Batarvers wrote:
Curious why throttling occurs on 'unlimited' data accounts.
For similar reasons that "all you can eat buffets" don't refill the crab legs as often as they do the beef or chicken dishes. If you want to get the service as fast as possible all the time, you can pay full price for the service (including overage fees) but if you want the pleasure of always having a fixed cost, then you accept that after you have used your "fair share" they slow the service down so that others can still get their service too.
When throttling was enacted, AT&T had published teh statistics and founrd that the top 5% of users by vlume were using the majority of the data on the network. In some service areas this was putting a strain on the towers and preventing some users form being able to get decent service, so AT&T began to enforce the "fair use" clause in their terms of service. AT&T now throttles 3G users at 3GB usage, and LTE users at 5GB usage. On a Mobile Share plan, you will pay $40 for 3GB of data, and $70 for 6GB, so your $30 is quite cheap in comparison. Of course, when a Mobile Shre user looks at the "big picture" than could get closer to 15GB of data ofr a similar cost as 2 unlimited data users (this is what my wife & I have done) and now she does not get throttled even though she uses over 6GB of our data pool, because I use less than 3GB of the same pool and we pay about the same money each month because it is a shared pool we both use from.