
The Commission’s findings that consumers and competition were harmed are devoid of factual support and wholly implausible,” the company wrote in its filing. “Its ‘moderate’ forfeiture penalty of $100 million is plucked out of thin air, and the injunctive sanctions it proposes are beyond the Commission’s authority.”
The FTC had stated that it could legally have imposed fines of $16,000 per affected consumer, but that would have resulted in an “astronomic” fine, so chose to limit the total penalty to one large enough to deter future violations. AT&T had originally claimed that it was doing nothing wrong, but Ars Technica notes that the company amended its policy in May so that throttling was applied only when the network was congested.
AT&T has not offered unlimited data plans to new customers for some years, but has a small-ish group of customers who remain on grandfathered plans which remain valid for as long as the customer retains the plan.
Photo: Re/code
AT&T announced today that it’s increasing the data allotment on two of its wireless service plans. Starting on Sunday, November 2nd, Ma Bell will begin offering 3GB of data for $40 per month and 6GB of date for $70 a month. Also sweetening the pot, AT&T is tossing in unlimited talk, text and international messaging at no additional charge.
Today, T-Mobile’s continued its aggressive marketing blitz, announcing a new promotion that doubles tablet data for its customers, along with an increase to the number of lines supported by its family plans. Starting on September 3rd for $10 extra per month, T-Mobile will match Simple Choice data allotments by up to 5GB, with the extra data bucket being available exclusively to your network-connected tablet.
In the world of wireless, words like “unlimited data” have their restrictions if you take the time to read the fine print of a carrier’s service agreement and it appears that T-Mobile is not exempt from such practices. An alleged internal memo obtained by TmoNews details how the company will address customers suspected of using its network to access peer-to-peer file sharing services.
